Palace will house Rostropovich art

The billionaire who bought the art collection of the late cellist Mstislav Rostropovich said Monday it would be on permanent display in a palace outside St. Petersburg, Russia, that is one of the presidency’s main meeting centers.

The announcement by Alisher Usmanov at a news conference in Moscow that the extensive collection of Russian art would be placed in the Konstantin Palace disappointed some museum directors who wanted pieces of the collection and raised criticism that it could often be out of public view because of the palace’s ceremonial functions.

But the head of the Kremlin’s property department, Vladimir Kozhin, said the exhibit would be generally open to the public and that the recently restored palace offers top-flight security and physical conditions for preserving the collection’s 450 pieces, which include porcelain and paintings by renowned artists such as Ilya Repin.