The State Museum of Fine Arts

The State Museum of Fine Arts, named after Abylkhan Kasteyev, was established in 1935 as the Kazakh National Art Gallery. It has a leading role among museums of Kazakhstan. It houses a remarkable collection of the folk and crafts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries such as rugs, carpets, masterpieces of workmanship in leather, bone, metal and wood, and ancient ceramic vessels.

The collection of the art of the Soviet period was started in 1936 with a gift from Moscow's Tretyakov Gallery; it now contains various paintings by significant artists such as Filonov, Konenkov, Sarjan and Redko. In the Russian Rooms we can follow the history of classicism, romanticism and socialist realism, while viewing works of world importance. The art of the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is reflected here in the pictures of artists such as Korovin, Serebryakov and Petrov-Vodkin.

The collection given to the museum in 1935-36 by the Hermitage of St Petersburg and the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow have provided the base for a collection of European and Eastern art. Chinese, Tibetan, Indian, Japanese and Korean art is represented here as well as works of Uighur and Dungan art. The museum is still buying works from private collections. Furthermore, it serves as a commercial gallery, exhibiting and selling the works of local and foreign artists of our own time.