A private foundation headed by a Kremlin official said it has bought one of the most important private collections of Russian art outside the country.

The St. Petersburg-based International Konstantinovsky Charitable Fund said it purchased the Nikita and Nina Lobanov-Rostovsky collection of theater art from the Panama-based Europactole Properties Inc. for $16 million.

The collection has 810 watercolors, drawings, and gouaches by Russian Modern artists. Most of the works were made for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, which performed in Paris, and later Monte Carlo, between 1909 and 1929.

“This collection is priceless,” the head of the Russian president’s property department and chairman of the Konstantinovsky Fund, Vladimir Kozhin, said at a news conference in St. Petersburg. “These artworks were created by the leading Russian artists of the early 20th century.”

The top works in the collection include Leon Bakst’s costume designs for “Cleopatre,” Natalia Goncharova’s designs for “Liturgie,” Mikhail Larionov’s sets and costume designs for “Chout,” and Alexandra Exter’s designs for “Aelita.”

“The collection is unique,” a Russian art history expert at the University of California in Los Angeles, John Bowlt, said in a statement. “Russia, a ‘backward’ country on Europe’s periphery, caught up to and surpassed the culture of the West.”

The collection is currently in storage in Cologne, Germany, and will be put on temporary display in the St. Petersburg State Museum of Theatre and Music in September.

In February, Nina and Nikita Lobanov-Rostovsky donated two works to the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow — Giorgio de Chirico’s “Poet’s Melancholy” (1916) and Theo van Doesburg’s “Black Zigzag” (1924).