Lviv Art Gallery

Lviv Art Gallery (Львівська національна галерея мистецтв ім. Бориса Возницького; Lvivska natisonalna halereia mystetstv im. Borysa Voznytskoho). An art museum in Lviv, established in 1939 on the basis of the nationalized Polish People’s Museum in Lviv (1907–39). The core of its collection consists of 300 paintings once owned by a magnate from Podilia, J. Jakowicz, and canvases formerly in Lviv’s Museum of Artistic Industry (est 1905), the National Museum (1905), the Lubomirski Museum (1907), the B. Orzechowicz collection (1921), the museum of the Stauropegion Institute, the Greek Catholic Theological Seminary in Lviv, and numerous private collections. During the Second World War hundreds of valuable paintings were removed by the Nazis. Today the gallery’s 34 halls have over 1,000 works on permanent display. The museum possesses over 62,000 works—Ukrainian, Russian, Polish, Western and Eastern European, and Soviet paintings, graphic art, sculptures, ceramics, and ornamental and applied art from the 15th century on, ranging from works by Leonardo da Vinci and Titian to those of contemporary Ukrainian painters (Liubomyr Medvid, Volodymyr Patyk, Roman Selsky, Oleksa Shatkivsky, Hryhorii Smolsky, Karlo Zvirynsky) and sculptors (Teodosiia Bryzh, Dmytro Krvavych, Emmanuil Mysko). It has original porcelain from Korets, Meissen, and Vienna, a copy of the Lviv Apostolos of Ivan Fedorovych (Fedorov), and other priceless artifacts. Since 1966 departments of 16th- to 18th-century Lviv portraiture and 18th- to 19th-century Oriental art have existed at the gallery. Branches of the gallery include the 17th-century Boim Chapel (est 1977), the Olesko Castle Museum-Preserve (est 1975) in Buzk raion, the Pidhirtsi palace in Brody raion, and the Zolochiv castle. Many albums with reproductions of paintings in the gallery have appeared and a guide to the gallery was published in 1972. In 2013 the gallery was named in honor of its long-time director and art scholar Borys Voznytsky

Sofiia Yaniv

[This article was updated in 2016.]