S. P. Diaghilev Museum of Contemporary Art

About museum

The S. P. Diaghilev Museum of Contemporary Art was opened in 2008 and contains more than 300 works in various media — painting, graphics, sculpture, decorative and applied arts, and photography. The museum was based on the collection of the Diaghilev Arts Center, founded in 1990 by art historian and Saint Petersburg State University professor T. S. Yuryeva. The collection features works by Leningrad independent artists of the 1960s–1980s, including Alexander Baturin, who endured the Stalinist camps, and representatives of Osip Sidlin's school — Anatoly Basin and Natalya Toreeva, Vladimir Ovchinnikov and Anatoly Vasiliev, participants of the banned Hermitage exhibition of 1964. The collection also includes works by Gleb Bogomolov, Anatoly Belkin, Valentin Gerasimenko and Nikolai Sazhin, who took part in the first major nonconformist exhibitions of 1974–1975.