National Art Museum of Ukraine

National Art Museum of Ukraine – is the most representative collection of Ukrainian art in the world. The museum collection includes more than 40 thousand exhibits, including masterpieces of Ukrainian iconography, painting, sculpture, graphics, and media from the XII century to the present day.

The museum was founded by the efforts of Ukrainian intellectuals and industrialists-patrons in the late XIX century as the first public museum in Kyiv. On September 21, 1897, the foundation stone was laid while the treasury allocated first 50 thousand rubles.

The museum building was designed by architect Petro Boitsov in the neoclassical style. The famous Kyiv architect Vladyslav Horodetskyi finalized the project and supervised the work. The sculptural decoration of the facade was made by the workshop of Elio Sala.

The first exhibition on the occasion of the XI All-Russian Archaeological Congress opened in the unfinished premises of the Kyiv City Museum of Antiquities and Arts on 5 (17) August 1899. The official opening and consecration of the institution, which was named the Kyiv Art, Industrial and Scientific Museum, took place on December 30, 1904.

Over its 120-year history, the museum has changed its name 12 times. The change of the museum’s name reflects the complex processes of the country’s life and certain stages of the formation of the national museum business. In particular, the names can be used to trace how the profile of the collection changed and how certain parts of the original collection left to become the basis for the birth of other museums in Kyiv and Ukraine.

The latest name of the institution, the National Art Museum of Ukraine, appeared in 1994, at the time of Ukraine’s independence, which confirmed the museum’s highest status as a leading collection of national art.