Manet’s Olympia (1863), which rarely leaves Paris, travelled last month from the Musée d’Orsay to Moscow for a show at the State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts (until 17 July)—an example of the way in which Modern art sits at the heart of French-Russian cultural diplomacy. The work is then due to go on show at the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, our sister paper The Art Newspaper Russia reports. Further French-Russian exchanges are planned. Alla Manilova, Russia’s deputy culture minister, told the Ria Novosti news agency that France will be sending masterpieces, some of which have never left the country before, to a major show at the Moscow Kremlin Museums in 2017. In February, the Hermitage and Pushkin museums announced that they were lending works collected by Sergei Shchukin to a blockbuster show in October at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris.
