The story
The long yellow-brick building on Lavrska Street, in Kyiv's Pechersk district, was built to store guns. Empress Catherine II of Russia ordered an arsenal for the Pechersk fortress in 1783, and by 1801 it stood finished, a workshop and depot for cannon and ammunition and the first building in Kyiv in the classical style. Its warm amber brick earned it the nickname "the porcelain Arsenal."
For two centuries it served the army and industry. In 2006 the Ukrainian state turned it into Mystetskyi Arsenal, a national museum complex for art and culture, and its long vaulted halls now take large exhibitions of contemporary and historical art, theatre, and the Book Arsenal literature festival.
The complex also keeps a collection, and its best-known pieces are two paintings by Kazimir Malevich, the Kyiv-born founder of Suprematism. One of them, Suprematist Composition I from 1916, is a small canvas where a green triangle, a blue circle and narrow dark rectangles float on a light grey ground. It passed through the hands of the Kyiv collector Ihor Dychenko, who was offered it in Moscow as the work of a Malevich pupil, suspected the master himself, and had his hunch confirmed after two years of restoration and research.
