The Russian Museum, Leningrad

Előszó

THE RUSSIAN MUSEUM in Leningrad is a treasure-house of great artistic importance. All the wealth and variety of Russian art is exhaustively represented in its collections which contain more than 300,000 items, including relics of early Russian art, articles by folk craftsmen, objects of decorative and applied arts, and a large number of paintings, sculptures, engravings, drawings and water-colours.
It was not at once that the Museum reached its present stature. In the year 1898 when its halls were first thrown open to visitors, the Museum could boast only 2,300 works of art, for the most part paintings and drawings, which were displayed more or less at random.
After the October Revolution the situation changed radically. The Museum became the natural depository for outstanding works of art which found their way there from the former collections of royalty, the nobility and the bourgeoisie. New departments of decorative and applied arts as well as of folk art were established. The foundations of the department of Soviet art were laid. The permanent exhibition was organized on a scientific basis to provide a cohesive and comprehensive picture of the development of Russian artistic culture. Works of art which had been produced by the great Russian masters over the centuries were now made accessible to broad sections of the population.
A real work of art is possessed of the striking ability to retain its charm and always stir the imagination of man as strongly as at the time of its creation, sometimes even more strongly. The portraits Levitsky, Kiprensky, Repin and Serov painted in the mid-eighteenth and late nineteenth centuries — however diverse the personalities of their sitters, the choice of means of expression, and the very understanding of beauty — are nevertheless all dear to the modern man, who lives in a completely different historical epoch. Vissza