The Pushkin Art Museum in Moscow and the renowned Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg engaged in a public dispute on Tuesday, April 30, 2013 after Irina Antonova, the director of the Pushkin, asked Russian President Vladimir Putin to consider reopening the State Museum of New Western Art and restoring its original collection. The State Museum once housed the impressionist and early modern art collection of Russian art collectors, Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov, but it was closed in 1948 under Joseph Stalin’s dictatorship for straying too far from Soviet art. The Museum of New Western Art’s collection was later divided between the Pushkin Museum and the Hermitage Museum.

Officials at the Hermitage voiced their opposition to Antonova’s query as the museum could see some of its most prized artworks relocated to Moscow if the plan was approved. Antonova fired back by saying that the revival of the museum was a matter of historic fairness since the Soviet state was responsible for the museum’s downfall.

Morozov and Schukin’s private collection, which includes works by Henri Matisse (1869-1954), Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), and Edgar Degas (1834-1917), was nationalized after the Russian revolution and used to form the core of the Museum of New Western Art’s holdings in 1912. After the museum closed, the collection was divided up under an agreement between the directors of the Pushkin and the Hermitage. For the Hermitage, the paintings were compensation for the hundred of old master works that were taken from Saint Petersburg to Moscow in the 1920s by Soviet officials when the Pushkin Museum was undergoing an expansion.