On
20th
of May 2015 the Russian Museum is going to open the renovated
permanent exhibition of the Ludwig Museum at the Russian Museum.
In
1994 famous German collectors Peter and Irene Ludwig gifted their
collection of art of the second half of the XX-th century. This gift
resulted in a special part of the permanent exhibition «The Ludwig
Museum at the Russian Museum» which hosted its first visitors on the
20 March, 1995 at the Marble Palace. The content of the collection
was defined by the collectors together with the representatives of
the Russian Museum. Among the artists whose works happen to be part
of the collection are Pablo Picasso, Joseph Beuys, Jasper Johns, Andy
Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Tom Wesselmann, George Seagull, James
Rosenquist, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, Anselm
Kiefer, Jorg Immendorff, Jonathan Borofsky, Jeff Koons, Ilya Kabakov
and others.
«The
Ludwig Museum at the Russian Museum» reflects the major preferences
of the collectors. The collection has two main core directions. The
first is American op-art the importance of which was immediately
comprehended by the Ludwigs. The pop-art, which was the most radical
art movement of that time, became the foundation for the future
collection. The second movement the Ludwigs gave preference to was
the German neo-expressionism which brought back timeliness to the
painting in 1980-ies together with the debatable phenomenon of «the
German» in German art.
Regular
participation of the works from «The Ludwig Museum at the Russian
Museum» in world art projects proves the collection to be of high
quality and viability. In 2014 the Russian Museum organized the
exhibition of the collection in Brazil. The exhibition at the
Cultural Center of the Bank of Brazil in Rio-de-Janeiro became second
in visiting rate. During first two months of the display it had been
seen by 530 088 visitors in the cities of Sao-Paulo,
Belo-Horizonte, Rio de Janeiro. The total number of visitors was
around one million.
