ABSTRACT
Art museums increasingly present their collections in the form of special exhibitions—temporary and often polemical propositions, rather than what used to be known as permanent displays that unfold in a continuous and seemingly universal progression. This chapter presents a historical case study of a group of radically experimental collection displays held at two major Soviet art museums, the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, and the State Russian Museum in Leningrad in the early 1930s. It examines experimental displays of early twentieth-century Russian avant-garde works, which were freshly integrated into the collections of the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow and the State Russian Museum in Leningrad from the Museums of Artistic Culture. It is essential to acknowledge how radically innovative this brief museological experiment was in foregrounding and exploring the power and rhetorical potential of the very language of display.
