The exhibition features works from the Bohdan and Varvara Chanenkas National Museum of Art's collection of Western European engravings. The museum is named after the famous spouses, who were patrons of the museum and understood that the world's works of art should be accessible to the public. The private collection of the Chanenkis became the core of the museum's current collection, one of the most important collections of world art in Ukraine.
The composition of the museum's collection changed dramatically in the 20th century. In the 3-4th decades of the 20th century, the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts was changed. In the 3-4th century, the museum often gave away and received individual works and large collections from elsewhere. The staff, who were few in number in those years, did not have time to document this process. This situation still makes it difficult to study the history of the collection, especially the collection of printed prints. The museum's founders mentioned the print collection only once, in 1919, in the museum's first library inventory, when they called it "the collection of engravings from the Chanenki collection".
In 1931, the museum received over 1,000 prints from the collection of Vasyl Shchavynsky (1868-1924), the renowned chemist, connoisseur of the arts, explorer and collector. Forced to leave his homeland due to political circumstances, Shchavynsky, a Ukrainian patriot, ordered the valuable collection of paintings and prints, the photographic library and the library to be transferred to the Kyiv National Museum or to the Bohdan Khanenko Museum. Shchavynsky was assassinated in 1924 in what was then Leningrad. His widow, together with museum workers and other Ukrainian intellectuals, did their best to carry out the will, even though the Communists of the time did not recognise private property. This is how the museum came to own the engravings of Luc van Leyden, a large number of Dutch etchings and Albrecht Dürer's incomparable "Madonna and the Monkey".
In 1933, a large number of engravings from the Zhytomyr Museum arrived in Kyiv. It is known that in the 3rd decade of the 20th century, a museum of Kyiv museum was opened. The collection of Zhytomyr was substantially enriched with works from the private collections of the nationalised Barons de Shodar and Ilyinsky family. The woodcuts by German artists and the etchings by Rembrandt are believed to have originated in the Zhytomyr collections. The lack of stamps and numbering prevents more precise conclusions.
The Chanenkos Museum suffered a significant loss during the Second World War, when most of the engravings were taken to Germany.
Despite its dramatic history, the Museum's collection of prints now accounts for half of the museum's total number of objects. It contains the major engravings of the 16th and 18th century European schools, including masterpieces by famous masters.
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