Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts

On Volkhonka Street in the center of Moscow stands a building in the shape of an ancient temple — a major Moscow museum of fine arts, named after Alexander Pushkin. It holds one of the largest collections of Western European art in the country, originally conceived as a teaching collection of casts and originals for students and artists. Today the museum ranks among the most visited art venues in the world and remains one of the capital’s chief attractions.

The idea of a teaching collection of paintings and sculptures within the walls of the university was first voiced back in 1831, but it was only realized by Professor Ivan Tsvetaev, father of the poet Marina Tsvetaeva. In 1894 he proposed creating a teaching collection illustrating the development of art from antiquity to the Renaissance, and in 1898 he presented the building’s design to Emperor Nicholas II, who allocated 200,000 rubles for construction. Most of the expenses were covered by the industrialist Yuri Nechaev-Maltsov, who became the project’s principal patron.

The competition for the building’s design was won in 1896 by the architect Roman Klein and the engineer Ivan Rerberg. In 1904 a fire broke out, destroying part of the structures and more than one hundred and fifty crates of casts, including recently commissioned copies of the decoration of St. Mark’s Basilica, but the reconstruction continued with funds from Nechaev-Maltsov. The building was erected in the Neoclassical style, given the appearance of an ancient temple with a colonnade. The museum solemnly opened its doors on 31 May 1912 — the emperor, together with his wife and daughters, attended the ceremony; at that time the institution bore the name of Alexander III.

Over the following decades the name changed several times, and only in 1937, on the centenary of the poet’s death, was the institution given the name of Alexander Pushkin. With the outbreak of the Great Patriotic War the collections were evacuated to Novosibirsk and Solikamsk, and the building itself suffered from bombing during the Battle of Moscow. The first postwar exhibition opened in October 1946, but as early as 1949 the halls were taken over for several years by an exhibition of gifts presented to Joseph Stalin for his jubilee, and the museum’s genuine exhibition returned to its place only after his death in 1953.

The museum’s picture gallery began to take shape in 1924 from works coming from the nationalized collections of the Yusupovs and the Shuvalovs, as well as from the collectors Sergei Tretyakov and Dmitry Shchukin; the gallery’s final composition was formed in 1948, after the dissolution of the Museum of Modern Western Art, from which came canvases by French Impressionists and Post-Impressionists. For many years, from 1961 to 2013, the museum was headed by Irina Antonova, under whom the Department of Private Collections was established in 1985.

Today the collection numbers about 700,000 works — from ancient casts and artifacts of Ancient Egypt to paintings by Dürer, Rembrandt, Rubens, and the Impressionists. Every year the museum receives more than a million visitors and ranks among the most visited art museums in the world, and since 1991 it has been officially recognized as one of the especially valuable cultural heritage sites of the peoples of the country.