Aleksei Fedorov Davydov

Aleksei Aleksandrovič Fedorov-Davydov (1900-1969) was a Soviet art scholar.

His 1929 article 'The Principles of Building Art Museums' criticized existing Soviet galleries and museums for their 'fetishism of objects'. He called for museum displays to concentrate on 'processes' rather than 'things':

the history of styles stretched into a single straight line of evolution... we know that this single line exists because every piece of the historical process is a complex intersection, a dialectical struggle between competing forces and heterogenous tendencies.