MATICA SRPSKA GALLERY

This museum offers a fairly comprehensive approach to national painting of the 18th and 19th centuries. The gallery exhibits only a small part of the 7,000 pieces stored in its cellars: paintings, sculptures, drawings.

The works exhibited give a good account of the complex process of Europeanization of Serbian pictorial art from the great migrations of 1690 to the creation of Yugoslavia in 1918. The section devoted to the 20th century offers a good illustration of visual art in Vojvodina.

The oldest and most important cultural institution in the country. Founded in 1826 in Pest, Hungary, to be safe from Ottoman repression, the Serbian Matrix had from the beginning the objective of preserving, developing and nurturing the Serbian cultural heritage, in all arts and letters. In 1864, the headquarters of the institution was established in Novi Sad, at No. 1 Matica Srpska Street, in a pseudoclassical building from the beginning of the 20th century, donated by Marija Trandafil. After the Second World War, the Matica Srpska became a scientific, cultural and literary institution promoting many Serbian men of letters and scientists. It is a fully autonomous institution, living thanks to the support of its academic members residing all over the world, which has enabled it to found museums, galleries, a library of three million books and even a publishing house. It also publishes nine journals, including Letopis Matice Srpsk, which has never stopped publishing.