State Museum of Oriental Art

12a, Nikitsky Boulevard
Moscow
Moscow
121019

Website: http://www.russianmuseums.info/M297

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The museum houses a unique collection including rare Buddhist sculpture, jewellery and textiles, wood and bone carvings and antique weaponry.
Although the collection is small and, in comparison with equivalents in London and Paris, rather amateurish it covers the cultures of the whole of Asia, displaying paintings, sculpture and handicrafts from all across the continent, including the Middle and Far East, Central Asia, the Caucasus and the indigenous tribes of Siberia and Eastern Russia.
A special section of the museum is devoted to the life and works of the renowned thinker, poet and artist Nikolai Rerich (1874-1947) and his son Sviatoslav. Rerich, who left his native land in 1917 already well-established as a talented painter drawing heavily on the religious and cultural traditions of old Russia and the East, traveled the world with his wife and family, particularly Asia, promoting his own fascinatingly crazy mixture of pantheism (each individual human, being part of the Universe or nature, is part of God), Eastern mysticism and European high culture, which to this day has thousands of followers in Russia and throughout the world. He spent the last decade of his life in a remote village in the Indian Himalayas, and many of the impressive landscapes on display here date from that period. His vibrant and mysterious paintings alone are well worth the admission price.