Museum of Circus Art

About museum

In 1928, the world's first Museum of Circus Art was opened at the Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg State) Circus. The initiator of its creation and its first director was Vasily Yakovlevich Andreyev. The museum's collections were formed thanks to circus performers who donated photographs, posters, programs, costumes and other materials. Today the museum holds more than 100,000 storage units. The museum's holdings include a library, a photo archive, a video archive, collections of posters, circus programs, personal papers, paintings and graphics, sculptures and small-scale sculpture, costumes and props, souvenir products, and decorative and applied arts. The museum's collections began with the materials of Vasily Andreyev and Evgeny Gershuni. The museum was created to systematize materials and research the history of the circus. In 1931 the book "Circus. Origin. Development. Perspectives" by Evgeny Kuznetsov, a historian and theorist of circus art, was published.