Erarta

This guide to Erarta in Saint Petersburg opens with the unsolved 2000 murder of businessman Dmitry Varvarin, shot on a Petrograd street on his way home. It follows his widow, Marina Varvarina, a mathematician who afterward began driving out to artists' studios at the edges of Russia, buying paintings the Moscow galleries had never bothered to notice. The building itself has its own past, raised in 1951 to house the local Communist Party committee before passing to a rubber research institute, concrete corridors never built for color.