BUDAPEST.- One of Russia’s most important public collections, the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, is exhibiting the finest pieces of the Old Masters’ Gallery of the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts. Raphael to Goya, which opened on 9 June, displays 60 masterpieces by the masters in the title as well as works by Van Dyck, Brueghel, Dürer, Rubens, El Greco, Velázquez and Giorgione.

The exhibition in the Budapest museum titled Degas to Picasso, displaying works selected from the material of the State Pushkin Museum, closed at the beginning of May and was seen by over 120 thousand visitors. The show that opened in Moscow on 9 June reciprocates the guest appearance of the Russian museum in Budapest.

The guest exhibition that can be seen in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow until the end of August provides a comprehensive picture of the Old Masters Gallery of the Museum of Fine Arts through works from the most important schools of the period from the late 15th century to the early 19th, exhibiting masterpieces by Netherlandish, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, German and French artists.

The exhibition organised in Moscow from the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts is not its first international appearance. In recent years the museum’s material has been displayed in independent exhibitions in the Louvre in Paris, the Bucerius Kunst Forum in Hamburg, and more recently in Tokyo and Kyoto in conjunction with the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. (The show organised in Tokyo was the tenth most visited in the world in 2009.) Following the guest performance in Moscow, in September the Royal Academy of Arts in London will showcase works from the Museum of Fine Arts under the title Treasures from Budapest. European Masterpieces from Leonardo to Schiele.