The palace was the residence of princes Alexander and Peter of Oldenburg, grandchildren of the Russian Emperor Paul I. Later there was a military hospital, a school, cadastral organizations. Since 2003, the palace houses the modern art gallery as part of the State Museum for Art and Cultural History. It exhibits mainly the works of German masters: romanticists (Carl Gustav Carus), expressionists of the "Bridge" group (Max Pechstein, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner), representative of the "New Objectivity" Franz Radziwill, the artist Ernst Wilhelm Nay, whose works were labeled by Hitler as "Degenerate Art".