The story
Minsk's national art museum was founded in 1939, and barely two years later most of what it held was gone. When war reached the city in 1941 the collection could not be evacuated in time, and the fate of many of its best works is still unknown.
Almost everything you see, then, was gathered after 1945. Curators rebuilt the museum piece by piece over the postwar decades, buying, collecting on expeditions through Belarusian villages, and taking in donations, until it held tens of thousands of works of Belarusian, Russian, Western European and Eastern art from the 15th century onward, with a notable set of old Belarusian icons and a hall of Russian 19th-century painting.
Its grand columned building on the former Lenin Street opened in 1957 and became such a fixture of central Minsk that it was printed on a Belarusian banknote in 2000.
