Pushkin Fine Arts Museum

The solemn ceremony of stone laying of the Museum took place on August 17, 1898 in the presence of the Emperor Nicholay II and members of the royal family. The Museum was opened on May 31, 1912 as a Museum of Fine Arts named after Emperor Alexander III. In 1932 it became the State Museum of Fine Arts and a little later was renamed in honour of Alexander Pushkin, the greatest 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 constructed in the centre of the city not far from the Kremlin. The construction of the building answered the latest achievements of the techniques and museum requirements. It has been conceived in the style of an ancient classical temple on the high podium with the Ionic colonnade along the facade.

In 1948 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. 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.

The beginning of post Stalin era in the Museum was marked with the demonstration in 1955 of masterpieces from the Dresden Picture Gallery, saved by Soviet solders from annihilation in the Second World War and fully restored by the Pushkin Museum's experts.

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".

Address: 12, Volkhonka Str.
Open: 10.00 - 18.00
Closed: MON