Students of painting and sculpture were tasked with acquiring simple methods that would enable them to go on to produce standard works on industrial themes. There was no mention of the study of the laws of composition and perspective, of mastering the secrets of drawing and painting technique. By Maslov's order of 14 May 1930, the museum of the Academy of Arts was completely abolished. Its stocks were transferred to the Russian Museum and Hermitage, as well as museums in Kharkov, Lvov, Krasnodar, Khabarovsk, Odessa, Dnepropetrovsk, Novgorod and Feodosia. Yet another reform of the Academy of Arts coincided with the heightened polemics in the early 1930s in the artistic milieu, where there were dozens of competing associations and groups of artists existing at the same time. Many of them, despite high-flown declarations, had no clear platform and were created with the sole purpose of providing their founders with means of subsistence. Others, such as the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia ( AKhRR – AKhR) with its almost forty branches, on the contrary laid claim to ideological leadership of the entire artistic movement. In the late 1920s, the purging of the AKhR of "bourgeois elements" resulted in the exclusion of the artists Mikhail Avilov, Isaak Brodsky and Gavriil Gorelov. Later Abram Arkhipov, Rudolf Frentz, Piotr Buchkin, Dmitry Kardovsky, Nikolai Dormidontov and other major painters quit the AKhR. The "Brodsky’s Affair", which was dealt with by a special commission of the People's Commissariat for Education, attracted widespread attention. It revealed a picture of intrigues and embittered group fighting, reflecting the abnormal situation that had arisen within art. Another event that aroused a public response was the scandalous 1931 exhibition in the Russian Museum, which featured "black walls" hung with paintings that the exhibition organizers described as "seditious". Beneath each work there was a special label revealing its "bourgeois essence". In response, within the walls of the Academy of Arts and among Leningrad's artistic community opposition to this deleterious policy for art took shape, also producing resolute criticism of Maslov's regime. In the spring of 1932, the Central Committee of the Communist Party adopted a resolution "On the reconstruction of literary and artistic organizations". The existing literary and artistic organizations were dissolved to be replaced by single creative unions of artists, writers, theatrical personnel and composers.