Russia's St Petersburg gets its first private art museum

A Russian art collector is due to open St Petersburg's first private art museum, devoted to Soviet underground and Russian contemporary art, on June 4. The collection will include works by 69 artists.

The Novy Museum is the brainchild of Aslan Chekhoev and his wife Irina, reports The Art Newspaper. It will focus on the Chekhoev's collection of nearly 300 paintings, works on paper and photographs assembled over the past five years. “Russian art of the second half of the 20th century is truly unique, but it is not appreciated in Russia and abroad,” said Chekhoev. “Underground art arose in extreme situations of dictatorship; never mind the censorship and repression, it was simply difficult to get materials. While this slowed them down, it also forced them to be more creative and resourceful, and this spurred an incredible level of originality.” The museum is housed in a 19th-century building on the historic Vasilievsky Island, not far from St Petersburg State University and the Russian Academy of Fine Arts. The collection features works by 69 artists - including Yevgeny Rukhin, Evgeny Mikhnov-Voitenko, the partnership of Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid, and Oscar Rabin - and the inaugural exhibition features a sample work by each artist. Chekhoev plans to rotate the exhibition around three times a year, and he also wants to collaborate with other collectors. The Chekhoevs have been active buyers at major European and US auction houses in recent years, spending around 5m euros to build the collection. Their most notable purchase was Komar and Melamid’s Yalta Conference: the Judgment of Paris, 1985-86, which they purchased at MacDougall’s in London in November 2007 for £184,400. The three-metre-wide canvas depicts the conference that divided Europe during the second world war in the guise of Greek mythology. The painting shows Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin as Greek goddesses and Hitler as the shepherd-prince Paris.