The National Gallery of Art occupies a building that began life in 1980 as the Museum of Revolution — a low, horizontal, stone-faced Soviet institution on the right bank of the Neris, facing the old town across the water.
It was reconstructed in the 2000s and reopened as the national collection of twentieth-century and contemporary Lithuanian art. The conversion kept the original structure and its severity, which makes it an unusually direct example of a Soviet building given a new purpose rather than either demolished or frozen.