Russian Museum Plans $380-Million Expansion

The Pushkin Museum, in Moscow, is planning an expansion expected to cost about $380-million, but it isn’t clear what artworks will appear in the new exhibition space, reports The Wall Street Journal.

The museum will close next year and should reopen in 2012, its centennial year, with 428,000 square feet of exhibition space. (For comparison, the newspaper reports that New York’s expanded Museum of Modern Art has 125,000 square feet.)

But the museum’s collection — mostly plaster casts of ancient sculptures, gifts given to Stalin, and art seized from other museums, private collections, and Nazi Germany — is in question, as Germany and the heirs of Holocaust victims and wealthy Russians try to recover family items. The museum’s longtime director, Irina Antonova, has said often that the artworks will never be returned, the Journal reports.

Ms. Antonova has also demanded that another Russian museum, the Hermitage, forfeit its art — including Matisses and Picassos — to the Pushkin, though it is unlikely that the Hermitage will do so, according to the newspaper.

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