The Main Building on Volkhonka
Roman Klein (1858 to 1924) · 1898 to 1912
Stand back on Volkhonka Street and the museum looks like a Greek temple that has been enlarged to the scale of a railway station. A colonnade of Ionic columns runs along the front, copied from the east porch of the Erechtheion on the Athenian Acropolis, and above it a frieze of figures in procession. The whole facade is faced in pale Ural marble and the roof is glass, which is why the halls inside are flooded with daylight. It was built between 1898 and 1912 to the design of Roman Klein, a Moscow architect who won the competition and then travelled to Europe to study how the great museums were lit.
The man behind the project was Ivan Tsvetaev, professor of classical philology at Moscow University. He wanted a museum of casts where students and ordinary Muscovites could see the masterpieces of world sculpture at full size, and he spent two decades raising money for it, most of it from the glass magnate Yuri Nechaev Maltsov. Look at the sequence of halls inside: Klein designed each one in the style of the art it was to hold, so that the Egyptian hall has papyrus columns, the medieval hall has pointed arches and the Renaissance hall has a coffered ceiling.
The museum opened on the thirty first of May 1912 in the presence of Tsar Nicholas the Second, as the Alexander the Third Museum of Fine Arts. After the revolution it was renamed, first as the State Museum of Fine Arts and in 1937 for Pushkin, whose centenary fell that year, though the poet had no connection to it. During the Second World War the glass roof was shattered by bombing and the halls stood open to the snow. Since then it has become the heart of a growing museum quarter, and the building itself, with its wide marble staircase, remains one of the most graceful public interiors in Moscow.
Did You Know? The museum has nothing to do with Alexander Pushkin; it was renamed for him in 1937 simply because that year was the centenary of his death.
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