Visitors to Moscow can now enjoy the art of the Jazz Age at Russia’s first private Art Deco museum. Founded by the owner of one of the world’s largest Art Deco collections, the museum contains more than 700 sculptures from that legendary era, valued at $100 million.

Russia’s very first private Art Deco museum has opened its doors to visitors in Moscow. Founded by businessman and gallerist Mkrtich Okroyan, the owner of what is believed to be one of the world’s largest collections of Art Deco works, the museum, which opened on Dec. 22, is located in the building that once housed the Imperial Mint. 

Okroyan started to accumulate his art collection at the end of the 1980s. As is often the case, his first sporadic purchases gave the collection a very eclectic feel. It contained work by Russian artists Aivazovsky, Savrasov, Goncharova, Bakst, and Sudeikin, as well as decorative applied art, furniture, and tableware from various eras and different styles.

But as the collector says, “I immediately had a real passion for Art Deco, and it started with architecture.” By the turn of the century, Okroyan had started focusing on the search for rare sculptures, paintings, and furniture from that period.

The pride of his collection is more than 700 sculptures by leading European Art Deco masters, including work by Demetre Chiparus and Ferdinand Preiss, Claire Colinet and Bruno Zach, which serve as the core of the exhibition. 

RBTH has selected five highlights of the new museum that visitors should not miss:

Untitled panels, Pierre Bobot, 1947

This eight-part panel is a fragment of a huge wall decoration created by French artist and sculptor Pierre Bobot after World War II for the New York Roseland Ballroom. These gypsum panels, covered with gold leaf and lacquer, were sold in pieces at Christie’s auctions in New York in 2000. This composition is more than six meters long and two meters high.

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