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# The Marble Palace Is Cramped
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/v-mramornom-dvortse-tesno/
- Published: 2026-09-06T16:12:58.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T05:25:16.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Art, Moscow, Museums, Observations, Saint Petersburg

The Marble Palace is cramped. One understands this on seeing the collection, so familiar from its walls, in the halls of the Zilart museum. Stepping into the space of the new exhibition of the gift of Peter and Irene Ludwig, shown here in its entirety for the first time, I realise that this is probably the main museum event of the year in Moscow.

Since 1995 the permanent home of the Ludwig collection has been Saint Petersburg, but it was shown in parts, in varying combinations of displays, while individual works spent years in storage. And now we can see more than a hundred works from one of the most significant collections of twentieth-century art all at once.

If one considers the Ludwigs' logic in the light of present-day realities, it looks remarkably bold. For half a century an industrialist who had grown rich on chocolate, together with his wife, an art historian, bought not the most fashionable pieces but works that arranged themselves into a single narrative. Beside Warhol there appears not only Lichtenstein but also Cuban, Mexican, East European and Russian artists, essentially representatives of the periphery of the art world of the 1970s and 1980s. And in 1994 this collection moved to the Russian Museum, in effect closing the gap in the country's holdings of Western art of the second half of the twentieth century, from Pop Art to Conceptualism.

The exhibition consists of eight sections: Pop Art, Hyperrealism, Neo-Expressionism, Abstraction, Realisms of the Twentieth Century, Myths and Signs, Art about Art, and Conceptualism. It is enough to list just a few names to grasp the importance of this exhibition: Ralph Goings with "Unadilla Diner", Robert Bechtle and "Date Palms", Lowell Nesbitt, Klaus Schmetz and the German luminaries Kiefer, Baselitz, Immendorff and Lüpertz; Warhol's portrait of Peter Ludwig himself, Picasso's "Big Heads", Kabakov's "Garden", Bulatov's "Melting Clouds", Yankilevsky's self-portrait, Makarevich's triptych with Chuikov, Kabakov and Bulatov; Hubertus Giebe's huge "Illusion and Shock" in memory of Walter Benjamin; Gerhard Richter, Basquiat, Arnulf Rainer, Berning, Nesterova, Dmitry and Nina Zhilinsky...

It is sad to grasp the scale of the loss: this collection could have had a permanent residence in Moscow, at the Pushkin Museum, had Irina Antonova agreed to the key condition: the creation of a branch named the "Ludwig Museum". The Hermitage, it is true, also declined the offer at the time. One can only guess at the reasons for such rejection. Was it simply an unwillingness to see within one's own museum another museum, with a separate entrance and a different name on the façade? Or perhaps the late Soviet museum hierarchy did not quite regard art after Picasso as art at all? However that may be, Moscow did indeed let slip a magnificent chance to acquire a ready-made, fully fledged museum of Western art of the second half of the twentieth century. So while there is still the opportunity, until 7 February 2027, let us go and look at this grandiose collection in the new museum on the grounds of the former car factory.

Curators: Alexandr Borovsky, Maria Saltanova and Margarita Kostrits. Exhibition architect: Erik Belousov.

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