The Museum of Nonconformist Art

The Museum was opened simultaneously with the "legalization" of "Pushkinskaya 10" as an art center in 1998. In fact, this is the first museum of nonconformist art in the world. The basis of the collection are the works of independent artists of the late soviet time, who participated in collective exhibitions; they gave their art pieces as gifts to the organizers or left it here before emigrating. No one object in the collection was purchased. As a result, the founders of the art center have gathered an impressive collection, which required the creation of a major institution to store, exhibit and study the art.

The term "non-conformism" has primarily moral and political significance. In the context of the Soviet era it was used for independent artists, who didn't fit into "socialist realism." As a consequence, there are wide ranges of artistic phenomena of Russian art of the late 20th century in the museum's collection. At the end of the 1980s and in the 1990s, when totalitarian ideology collapsed, it would seem that the term "non-conformism" should have disappeared itself. But, paradoxically, the struggle of nonconformist artists for freedom of expression cleared the way for art commerce, which became an even more serious threat to the freedom of art than former Soviet censorship. Today we can speak again about non-conformism or post-non-conformism of late the 20th - early 21st centuries, which exists in opposition to the ideology of commercialization.