Musée Kharkiv Art Museum

The history of the Kharkiv art collection starts in 1805, with the foundation of Kharkiv Imperial University. Its founder, a Ukrainian educator and civil activist Vassily Karazin, personally purchased a collection of graphical works by Western artists for art classes of the higher educational institution, and thus started the collection of artworks in Kharkiv.

Items in Kharkiv collections, which was formed over the course of over 150 years, were varied in their origin: they came from the University museum of fine arts and antiquities (1835), as well as Kharkiv municipal applied art museum (1886). Regional and national tastes in collecting reflected the established tendencies, which were primarily Western, then Russian and Ukrainian art, and then Eastern artefacts and icons. The collection was constantly added to, due to acquisitions of art objects from state institutions and private collectors, and post-1917 museum politics of multiple reorganisations.

In 1934 almost seventy-five thousand of exhibits, bearing artistic, historical, ethnographical value, were brought under the roof of Ukrainian national picture gallery, located in Basseyna Street (currently Yaroslava Mudrogo). Over the years of the Second world war many items from this collection were lost. In October 1941 the museum was partially evacuated, with over four and a half thousand items moved. However, the museum was working even under German occupation of Kharkiv. Over the time of the second occupation the Germans removed many artworks from the museum, and their fate is still unknown. In August 1943 the building of the museum was destroyed. Everything that was still left of its exhibits and in the store perished, including paintings, graphics, furniture and books.

Upon the liberation of Kharkiv from the occupation and return of the items from evacuation storage in March 1944, Kharkiv National museum of Ukrainian art was reopened in a building in Sovnarkomovska Street (currently Zhen Myronosits). From 1965 onwards it is known as Kharkiv art museum.

In the years that passed since the second world war, the number of items in the art collection increased to twenty-five thousand. Museum collection consists of paintings, graphics, sculpture, decorative and applied art of Ukrainian, Russian and Western artists from various periods in art history.