In the last twenty to twenty-five years, our country's two foremost museums, the St[ate] Tretiakov Gallery and the Russian Museum, have been filled with compositions of a Formalist and naturalist kind. Insignificant in their artistic importance and, in a number of instances, simply harmful compositions, they take up, however, to this day, a significant portion of the museums' exhibition space (for instance, compositions by the Jack of Diamonds [Bubnovyi valet] group

Jack of Diamonds was a prerevolutionary group of Futurist artists.

and other Formalist cliques. I am attaching photographs of a number of these kinds of pictures). At the same time, many pictures, sculptures, and drawings by the best Russian realist masters of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are being kept in storerooms.

Thanks to the large number of Formalist compositions, the Soviet period is represented falsely in the Tretiakov Gallery.

The inadmissibly low level of many compositions supposedly characterizing the Soviet period is especially startling in comparison with the marvelous exhibit of I. Repin. This kind of “picture” naturally evokes sharp responses among worker visitors.

Hence arises the task of reviewing the appropriate sections of our museums in order to preserve in the exhibition halls the best realistic compositions of our era and in part those compositions by prominent masters that are close to realism.

The review must now touch on only the two museums (Tretiakov Gallery and Russian Museum) and only the pictures of the last twenty to twenty-five years.

As for works that are subject to removal from exhibition but are at the same time material for art-historical study, it makes sense to separate them in a special building closed to the mass viewer.

Along with this rehanging of pictures, and based on the experience of the Repin exhibit, the Committee on Arts Affairs, for the purposes of propaganda for realist art, proposes organizing several exhibitions of this nature—Surikov, Rembrandt, and so forth.

I request approval for the following resolution: