Odesa
Museums, art and music

Fine Arts museum is the biggest art gallery in the city, which collection includes canvas mostly of Russian painters from 17th-21st centuries, icon collection and modern art. The Odesa Museum of Western and Eastern Art is big art museum; it has large European collections from the 16–20th centuries along with the art from the East on display. There are paintings from Caravaggio, Mignard, Hals, Teniers and Del Piombo.

Of note is Odesa's Alexander Pushkin Museum, which is dedicated to detailing the short time Pushkin spent in exile in Odesa, a period during which he continued to write. The poet also has a city street named after him, as well as a statue. Other museums in the city include the Odesa Archeological Museum, which is housed in a neoclassical building, the Odesa Numismatics Museum, the Odesa Museum of the Regional History, Museum of Heroic Defense of Odesa (411th Battery).

Among the city's public sculptures, two sets of Medici lions can be noted, at the Vorontsov Palace as well as in the Starosinnyi Garden.

Jacob Adler, the major star of the Yiddish theatre in New York and father of the actor, director and teacher Stella Adler, was born and spent his youth in Odesa. The most popular Russian show business people from Odesa are Yakov Smirnoff (comedian), Mikhail Zhvanetsky (legendary humorist writer, who began his career as a port engineer) and Roman Kartsev (comedian). Zhvanetsky's and Kartsev's success in the 1970s, along with Odesa's KVN team, contributed to Odesa's established status as "capital of Soviet humor", culminating in the annual Humoryna festival, carried out around the beginning of April.

Odesa was also the home of the late Armenian painter Sarkis Ordyan (1918–2003), the Ukrainian painter Mickola Vorokhta and the Greek philologist, author and promoter of Demotic Greek Ioannis Psycharis (1854–1929). Yuri Siritsov, bass player of the Israeli Metal band PallaneX is originally from Odesa. Igor Glazer Production Manager Baruch Agadati (1895–1976), the Israeli classical ballet dancer, choreographer, painter, and film producer and director grew up in Odesa, as did Franco-Israeli École de Paris painter and sculptor Isaac Frenkel Frenel, Israeli artist and author Nachum Gutman (1898–1980). Israeli painter Avigdor Stematsky (1908–89) was born in Odesa.

Odesa produced one of the founders of the Soviet violin school, Pyotr Stolyarsky. It has also produced many musicians, including the violinists Nathan Milstein, David Oistrakh and Igor Oistrakh, Boris Goldstein, Zakhar Bron and pianists Sviatoslav Richter, Benno Moiseiwitsch, Vladimir de Pachmann, Shura Cherkassky, Emil Gilels, Maria Grinberg, Simon Barere, Leo Podolsky and Yakov Zak. (Note: Richter studied in Odesa but was not born there.)

The Odesa International Film Festival is also held in this city annually since 2010.
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