Vladimir Putin is not always a friend of the arts. In August, he had Russian police seize a painting of him and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev in lingerie from the Muzei Vlasti. Now, however, he is asking the country’s culture minister, Vladimir Medinsky, to create satellite locations for Russian museums. “We must organize branches of such museums in regional centers of the Russian Federation, so works of art don’t lie around in storage or in basements,” Putin told Medinsky in September.
A branch of the State Hermitage Museum is scheduled to open in Vladivostok in 2016, and another branch, the Hermitage-Siberia, will open in Omsk in three years. Medinsky warns that some museums may not like the idea of giving up their collections, but Putin asserts that this will be a way to show art that Russians would otherwise not see, according to The Art Newspaper.
What will actually be shown across Russia? While we expect that the museums' collections mostly consist of work by Russian artists, we wonder if foreigners like Sylvester Stallone, whose paintings are currently on view at The State Russian Museum, could also have exhibitions across satellites.
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[via The Art Newspaper]
