Hermitage-Vyborg Center Hermitage-Vyborg Center The Hermitage-Vyborg Center is an external branch of the Saint Petersburg based Hermitage Museum in the Russian town of Vyborg. The museum was opened in 2010. Hermitage-Vyborg Center is located in the 1930 completed Vyborg Art Museum and Drawing School building, which was designed by the Finnish architect Uno Ullberg. Vyborg Art Museum and Drawing School was built in 1929–1930 as the town was a part of Finland. The classicism and functionalism style building is located on the top of the 16th-century Panzerlachs Bastion, which was one of the fortifications of the Vyborg town wall. Like Alvar Aalto's
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