Vilnius Guggenheim Hermitage Museum from Saint Petersburg's Hermitage Museum and New York City's Guggenheim Museum would have been displayed as well. It is estimated that the museum would have cost up to 170 million litas (75 million USD). Completion was initially scheduled for 2011. A feasibility study was conducted to explore various aspects of the project's implementation, including market and economic impact analyses. However. due to corruption allegations, the entire project ended. Three architects submitted their designs for the final competition: Zaha Hadid, Massimiliano Fuksas, and Daniel Libeskind. Daniel Libeskind, winner of the competition to rebuild the World Trade Center, presented his work under
Soviet sale of Hermitage paintings were made in the same period, notably the Codex Siniaticus from the Russian National Library, sold in 1933 to the British Museum (after 1973 British Library) for £100,000 raised by public subscription (worth £ in 2019), and "The Night Café" by Vincent van Gogh. In the 1990s, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Parliament of the Russian Federation passed a new law prohibiting the sale of Russian art treasures to foreign countries. For many years the National Gallery was reluctant to lend the paintings it had bought from the Hermitage back to that Museum, for fear that the