Pushkin Museum

The Museum was opened on May 31, 1912 as a Museum of Fine Arts named after Emperor Alexander III under the University of Moscow, but the solemn ceremony of stone laying of the Museum took place on August 17, 1898 in the presence of the Emperor Nikolas II and members of the royal family.. On May 31, 1923 ceased its subordination to the University. In 1932 was named The State Museum of Fine Arts, in 1937 was named in honor of Alexander Pushkin the great Russian poet. The founder of the Museum and its first Director (1911-1918) was Prof. Ivan Tsvetaev, the head of the Department of Theory and History of Art at the Moscow University, Ph.D. of Roman Arts and Letters. The Museum has been created on the basis of the Cabinet (museum) of Fine Arts and Antiquities of the Moscow University as an educational and public institution where the most important periods of art history from the ancient times to the New Age have been represented: in plaster casts, pictorial and galvanic copies, in accordance with the unique scientific program. The Museum became the first institution of this type in Russia.

The Museum has been constructed in the centre of the city on the territory of the former Carriage court (Kolymazni) not far from the Kremlin and turned by the Moscow Duma to the University for this purpose in 1895-1898 by Roman.J.Klein. It has been conceived in the style of an ancient classical temple on the high podium with the Ionic colonnade along the facade.

In April 1923 the People's Commissariat on Education adopted a resolution on re-organizing the University Museum of Fine Arts by setting up in Moscow a Central Museum of old Western art on the basis of Western European collection of the Moscow Public and Rumjantsev Museum. In 1924 the Museum has adopted paintings from private collections of G.A.Brokard, D.J.Shchukin, from the State Museum fund and a few from Museums of Leningrad. In 1948 when the Museum of Modern Western Art was closed and its collection was divided between Moscow and Leningrad the Museum has acquired 300 paintings and over 60 sculptures of Western-European and American masters of the second half of the XIX and the early XX centuries, mainly the works of French Impressionists and postimpressionists from the collections of two Moscow collectors Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov, a large selection of graphic art and their archive. This acquisition changed the Museum of Fine Arts' orientation completely having extended the parameters of the collection chronologically right up to the present time and bringing the Museum a new fame. At present the collection of the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts constitutes more then 500.000 works of art - paintings and sculptures, graphic art, decorative art, archaeological monuments and numismatic items, photography.

In 1991 the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts acquired a status of the "Institution of particularly valuable cultural heritage of the Russian Federation".

Since 1981 on the initiative and with participation of the great musician Svyatoslav Richter the Museum has been yearly holding the international music festival "December Nights".

The Museum has its own restoration workshops and a research library.


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