Odesa Art Museum

Odesa Art Museum (Одеський художній музей; Odeskyi khudozhnii muzei). A museum in Odesa, founded as the City Museum of Fine Arts in 1899 by teachers of the Odesa Drawing School and the Society of South Russian Artists, among them A. Pavlovsky, Kyriak Kostandi, A. Popov, Petro Nilus, Borys Edvards, and Gennadii Ladyzhensky. Under Soviet rule it was called the People's Art Museum (until 1945), the Odesa Oblast Picture Gallery (1945–50), and the Odesa Picture Gallery (1950–65). In 1918–19 its collection was enriched with the acquisition of several private collections, including Oleksander Rusov's and M. Braikevych's.

The museum has departments of iconography (16th–18th century icons), prerevolutionary art (18th–20th centuries), and contemporary art (from the 1920s). It contains works by Ukrainian and Russian prerevolutionary painters, such as Hryhorii K. Levytsky, Dmytro H. Levytsky, Volodymyr Borovykovsky, Ivan Aivazovsky, Ivan Kramskoi, Ilia Repin, Mykola Ge, Vladimir Makovsky, Vasilii Tropinin, Mykola Yaroshenko, Hryhorii Svitlytsky, Mikhail Vrubel, Kostiantyn Kryzhytsky, Serhii Vasylkivsky, Oleksander Murashko, Ivan Trush, and Mykola Pymonenko; the works of the Odesa painters Kyriak Kostandi, Gennadii Ladyzhensky, and Petro Nilus and the Odesa sculptor Borys Edvards; and works of Soviet painters, such as Anatol Petrytsky, Vasyl Kasiian, Yosyp Bokshai, Mykhailo Zhuk, Mykhailo Bozhii, Oleksii Shovkunenko, Andrii Kotska, Mykhailo Derehus, Olena Kulchytska, Tetiana Yablonska, and Valentyn Lytvynenko. Albums of works at the museum were published in 1980 and 1986.

[This article was updated in 2012.]