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   I Sleep with Two Telephones As of today, Mikhail Piotrovsky has served as the director of the Hermitage for 20 years. On the eve of that special day, the Rossiyskaya Gazeta contacted Mikhail Borisovich. You have been in the director’s chair for 20 years. What were you struck by when you first took the job, and what are you struck by now? Mikhail Piotrovsky: I did not vacillate when they offered me the job of director of the Hermitage. After I while, though, it did hit me, of course (“what have I gotten myself into?!”) Today, when my Western colleagues tell me: “There’s a crisis going on, we’re reducing expenditures. How are things going over there?” I answer: “Well, of course, the crisis is happening here too, and we’re reducing expenditures. However, compared with what was happening 20 years ago, both in the Hermitage and in our culture as a whole, these crises don’t worry us.” Back then there was a sense of total catastrophe. It was unclear how to get out of it. The only thing left to do was grit your teeth and keep working, and there you have to rely on God to help you. A few years of total despair. All that poor money we made had to be spent on heating bills; we have to save the walls of our storage areas by keeping the air warm. Salaries were “unclear,” it was unclear how to make repairs; but our building is a palace, after all! Everything was just decaying, leaking... There was a very difficult mood, a very difficult psychological climate, highly politicized and full of hopes and dreams that could never be achieved. People threw their hands up, they didn’t know what to do and began thinking exclusively about themselves, and about money, they forgot to think about the museum. It seemed that all of the Hermitage’s traditions would be destroyed. But once you’ve started something, you have to finish it. Then, gradually, thanks to your patient work, everyone started to accept that “you have to work, and maybe God will help you.” God really did help. Because everyone worked. What strikes me now? Nothing but the fact that we have a remarkable museum that is constantly giving birth to something new. It’s true though, that today, now that everything has stabilized, you understand that there are pluses and minuses to bureaucracy. The plus is that everything is put in its place, the methods of cavalry charges and partisan warfare are things of the past, paper that are submitted receive answers, hopes for financing emerge. The minus is that bureaucrats begin to increase the number of papers. This becomes a sort of invention for them. Where there are mountains of paper, an order is created that leads to a negative form of bureaucracy. On the other hand, it is, of course, impossible to get by without order; the romantic, revolutionary time has passed. But how can all of that be accomplished at once? It is very important here that each worker has boss that has twenty years of work experience He has the right to say “this isn’t how it should be.” I try to make that worker understand that if everything they produce is “how it should be,” that isn’t enough. We need initiatives, inventions. And we get them. We have managed to preserve the Hermitage from any sort of raiding, denigration or humiliation. We have significantly raised the reputation of the museum as an innovator, a legislator of museum fashion in the world. Today universities are conducting research about how the Hermitage works. The Hermitage has been part of your life since long before you became the director. Has that 20-year “first person” period “formatted” you in some way? Mikhail Piotrovsky: I have thought about why I became the Director... Well, what you have to understand is that at the moment I offered a unique combination of two characteristics. On the one hand, I was part of the Hermitage, thanks to my ancestry, my birth, my father, my profession, and on the other hand, I was someone they could bring in from outside, since I was a scientist, immersed in my subject. Throughout those 20 years, I have had to be both an outsider and someone from inside the Hermitage, the Director of the Museum and a scientist who views that Hermitage as part of the world cultural process. I like to think and reflect; and my way of reflecting has become significantly more organized over the course of those 20 years. As the Director, I have become accustomed to budgeting my time precisely and looking at an issue from different sides. Whether or not an exhibit will happen or repairs to a hall, however funny that might sound, I have to see it as part of the world cultural order. Of course, as time passes things get more complicated, but I continue to do scientific work, and I can see that my time is organized more interestingly than it was before. I’d like to ask you to answer frankly about the relationship between happiness and regret regarding the last 20 years. Mikhail Piotrovsky: It’s hard work. You sleep with two telephones, you have constant jitters. But when you put it all together, it still makes me happy; as they say in English, it’s fun. That’s the only reason I have the right to be the director. If the job doesn’t give me pleasure, then it isn’t worth doing. The one major disadvantage is that I can’t go on my beloved expeditions, to Yemen, for example. In our culture, it’s regarded a negative when a job is transferred from father to son, as a manifestation of nepotism or cronyism. But in your situation, it seems to be nothing of the kind. Your name has become a kind of insurance policy that saved the Hermitage. What obligations does the name you inherited come with? Mikhail Piotrovsky: With my name, it is much easier for me to insist on something, or prove something. Furthermore, that’s the kind of time it was; today we speak ill of it a lot, but we forget that it was a time of unusual decisions. When else would they nominate the Director’s son after his father’s death? Despite all of that son’s great qualities. That was a time when a lot of non-standard decisions were made, which, in many ways, have turned out to be right. I’m not just talking about the Hermitage, but about the country in general. Many of them were aimed at long-term results and saved us from a much worse version of how events might have unfolded. However, I felt a great deal of responsibility for making sure that everyone at the museum would accept that decision. The most interesting events at the Hermitage today according to Mikhail Piotrovsky The pearl road and the right scandal 1) In two years, we will celebrate the Museum’s 250-year anniversary. We plan to come up with quite a few presents for our friends. Completing the restoration of the Eastern Wing of the General Staff Building, open exhibitions there, completing the second construction phase for our reserves and storage area, and launching the third stage. We will create new exhibit halls in the Small Hermitage building, and are preparing a whole range of exhibits. All of this is not without the help of the government; our big plans have been approved as government documents. 2) The Nicholas hall hosts a grand exhibit on the remarkable architect Santiago Calatrava, which is the beginning of our series of exhibits on contemporary architects. At the same time, there is an exhibit of envelopes, decorated by Soviet and then Russian artists for the French Cultural Attache'. This is a sort of new art, given to us by the organizers of the exhibit From Kabakov to Chemiakin. In the summer, we usually bring sculpture to the Hermitage, and now our courtyard is hosting Luke by Anthony Cragg and the Tower of Snow by Enrique Celaya. 3) An exhibit dedicated to the ancient culture of the island of Bahrain presents both ancient archeology and wonderful Hellenistic monuments. It coincides with the session of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee in Petersburg, which was meant to be held in Bahrain, but was moved due to the unrest. As such, all of the members of the committee came to our exhibit, and Bahrain, through Petersburg, was present at UNESCO. The Petersburg session, by the way led to the approval of a wonderful program for Bahrain, which is called “The Pearl Road.” Harvesting pearls really is a thread that connects the entire spiritual and material history of the country. 4) We are currently exhibiting Degas’ Place de la Concorde, a controversial painting, which is regarded as “trophy art;” it was restored by our restorers and brought back to its original size. The exhibit will describe the fate of the painting, how Degas gave it to Vicomte Lepic, which is depicted in the painting, how he cut up the painting, how various arguments began–that’s quite a story to tell. 5) Second Life, Coins and Medals in European Applied Art, is a major exhibit in our center in Amsterdam, dedicated to the origin of impressionism, the Nomads of Eurasia on the Road to Empire exhibit in the Hermitage-Kazan center, as always, shows the encyclopedic range of our exhibits. 6) In August, we will open an exhibit in Venice, dedicated to Titian’s painting The Flight into Egypt. Its restoration, which took many years of work in the Hermitage confirmed Titian’s authorship and revealed a beautiful landscape, one of the first in Italian art. 7) At the end of the year, we will open an exhibit in the Armorial Hall, dedicated to paintings of all the battles of the War of 1812, beginning with the Battle of Klyastitsy, where Petersburg was defended, and every day we will bring in a new painting, up until the taking of Paris. 8) Two more small sensations might be called innovation, or perhaps provocation. We held a symposium, dedicated to bronze sculptures made after the artist’s death. They are closely connected with the very important and perplexing question of the artist’s rights; if the artist has died, and his molds are used to cast bronze sculptures, to what extent is that a work by the artist. Different countries have different legal standards for that issue. This is an extremely difficult problem; throughout the world, experts are afraid to express their opinions regarding the authenticity of works of art. This is because if an expert art historian says that a piece is not genuine, they take him to court. Experts can be ruined in court, even if they are right. That is why they have been trying to say nothing at all lately. Regarding bronze sculptures made after the artist’s deaths, this is particularly the case. Having provoked this conversation, especially with lawyers (experts were afraid to participate in it) we turned the discussion in a new direction, and it has continued to move that way. The second provocation is an exhibit on the famous English artists, the Chapman brothers, with pieces on the edge of horror and sadism. Right now, we are thinking of how to do everything possible to make sure this scandal comes out right. The Chapman figures bring back the horrors of war and the sense that war means more than victory. It is time to remind people of that. Elena Yakovleva http://www.rg.ru/2012/07/25/piotrovskiy.html |
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