PUSHKIN MUSEUM

Description

Essentials about the Pushkin Museum in brief

Art fans should definitely have seen the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. Officially called State Museum of Fine Arts A. S. Pushkin, it houses one of the most important art collections in Russia and is known worldwide for its collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art.

The history of the Pushkin Museum

The idea for a civic educational museum dates back to the 1850s. The historical core of the Pushkin Museum was the art collection of Count Nikolai Petrovich Rumyantsev, which was first exhibited in its own museum in Moscow in 1862. As the so-called Rumyantsev Museum constantly suffered from a lack of money and exhibition space, its director initiated the creation of a new museum building. After a construction period of 14 years, the new museum was ceremoniously opened in 1912 under the name of Emperor Alexander III Museum of Fine Arts.

The basic stock of the collection consisted of plaster casts of famous sculptures of Western European art from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The fact that the museum was not content with just copies was shown by the fact that from the beginning it also acquired or donated a considerable collection of ancient Egyptian originals and some early Italian paintings. This collection of paintings was continuously expanded in the following years and developed into the most important and internationally renowned part of the museum’s collection.

In the following years, the collection of the Pushkin Museum grew steadily thanks to abundant donations from numerous art collectors. The museum was given a further boost by the October Revolution, in the course of which numerous expropriated private collections were transferred to the museum. In addition, collections from other museums, such as the Tretyakov Gallery, were transferred to the Pushkin Museum. In 1937, a hundred years after the death of the Russian national poet Pushkin, the museum was renamed in his honor.

During World War II, the building was severely damaged. However, the museum’s collections survived the period unscathed, as they were moved out in time. As a result of the Second World War, numerous collections from German and other European art collections were also transferred to the Pushkin Museum. To this day, this looted art remains a controversial issue.

In 1948, the decision to divide the holdings of the “Museum of New West European Art” between the Pushkin Museum and the Hermitage once again brought the museum a significant increase in works of art, especially the well-known collection of works of French Impressionism. Since 1996, the world-famous Treasure of Priam from ancient Troy has also been part of the museum.

The collections of the Pushkin Museum

Visitors should definitely plan a few hours to visit the extensive collections of the Pushkin Museum. After all, the museum owns nearly 700,000 paintings, drawings, sculptures, furniture, coins, and other archaeological artifacts, as well as photographs from various periods of art history.

The list of artists represented reads like a who’s who of art history. Italian painting from the 13th to 18th centuries is represented by masters such as Sandro Botticelli, Paolo Veronese and Giovanni Battista Tiepolo. From Flemish painting of the 16th and 17th centuries, works by Peter Paul Rubens and Jan Brueghel the Elder, among others, are on display. Dutch painting of the 17th century also has very prominent representatives with Jacob van Ruisdael, Paulus Potter and Rembrandt.

The Collection of European and American Art of the 19th and 20th Centuries

Probably the most important part of the exhibition of the Pushkin Museum is the collection of European and American art of the 19th and 20th centuries, which are housed in a separate building. It represents one of the world’s most important collections of impressionist and post-impressionist art. With Cézanne, Degas, Gauguin, Matisse, Monet, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec and van Gogh, the most famous representatives of these styles are exhibited in the Pushkin Museum.