75,000 artifacts of Ukrainian traditional folk
The museum is located on the grounds of Kiev Pechersk Lavra monastery in the house of the former Metropolitan's residence. The museum collection was established in 1899 as part of the collection of the newly founded City Antiquity and Art Museum. Now the reserves and displays of the museum contain over 75,000 artifacts of Ukrainian traditional folk and professional decorative art dating from the 15th century to the present days. Many of them are house hold and domestic articles varied in material, shape, decoration, and purpose which talented craftsmen had turned into highly artistic items inhering the wealth of regional specificities.
Metal work, glassware, porcelain, Easter egg painting, folk painting. That’s all in the “National Folk Decorative Art Museum”
Traditionally Ukraine consists of six ethnographical zones that differ in customs, favorite materials, designs, colors, techniques. Ukraine is traditionally famous for carpet weaving, weaving, print, embroidery, ceramics, glazed pottery, wood carving, painting, artistic leather work, horn and metal work, glassware, porcelain, Easter egg painting, folk painting and primitive iconography. Especially valuable objects, both from the historical and artistic viewpoints, are wooden carved silver-mounted cross of 1576, clay glazed tiles of the 15th – 18th centuries, Cossack tobacco-pipes and powder flasks of the 18h-19th centuries, silk woven sashes of the 18th century, embroidered in gold and silver, «guta» (a traditional glass workshop in the 16th-19th centuries), production of leading Ukrainian porcelain and faience enterprises of the 18th -19th centuries. Everybody is impressed with the collection of the Easter eggs. The Museum possesses Ukraine's largest collection of works by Maria Primachenko (1909–1997), which includes more than 500 paintings. A special showroom accommodates the canvases by Ekaterina Bilokur (1900–1961). They are deservedly considered the masterpieces of the Museum's collection and belong to riches of world art. The main task of the museum is “to preserve the genetic code of the Nation”.
