On Cosmonaut Day, museum specialists Yulia Kostina and Polina Lysakova spoke about the Museum of Cosmonautics, its expositions, and presented a collection of space-themed paintings.
This year the museum celebrated its 40th anniversary; it opened on 10 April 1981—the 20th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s space flight. Today, as the 60th anniversary of this memorable date is celebrated, the museum’s collections contain more than 98,000 items and 300 paintings.
Museum specialists presented a series of Soviet posters dedicated to space conquest. The lecturers talked about the work of the founders of space painting—artists who worked long before space exploration began, at the beginning of the 20th century—Nicholas Roerich in Russia and Mikalojus Čiurlionis in Lithuania, who became the spiritual fathers of the Amaravella association of cosmist artists, which was created in the mid-1920s and tragically ceased to exist in 1930.
The true flourishing of space themes in painting began in 1961, with the first manned space flight, with the work of such founders of the space genre as Y. Kopeiko, Y. Pokhodayev, and A. Sokolov. The museum specialists also introduced new acquisitions to the painting collection, in particular, interior sketches of space stations made by the first space architect Galina Balashova.
