Выставка картин И.К. Айвазовского

About the exhibition

On 2 May 1945, the Aivazovsky Gallery in Feodosiya opened a temporary exhibition in the restored former residential rooms on the upper floor of the artist’s house. The paintings had returned from wartime evacuation in November 1944, while the damaged main exhibition hall still required reconstruction. The presentation marked the forty-fifth anniversary of Aivazovsky’s death, the gallery’s sixty-fifth anniversary and the centenary of the house. Nikolai and Sofia Barsamov’s 1955 gallery history records 152 works: all the Aivazovsky paintings then in the collection, including reserve paintings that had not previously been displayed and were returned to storage after the exhibition. This unusually broad selection accompanied the museum’s gradual recovery before the restored main gallery reopened on 2 May 1946. The temporary exhibition’s exact closing date is unknown. The selected checklist identifies Surf near coast of Crimea, painted in 1892 and bequeathed to the gallery in 1900, as inventory number 52 in the historical collection catalogue. Its inclusion follows the director’s explicit statement that all the gallery’s Aivazovsky paintings were shown, together with the documented earlier accession. The original 1945 catalogue and the remaining paintings have not yet been reconciled, so this is a partial checklist. Historical ownership is evidence for that selection; no new present-day holding or display claim is made.

Also recorded as: Exhibition of paintings by Ivan Aivazovsky, Feodosiya, 1945 · Aivazovsky Gallery temporary postwar exhibition, 1945