For the Press

Briefly on the Khanenko Museum

The Khanenko Museum is the key world art museum in Ukraine.

The museum presents the most significant Ukrainian collection of Western European, Asian and ancient art. The core of the museum holdings is made up by the private collection of Bohdan and Varvara Khanenko, who were distinguished Ukrainian collectors of art and philanthropists of the late 19th – the early 20th centuries.

One of the two main museum buildings is the Khanenkos’ mansion, a unique monument of history and architecture. Built in the late 19th century, the house retains extraordinary spirit of the past. Its façade and interiors are designed in the “historicism” style implying the mixture of various historic features: gothic, Renaissance, baroque, rococo, etc.

The other museum building located nearby belonged up to 1918 to the family of Volodymyr and Efrosynia Sakhnovskys, close relatives of the Khanenkos. Today this building houses the permanent exhibition of Asian art.

The Khanenko Museum’s collection includes original artworks by outstanding European masters, such as Pieter Paul Rubens, Gentile Bellini, Juan de Zurbarán, Jacques-Louis David, François Boucher.     

The museum keeps highly valuable collections of European sculpture and decorative arts. You can find here beautiful and rare pieces of Iranian, Tibetan, Chinese and Japanese fine and decorative art, as well as small but interesting collections of Ancient Greek, Roman and Egyptian art.

Over the course of the 20th century and particularly during the period of the II World War the museum survived significant collection losses. At the same time new valuable objects were added to the collection as donations and acquisitions.

The most important of the latter was the group of the unique “Sinai” icons – four earliest Byzantine icons of the 6-7th centuries. Today the icons are permanently displayed in the separate hall of the Khanenkos’ mansion.

In total, the Khanenko Museum’s holdings comprise more then 25 000 exhibits. Almost 1000 selected artworks are displayed permanently.