To the prehistory and development of the complex art studies approach in the work of the first North expeditions of the State Institute of Art History

Abstract

Russia’s first art history center, the Institute of Art History, was organized by an art patron and art critic, count V.P. Zubov in his own mansion as a private institution. opened on March 2 (15), 1912, the Institute (by the end of the first year of its existence) announced the recruitment of regular students to the Courses of Art History. In 1916, the Institute was registered with the Ministry of Public Education as a research and educational institution and remained so permanently. The courses turned into the Higher State Courses of Art Criticism. There were four faculties at the Courses, which were supervised by the corresponding Departments of the academic staff, those of the history of the visual arts, the history of music, the history of the verbal arts and the history of the theater. Courses received the status of higher art education.

The author examines regular and random impulses (including contacts with the German Society of Friends of New Russia), a bizarre combination of which led first to serious preparation, and then to the first complex art expeditions of researchers of the State Institute of Art History to the Russian North. The expeditions, unprecedented in the scale and type of field work, for six years (1926–1931) covered several key zones of the Russian North: Zaonezhie, Pinega, Mezen, Pechora. The expedition materials of the Institute are still being developed by researchers, and some of the expedition members who first started collecting and recording folklore, such as E.V. Gippius, Z.V. Ewald, A.M. Astakhova, N.P. Kolpakova and some others, – became classics of national science.