It is exceptionally momentous for Budapest to host a major collection of Russian avant-garde art from a single museum, especially when the works in question have never been seen together before outside Russia. The Hungarian National Gallery is proud to welcome forty outstanding works of art from the avant-garde collection of the Ekaterinburg Museum of Fine Arts, produced by such notable Russian artists as Kazimir Malevich, Wassily Kandinsky, Alexander Rodchenko, El Lissitzky, Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov.


The Ekaterinburg Museum of Fine Arts has one of the world’s most important collections of Russian avant-garde art from the 1910s and 1920s. The museum was founded following the reorganisation of cultural life in Russia that took place after the Revolution. By 1918, avant-garde artists were meeting at the arts department of the People’s Commissariat for Education (Narkompros) in Moscow to debate how modern art museums and state exhibitions should be used to help educate the masses.

In December 1918, Narkompros commissioner Anatoly Lunacharsky approved a list of artists whose works would be purchased by Narkompros for the state art fund. In 1920, a selection was made from this enormous array of art for an exhibition titled All the Movements of Contemporary Painting, which later formed the basis of the collection at the museum in Ekaterinburg. Between 1925 and 1934 the collection was housed in the Ural State Museum, being transferred in 1936 to the newly built Art Gallery in Sverdlovsk (Ekaterinburg’s Soviet-era name).