Originally called the Kiev City Museum of Antiques and Art, the National Art Museum of Ukraine (the Museum, for short) was opened in 1899.
First, the Museum collections were replenished by Kiev sponsors. After the 1917 Russian Revolution, private collections were nationalized. And later, the Government granted allocations for purchasing works of art.
The founders of the Museum collections were its first director and historian Nikolai Bilyashivsky and his associates and art critics Daniel Shcherbakovsky and Fyodor Ernst.
They identified a "team" of leading representatives of Ukrainian art. In opinion of these scientists, the "team" included those who was born and worked in Ukraine as well as the artists who by the will of God left their motherlands and moved to Ukraine. According to them Ukrainian art was also enriched by those foreigners who created within the country. These were the principles taken as a base when collecting.
This is why the Museum got the works by Taras Shevchenko, Ilya Repin, Vladimir Boravikovsky, Vasily Tropinin, Mykola Pimonenko, Mikhail Vrubel, Nikolai Ge, Heorhiy Narbut, Oleksandr Murashko, and Vasily Krichevsky and many others.
The founders touched ancient days as well and collected medieval icons and portraits of military and church leaders during Cossack times, and some caricatures depicting Mamay.
The incoming geography was quite extended from Galicia to Chernihiv District. The directors obtained Ukrainian art from Moscow and St. Petersburg, as well as from Ukrainian artists living abroad in Europe and America. However, during the Stalin Great Purge of 1936–1938, this activity was seized, and a big part of the collection was dispersed and hidden in special storage rooms. Despite all this, the founders' tradition is still alive and viable.
Today, the Museum collections are replenished according to the scale of valuables willed by the founders. The Museum collection has a unique 12th century relief icon Life of St. George, a work by the founder of world abstractionism and native of Ukraine Kazemir Malevich, a masterpiece of Ukrainian rococo of the 18th century, the icon Great Martyrs, a graphic work by the world known Ukrainian from the USA Yakov Hnizdovsky.
Now the Museum has several tens of thousands items.
The first decade of Ukraine independence, the 1990s, was a period when the Museum reached a status of international recognition.
For the first time, its collections travelled outside of the country and were exhibited in Canada, France, Denmark, and Croatia. They introduced the world to highly developed culture of the country with the thousand year history. Thanks to these exhibitions several artists unknown before became world famous.
Today, the belief of the Museum founders that Ukrainian art is equal to world culture becomes a heritage of many thousands of people all over the world.
The Museum building was built in neoclassic style by architect G. Boytsov in association with architect Vladislav Gorodetsky.
The Kiev Planetarium (the Planetarium, for short) at the Knowledge Society of Ukraine was founded in 1952 by the world-famous astronomer Sergey Vsekhsvyatsky.
On 1st January 1952, the Planetarium opened its doors to everybody interested in learning the mysteries of the Universe.
The Planetarium has been very successful from the very day of it...
The Odessa Museum of Modern Art (the Museum, for short) presents works by painters and sculptors of Odessa, of the last decades of the 20th century and the early 21st century.
The exhibitions of the Museum are based on the collection of Mikhail Knobel.
The Museum consists of 8 rooms.
Room No. 1: The Art School of South Russia in the Second H...
On 24th May 2003, the opening ceremony of the Museum of Water (the Museum, for short) took place; the Museum was created on the basis of renovated ancient water towers constructed as early as in 1872–1876.
Now, it is a kind of a "research laboratory", where the main attention is directed at new approaches to ecology-related issues, experiments a...
WorldWalk.info
en
info@worldwalk.info