What to do and see in Boulevard Ring, Central Russia: The Best Art Museums

It is one of the largest private collections of the world's cultural heritage, the repositories of which hold over 20 000 items. The basis of the collection is built up with a great range of exhibits - self-playing musical instruments and mechanical rarities, among them are music boxes, organs, orchestrions, street organs, mechanical pianos and grand pianos, gramophones and phonographs, accordions, clocks and automata. The Museum houses a great variety of items of art and crafts, paintings and drawings, a comprehensive collection of Russian bronzes, including small statuary of illustrious artists of the 19th – 20th centuries, as well as the collection of old Russian and Foreign silver, glass and crystal.

The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts (Russian: Музеи изобразительных искусств им. А.С. Пушкина) is the largest museum of European art in Moscow, located in Volkhonka street, just opposite the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. The International musical festival Svyatoslav Richter's December nights has been held in the Pushkin museum since 1981. The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts holds one of Russia's largest collections of foreign art from ancient times to the present day. Its modern presentation introduces visitors to the Museum's extensive study collections of toned plaster casts reproducing works of Graeco-Roman art, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The Museum also houses original paintings and sculpture, drawings and examples of decorative and applied art. In the halls on the ground floor original works of art are displayed from Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece and Rome, together with European paintings ranging in date from the 8th to the 8th centuries. Two halls, known as the Italian and Greek Courtyards, contain casts. The halls on the first floor display for visitors casts of art works from Ancient Greece and Rome, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The halls, hung with paintings, exhibit works of art from the 19th and 20th centuries. Known for its outstanding temporary exhibitions, this museum also has an impressive permanent collection of Impressionist and post-Impressionist art.

A dazzling array of treasures from the 4th to the 20th century are housed in this Kremlin museum, including thrones and carriages of the tsars, the works of Moscow silver and goldsmiths, arms, jewels, precious Russian Easter eggs and other Russian and foreign decorative arts.

Once you've perused the Pushkin Museum, stop in next door to view the treasures in these private collections acquired in Soviet times, including works by Salvador Dali and Henri Matisse, ballet set designs, Russian icons and a whole floor of 20th-century art.

Solyanka VPA — a project in a genre known in the world as artist-run space — that is, many of the principles and criteria are a bit subjective, which doesn’t prevent the curators and artists working on a project from moving in their own independent direction.Solyanka is located exactly where blood flows on Moscow vessels — in the heart of city life, just 5 minutes from the Kremlin, right on the Ivanovskaya hill. All around you can see temples which miraculously survived 1917, as if the destroyer that was the twentieth century never rocked the city. Almost everything is almost exactly the way it once was. Here — as in few places in Moscow — you can see the surviving medieval tricky side streets which are twisted into complex knots making lanes run either down or up the hill. The word «Solyanka» comes from the time of Ivan the Terrible and his Salty yard. Architects Sergeyev, Sherwood and Guerman built the house that inhabits our museum in the early XX century. They managed to complete what the developers required. They maximized the use of space, which had quite an intricate form, and they increased the size of the building both in height and depth. The house is now considered a monument of neoclassicism.