The Museum of Russian Art

It started out as business. Then it became personal. 

In the late 1980s, Raymond E. Johnson, who owned a string of galleries dealing in American realism, looked to Russian art as something that might appeal to U.S. collectors. Encouraged by the findings of a team of American art historians and curatorial advisors he dispatched to the Soviet Union in 1989, Johnson began acquiring Socialist Realist paintings for his business, and found that there was a real U.S. market for the art.

Johnson became personally taken with the work as well, and started purchasing it in 1991 for himself and his wife, Susan. Today, the Johnsons have amassed a private collection of Soviet art believed to be the largest of its kind outside the former Soviet Union. The collection is still growing, and currently numbers some 12,000 works, mainly devoted to Socialist Realist painting but also including earlier and other examples of 19th- and 20th-century Russian realism. 

In 2002, Johnson founded The Museum of Russian Art as a way to share his private collection with the public. Originally situated in an office building in Bloomington, Minnesota, it moved to its present location in 2005 – a stunningly renovated 1935 Spanish Revival-style church in downtown Minneapolis. Since relocating, TMORA has hosted approximately 40,000 visitors per year.

TMORA has an extensive program of rotating exhibitions that often feature works borrowed from the Johnson holdings and other private collectors. The museum’s permanent collection originated with a major donation by Johnson but also includes gifts from other individuals. It now totals about 150 paintings, lacquer boxes, and other art and artifacts of Russian culture.

TMORA’s exhibitions have also involved impressive collaborative efforts with several U.S. and Russian institutions. TMORA lent twenty-five paintings to the Tretyakov in 2003, and, in turn, borrowed works from that same institution – including Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin’s famous painting Bathing the Red Horse (1912) – for its exhibition In the Russian Tradition, held in 2004–05 in collaboration with the Smithsonian’s Sackler Gallery in Washington, D.C. It borrowed works from the State Russian Museum for its 2007-08 retrospective of the artist Geli Korzhev, and will borrow works from the Yaroslavl Art Museum for an icon exhibition this fall.

The Museum of Russian Art

5500 Stevens Avenue South, Minneapolis, MN

ph. 612-821-9045 • tmora.org