The Hermitage-Siberia Center is the third branch of the State Hermitage in Russia. It was established on the basis of the M. A. Vrubel Museum and opened in 2019. The museum is housed in the building of the Salamandra insurance company, built in 1914 in the neoclassical style to a design by St. Petersburg architect Nikolai Veryovkin. This project is considered one of the best in the architect's career: he masterfully used the relief terrain to construct a harmonious and proportionate building. And although a significant portion of the interior decoration was lost, the museum has preserved sections of flooring laid with embossed Metlakh tiles.
Building facade
In 2015, during site improvements and replacement of the building's utilities, disturbed burials were discovered. As the center's director Farida Bureeva notes, many buildings in the center of Omsk stand on the territory of an ancient archaeological monument. The Hermitage-Siberia Center was no exception. In 2016–2017, during reconstruction of the heating main, human remains and items dating to the first millennium BC were found. Researchers note that the finds themselves and their arrangement in the burials are unique. These artifacts are displayed in a showcase in the center's vestibule.
The Hermitage-Siberia Center building houses not only exhibition halls but also the Theatre of Painting and a lecture hall of the Youth Center; a souvenir shop operates there, and it also holds collections of Soviet and contemporary painting, graphics, and traditional art. The restoration workshop is equipped with a vacuum table—rare for regional museums—which allows a work to be fixed to the work surface and speeds up restoration processes.
Exhibition hall
From September 1, 2023 to March 17, 2024, the Hermitage-Siberia Center is hosting a large-scale exhibition 'Conservatives and Rebels. French Painting and Sculpture of the 19th Century' from the Hermitage collection. The exhibition tells the story of a period when conservative French art was enriched by new movements in painting: Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. Paintings that sparked a revolution are being shown in Omsk for the first time. The exhibition features works by Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, Gustave Courbet, Edgar Degas, Auguste Rodin and other masters. An interesting fact: there are only nine works by Vincent van Gogh in the State Hermitage, and they are non-lendable. However, specially for the exhibition the smallest painting by the master—'Landscape with House and Ploughman', painted by Van Gogh in 1889 while he was in the asylum in Saint-Rémy—was brought in. Grand society portraits sit alongside the expressive paintings of the innovators. The exhibition is arranged so that visitors can become acquainted with all the genre and thematic directions of 19th-century French painting and sculpture and feel like visitors to a Parisian art salon.
'Landscape with House and Ploughman' — a painting by Vincent van Gogh from the State Hermitage collection
