A.A. Bakhrushin State Central Theatre Museum, Theater museum in Zamoskvorechye District, Moscow, Russia.
The A.A. Bakhrushin State Central Theatre Museum is a collection of theater artifacts in Moscow displaying costumes, stage designs, original scripts, and photographs. The holdings document the material history of Russian theatrical productions from the 19th century onward.
Alexey Alexandrovich Bakhrushin, a Moscow merchant and philanthropist, opened his collection to the public on 29 October 1894, the museum's founding day. In 1913 the collection passed to the Academy of Sciences on condition it stay in Moscow, and in 1918 Lenin proposed Bakhrushin as its life director. The holdings grew from about 12,000 items in 1917 to over 1.5 million today.
The museum keeps costume and set designs by Alexandra Exter, Natalia Goncharova and Léon Bakst, among others. Its collection of decorative and visual materials also holds portraits by Karl Bryullov and Orest Kiprensky, plus caricatures of theatre figures and scale models of stage sets.
The museum occupies Bakhrushin's former manor in Zamoskvorechye, south of the Moskva River. The main building was designed by Karl Gippius in 1896 and enlarged by Ilya Bondarenko in 1937–1938. Three large halls survive in the basement, including Bakhrushin's Lower Study and the storage room built for his literary, theatre and music collections.
The museum's photo-negative department holds over 500,000 items, the second-largest section of the collection. It covers drama, opera, ballet and operetta scenes, plus portraits of actors in life and in role, and photographs of theatre buildings inside and out.
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