The Vitebsk Museum of Modern Art occupies a neoclassical building in the city centre and holds a collection that spans Belarusian art of the twentieth century, with particular emphasis on the avant-garde period of the 1910s and 1920s when Vitebsk was briefly one of the most important centres of modern art in the world. Works from the Chagall and Malevich periods sit alongside later Soviet-era painting and contemporary Belarusian art.
The museum is small and uncrowded, which makes it possible to spend time with individual works rather than rushing through. The permanent collection is arranged chronologically, and the early-twentieth-century rooms are the strongest. Check locally for temporary exhibitions, which are sometimes excellent.