About the Archive
Few people know that sculptor Erzia was also a good photographer and archivist. He photographed all his works. Thanks to this, we now have pictures of the sculptor’s many little-known and lost works, numerous articles about Erzia exhibitions, valuable documents about his personal life and art, which he carefully collected and pasted into special albums throughout his life.
The extensive and interesting Erzia’s archive that he has been carefully keeping for his whole life is now in different depositories in the country and abroad. The archive is still waiting for its researchers who will prepare it for printing to make it available to researchers and admirers of the great sculptor’s talent in Russia and other countries.
The archive material collected by the Erzia Foundation contains a large number of new photographs and articles from Italian and Spanish periodicals that have been discovered by the employees in the cities and countries, where S. Erzia lived and worked.
A certain part of the archive was given as a gift by different persons, who carefully kept the valuable documents for many years. Domestic givers include the Russian State Library (former Lenin Library), and the foreign Foundation associates are: Argentinians Anibal Lomba, Elena Boiko, Anna Shcherba, Vladimir Sebriano, German journalist Jurgen Hartman, Hungarian sculptor Sandor Zicherman, Italian artist Monica Michelotti and researcher Marzia Dati. The material obtained from them helps to fill unknown pages and facts in the creative biography of the sculptor.
Exhibitions with the archive sections as well as S. Erzia’s archive publications are the result of many years of the Foundation researchers’ work, which is one of the prospective trends of their scientific activities.