Looking After the Treasure

Last year’s controversial exhibitions at St. Petersburg’s Hermitage museum gave attendance a new boost, and fueled hope for expansion and upgrade plans. Lisa Dickey takes a look at what’s in store for Russia’s greatest art museum.

For many, 1995 will be remembered as the year the ‘Hidden Treasures’ were finally revealed. In a move that made headlines all over the world, the Hermitage Museum put on display an astonishing collection of 74 Impressionist and post-Impressionist paintings by some of the greatest names of that era: Monet, Matisse, Van Gogh, Renoir, Gaugin, Degas.

Even in ordinary circumstances, the exhibition would have been noteworthy. But the fact that the paintings, which were taken from Germany by Soviet troops at the end of World War II, had been missing and widely presumed destroyed for the last 50 years, focused even more attention on the exhibition, and on the museum itself.

The Hermitage, arguably Russia’s most famous museum, houses one of the largest collections of art in the world: with nearly three million objects on display, a visitor would need nine years simply to glance at them all.

In 1764, Catherine the Great began buying collections of European art wholesale and created a museum in an annex to the Winter Palace. But while proving to the world that she was an educated and enlightened ruler, she jealously guarded her museum from ordinary people.

“Only the mice and I can admire all this,” she said of the English Walpole collection which arrived in 1779.

The Hermitage did not open to the public until the Bolsheviks came to power and proclaimed it a museum for the people. With the nationalization of the huge collections of art patrons Ivan Morozov and Sergei Shchukin in particular, it also received a major material boost. Despite the sale of over fifty paintings, including Rubenses and Rembrandts, for desperately needed hard currency in the 1920s and 30s, these collections are the better part of what confronts the visitor today.

The Hermitage now draws over a million visitors a year. However, while crowds wander the 400-odd rooms and corridors, the management and behind-the-scenes activity there has traditionally been a shadowy, little-explored arena.

But suddenly, with the announcement of the Hidden Treasures Revealed exhibition, the Hermitage found itself under the white-hot spotlight of international media attention. Swarms of art experts, journalists, curators, critics, students and tourists descended on the museum, and the world press began making judgments and asking difficult questions — about the legal ownership of the paintings in the exhibition, the condition of the Hermitage’s buildings and collections, and the fate of the museum in a chronically unstable society.

How did the Hermitage stand up in the glare of the spotlight? And perhaps more important, what is the museum doing this year to keep up the momentum that, according to some, has finally thrust it into the modern era?

“As an art event, as a socio-cultural event, [the exhibition] was a success,” said Hermitage Director Dr. Mikhail Piotrovsky (pictured above left). “It’s a bad thing to make art a prisoner of politics. One thing that we succeeded at was making this exhibition a world art event” — and one, according to some critics, that has re-established the Hermitage as a museum to be included on any list of major art tourism destinations.

And yet, according to Piotrovsky, the irony is that the Hidden Treasures exhibition was not even the most important at the Hermitage last year, much less in the world. “From the point of view of the museum and art, the exhibition of ancient Greek gold was more important,” he said, referring to a collection shown in tandem with exhibitions at the British Museum and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. “There will not be another exhibition like it for at least a hundred years.”

But it was Hidden Treasures Revealed  that ignited a firestorm of interest, partly because of the bitter debate sparked by the re-appearance of the long-lost paintings: Who rightfully owns the art taken as spoils of war from Nazi Germany? And what will happen to them now?

The ultimate fate of the paintings is yet to be resolved. Having been widely quoted in the Western press last year as generally in favor of returning at least some of the works to Germany, Piotrovsky now seems more defensive: “I’m not opposed to discussions and negotiations...I think there must be compromise, but in a compromise the decision must be ours.

“We brought these things into Russia legally,” he said. “It must be our decision [to return the paintings], not because we’re criminals, not because we’ve done something wrong... but because it was a legal decision which we now can change.” For the moment at least, the fate of the pictures is in the hands not of the Hermitage, of the Russian government, which continues to wrestle internally with the issue. No resolution is yet in sight.

For now, although the Hidden Treasures exhibition has closed, 54 paintings are still on display, with the rest temporarily in storage due to their light-sensitivity. “The most important thing,” says Piotrovsky, “is that the art is available for  everybody who wants to see it.” To the heirs of the German collectors from whom the art was taken, some of whom wish to see the paintings returned, the unspoken corollary to this statement is clear: never again must this art be hidden from a public that wishes to see it.

If the Hermitage is lucky, the numbers of people that want to see it will remain steady, bringing in much-needed income to the museum. After falling steadily since 1991, visitation increased in 1995, thanks largely to Hidden Treasures Revealed. Two million people came to the museum last year, an increase of 10% over 1994. Of these, nearly 300,000 were foreigners, many of whom came on specially booked tours to see the exhibition.

“We have saved tourism in St. Petersburg,” said Piotrovsky, adding that while a combination of bad press and poor public relations have hurt the city’s tourist draw, he expects visitation to the museum at least to level off, if not increase, in the next few years.

What is the Hermitage presenting in 1996 to maintain the public’s newfound interest? Of sixteen temporary exhibitions scheduled this year, the one likely to garner most press attention is a second exhibition from the museum’s trove of trophy art. Hidden Treasures: Drawings of the Western European Masters will open December 3, and will include watercolors and drawings by artists like Van Gogh, taken from private German collections at the same time as the Impressionist work.

Another major undertaking this year is the Hermitage’s collaboration with several Dutch museums and a number of St. Petersburg institutions — the zoo, Kunstkammer museum and the archives of the Academy of Sciences among them — to produce a wide-ranging exhibition in honor of Peter the Great’s ‘Great Embassy’ to Europe. The exhibition will include paintings, applied art and scientific instruments to commemorate the tricentenary of the tsar’s ‘undercover’ trip to Holland early in his reign to learn the art of shipbuilding. Exhibitions of Flemish miniatures, Wedgwood porcelain and 16th-20th century Russian icons are also planned this year.

So, from an art standpoint, the Hermitage still presents exhibitions on a par with the best museums in the world. But how does it measure up in other ways?

Depending on who you believe, the Hermitage is either a crumbling relic or a thriving, rapidly modernizing museum. It has long endured a reputation as a place where priceless art hangs in drafty rooms to fade beneath shafts of sunlight let in by the elderly guards, the walls are water-stained and crumbling, and the building seems ready to collapse into the nearby River Neva at any moment.

“The Hermitage isn’t falling down,” said Piotrovsky, though he acknowledged that there was still work to be done. “Certainly not everything is good enough; we’re now working on new lighting... with different kinds of glass, and we’ve put new skylights in our Italian room. We’re doing quite a lot to improve what we have...”

On the subject of the condition of the paintings themselves, Piotrovsky said: “The works of art in the museum aren’t in any danger. They’re not always in the best possible situation; a lot of things can be done. But they’re not in danger — they’re not in the hands of barbarians who don’t know what to do.”

While the Hermitage is not exactly in the vanguard of the latest management techniques, the museum staff has nevertheless made enormous strides in the last two years in modernizing bookkeeping, management of the collections, donor contacts and development.

In fact, just over a year ago, the museum opened its first-ever development office, where three employees manage the business of finding and maintaining donors and sponsors. Although a development office is a vital part of any museum in a market-driven economy, where success or failure of its work can mean the life or death of a museum, the whole concept of finding outside money was unnecessary for the Hermitage throughout Soviet times, when arts funding came entirely from government. So the museum has been forced to play catch-up.

“This kind of institution doesn’t change overnight,” said Stuart Gibson, a UNESCO consultant based in Paris who works specifically with the Hermitage. “When Russia first opened up, you had all these experts coming in, saying ‘This is the way we do it, so this is the way it should be done here.’

“But the Hermitage has its own traditions and its own needs,” said Gibson. “You cannot necessarily apply what works for a Western museum here.”

With the help of UNESCO, Hermitage staff have reworked the museum’s Master Plan, originally drawn up in the early 1980’s. Much of the proposed work for the Hermitage is predictable enough: renovation of the building and the collections; improvements in security, lighting, visitor facilities and information services; staff training in marketing, administration and funding. In short, the plan allows for improvements that will improve the visitors’ experience in indirect ways.

But the plan also includes a few proposals that, when actually put into effect, will radically change the visitors’ experience at the Hermitage.

The first of these is a $12-14 mn project to build a new entrance from historic Palace Square. The current entrance, on the building’s north side, faces a busy street and requires visitors approaching from the pedestrian-heavy Palace Square side to walk halfway around the building. The new entrance, facing the sprawling square, will be safer to access and aesthetically preferable, with views of the Alexander Column, General Staff building, St. Isaac’s Cathedral and Admiralty.

The second and much more ambitious proposal, which would also have a major and lasting impact on the character of Palace Square, is to locate a museum of applied arts in the General Staff building.

The building, which curves along the southern edge of Palace Square, is virtually empty, and the interior is in need of major repair work. But the exterior, designed by architect Carlo Rossi with a rousing chariot sculpture and dramatic archway leading into the square, is a beloved and instantly recognizable landmark in the city. The presentation by the government of one half of the General Staff building to the Hermitage for use as a museum was the first step in what promises to be a very long process of developing and installing the new museum — a process which, for now, has no projected completion date.

Where does the money come from for projects of this size? The Russian government is in no position to provide extra funds; in fact, last year it fell far short of its promised obligation to the museum. The Hermitage’s share was cut by 33 billion rubles ($7 mn) a shortfall which, remarkably, Piotrovsky takes in his stride:

“It’s the state’s debt, not our debt,” he said, then continued with a smile. “And besides, I’ve had directors of major international museums say to me, ‘Oh, that’s nothing! You should see our debt!’”

Money for the large projects is expected to come from donations, the museum’s own budget, sponsors and support groups like the international “Friends of the Hermitage” organizations. Finding enough funding sources for these plans means the year-old development office has its work cut out, work which could become more difficult in the event of political and economic instability.

But as Piotrovsky says, “I don’t believe the greater historical development of the museum will really be changed by circumstances. There could be some problems; I hope there won’t. But we’ll see.”

Lisa Dickey is a freelance writer based in St. Petersburg. Her work has appeared on the World Wide Web site The Russian Chronicles (“http://www.f8.com/FP/ Russia /index.html”), which details her travels across Russia in the fall of 1995.