Konstantin Chernyavsky, chairman of the National Artists Union of Ukraine, told Local History that the museum, housed in a turn-of-the-twentieth century Art Nouveau mansion, possesses three works by Kuindzhi, as well as ephemera including letters, photos, documents, and the two-hundred-year-old baptismal font in which the artist was christened. Known for his extraordinary ability to depict light and for his use of brilliant color, he was originally a member of the Wanderers, a nineteenth-century group of Russian realists, before breaking with them and establishing his own style, strikingly embodied in the 1905–08 Red Sunset on the Dnieper, currently held in the collection of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Kuindzhi, who was of Greek descent, is considered important by both Ukrainians and Russians.
The Kuindzhi Art Museum, devoted to the work of influential Ukrainian realist painter Arkhip Kuindzhi (1842–1910), was destroyed March 21 in a Russian airstrike on the Ukraine port city of Mariupol, according to Lviv, Ukraine-based culture website Local History. Mariupol’s Kuindzhi Art Museum Reported Destroyed in Russian Air Strike