Behind the Icon Curtain. Dutch and Flemish Art in Central and Eastern Europe

When in 1998 the Pushkin Museum in Moscow celebrated its hundredth birthday, it did so in an unexpected way. The museum undertook a complete cataloguing and exhibition project of its paintings and drawings from Flanders and the Netherlands. And there's much more in this way behind the ‘icon curtain'. The author offers a look at Dutch and Flemish art in Central and Eastern Europe, limited mainly to paintings. He concludes that these countries are inseparable not only from our continent but most emphatically from the part of European cultural heritage that we call Dutch and Flemish art.