The State Hermitage Museum: Information

Rembrandts Living In The Hermitage Museum Are Our Russian Rembrandts
Interview to the Izvestia newspaper
July 11, 2008 (N125)

- How is the Hermitage Museum doing at the height of summer?

- There are a lot of tourists. It is great because they bring money. But at the same time tourists are a jam that blocks the museum as a traffic jam blocks the street. People experience difficulties when they want to see the museum without a hurry and approach their favourite paintings. Just recently I have been walking through the halls and next to Leonardo's paintings a woman grabs me by my hand and says, "Look what they are doing! They crowded the paintings and now they are taking pictures of them and irradiate them!" But all of the paintings were under the glass and one of the Japanese visitors was taking pictures without the flash. I hope that the problem with flash will be solved soon; there are digital cameras without flash. Also the bad impact of the flash on the painting is not proven. The paint crumbles more after the rock concerts on the Palace Square.

- But does the flash distract the other visitors?

- It is impossible to look at the painting with flashes all around. It is the same with air conditioning in the museum. We do not have air conditioning everywhere; it is too complicated and expensive. Besides, people need air conditioning more than paintings that live behind the thick walls for ages. There is a constant dilemma - comfort for people or comfort for paintings. And that woman was partially right about the irradiation. Paintings should be protected but also they should be shown to people. The whole museum is built on risks like that. Of course it is easier to lock everything up in the vault so that no one would damage or steal it. But we must always maintain the balance of our visitors’ interest and the objects’ priorities.

- Recently one of the visitors couldn’t get inside of some of the halls and so she brought a claim against the Hermitage Museum and lost.

- In the court decision there was an adequate statement about the logic of the plaintiff. According to her logic the Hermitage Museum must cease all the restoration works, re-expositions and creation of the new exhibitions. The museum doesn't consist just of the halls you are walking and looking at. We have other halls and other rooms. We change their schedule as we wish. They can become the fund depositories when the objects must be moved from somewhere. In some of the halls the painting are lying because we are restoring the Main Art Fund. So protection of culture may cause inconvenience for people. Nicholas Roerich and Dmitry Likhachev used to speak about it, about the rights of culture. And the rights of culture may contradict the rights of humans.

- Did the museum manage to protect the science and the postgraduate studies programme that the bureaucrats wanted to take away?

- They left us neither for now. A lot of things are being brought into order right now and so negative consequences may follow. Cultural institutions are financed by one division of a department while science is financed in another one. The Hermitage Museum under the ex-charter used to be a cultural and scientific institution at the same time. The bureaucrats must have had terrible troubles to finance us like that, joining the flows. It was easier to separate - this is a cultural institution and this is a scientific institution. But in reality it brings a lot of complications because there will not be any money for scientific projects and post-graduate studies. But it is a major issue, in every museum, even in the smallest one, there should be science. It is impossible to calculate the services as in a hospital and finance them. A museum is not a service institution; it is the most valuable thing that the nation possesses. The state must support the museum while the latter may provide no services at all. By the way, free museums in the Anglo-Saxon countries follow this idea: the state supports the museums and therefore provides free entrance. The rest, like temporary exhibitions, cost a lot.

By the way, our society had an acute reaction to what was happening to the science. When we received the papers where the research scientists were excluded we thought that it would be a usual struggle by means of letters and in the department corridors. All of a sudden it turned out that it caused response from people. The museums have presented their suggestions to the Department of Economic Affairs. I believe a compromise will be found.

- There is no final answer to a question about who should head the museum - a manager or a scientist. Do you feel your personality split acting as a manager now and thinking as a scientist in the evening?

- European tradition is as follows: museums are headed by scientists who act like managers at the same time. There is no splitting there. For example an archaeologist is used to raise money, render an account in a cunning way and spend the money wisely. A humanities scientist has the same skill as well. But generally if you ask clever people you can learn everything. When a scientist takes an executive position he understands the most important thing - there are things which cannot exist because they cannot exist. It is a rather anti-scientific point of view, something called moral. You cannot and that is it. Like you cannot make an ice rink on the Palace Square. And there is nothing to explain there. To an art expert it is clear without any explanations. Also there should be, of course, a scheme of executive work, as well as knowledge of how things work. Museum directors often take part in economical forums; I conducted the round-table discussions in Davos and St. Petersburg. I think that the management experience in the cultural sphere is very important for economics. In the 21st century it is becoming extremely humanized. There was an idea stated in Davos that a lot of business decisions will become a result of artistic inspiration rather than the result of a meagre mathematical calculation.

- Have you ever had to ask for money "for the Hermitage" from the businessmen?

- Really, the worst is to ask for money from the state. But we do not ask. We demand from the state and we do it in a harsh manner. Although at the same time we show that we can earn ourselves. There is a limit. It is real to earn 30-40 percent and impossible to earn more. It means that the rest should be given to us by the state. It does give the money when it sees that we can earn the money and spend it wisely. We do not ask anything from the rich people. We create conditions under which they come themselves and offer. We come up with projects that should be liked by the donators. Some want to donate for the Hermitage Museum exhibitions in the places where their businesses are located or where they were born. The others want to make something good for St. Petersburg. Some want to support the scientific researches or restoration process. We have a kind of special menu that we constantly improve.

- What is you clear position regarding what can and cannot be done on the Palace Square?

- It is not about my position. There is a regulation of using the Palace Square. It was adopted after the figure on top of the General Staff Arch burned. But the regulation is often misused. Now under an agreement with the Governor we prepare a list of things that can happen there. I believe that ceremonial events must take place on the Palace Square, like military parades of all types, pledging oaths of allegiance or accepting the students for the first year to the military schools. It is possible to conduct starts and finishes of the sport events. Also it is possible to have concerts but not the types with loud screaming, yelling and uncontrolled crowd but ballet or opera concerts with normal audience. A big concert may take place once a year.

Another important thing is the sound level. It cannot be higher than 83-84 decibel. We sign an agreement with the organizing companies according to which we measure the sound. If it is higher than the set norm we contact the companies and they change something during the rehearsals. When the people want it and the musicians are good everything works. For example we had no problems with the Rolling Stones concert. But when the musicians or the organizers are bad there are scream and noise and everything goes off scale. So we try not just to say "no" but to introduce some rules. Now we are conducting a research of sound impact upon the paint. The first results show that after ten concerts for each painting hanging on the first floor in the halls overlooking the embankment one year counts as two. But it is not seen at once, precise measurements are required. We are starting a similar research of vibration to find out its limits.

- In your opinion, is a law on using the Palace Square necessary or the regulation is enough?

- The regulation is not always carried out. For example, there must be no pyrotechnical effects. Also the most important here, as for the whole city, is height but no one follows the height norms. They build an 8-meter high construction on the Square. We managed to defend the Square during the last struggle on the occasion of an international movie festival. The deputy Alexey Kovalev offered the Legislative Assembly to pass a law on the Palace Square. A minimum number of the deputies were ready to discuss it. The arguments were as follows: there are many squares in St. Petersburg, why is the Palace Square so special? We constantly hear this argument. So why is the Hermitage Museum so special? And why is Petersburg so special? After all, we have got a lot of museums and a lot of squares.

In France there is a law on Louvre. The Hermitage has a number of decrees which separate us from the other museums. But we have to constantly struggle and prove our status. And we are truly special. Of course it would be better to secure it by the law.

- What is a successful museum - the one with unique objects, lots of exhibitions or crowds of visitors?

- It is a very good and complicated question - what is a successful museum and what is the criterion for measuring its success. A lot of people are occupied with economics of culture today. After you struggle through the clever terms in their articles you seem to go back in time into the Soviet Union or to today’s New York. What is the general amount of visitors? What percent of the population is covered with the museum activity? The visitors' quantitative criterion doesn’t fit here. We were the first to understand it. There were times when crowds of people tried to get inside our museum so articles with headings like "Beware, Hermitage!" were published. The articles explained that there were too many people and that something had to be done, so the restoration works had begun. Then the "quantitative" epidemic hit the West. Everybody was happy about 5 million visitors in Louvre or Metropolitan Museum. But their directors just shrug their shoulders when they met - so what? Sometimes it is impossible to enter a museum. I remember the ex-director of the Louvre joking. We were walking in the garden in Kyoto when he said, "I felt as if I am in Louvre - just the Japanese around". The Japanese are fine people joining the culture, of course. But for many museums it is a real problem - foreign tourists suppress the "native" visitors. The tourists partly visit just for the sake of appearance but the museum plays an immensely huge educational role in its country. We are proud to have 2.5 million visitors a year, 0.57 million are foreign tourists. The rest are our citizens, the Russians. Of course they bring in less money; almost half of them visit the museum for free. We introduced benefits for pensioners, children and students. On the first Thursday of every month the entrance is free for the Russian and foreign visitors.

I think that the Hermitage Museum follows the right plan. We try to make the museum accessible for those who have little money to the maximum. We should build such a system under which the chief function of the museum will be carried on - preserving the nation's spiritual health. We try to expand our territories but not without any limits since people cannot walk through the museum for an endless number of hours. That's why we are restoring the East Wing of the General Staff Building. We came up with an open fund storage which is the best in the world for now. A system of visiting the storages solved the problem of not all of the objects being shown at the museum. We make our collections as accessible as possible but we are not exposing the raw materials. We are exposing the product: our exhibition or our exhibition centre. That is we demonstrate a car, not oil or gas. We are also active on-line. In my opinion all together it creates an image of a successful museum. It is the museum that demonstrates its collection and scientific results to the maximum to the wide audience. There are different ways to measure it. One of the objectives of the Russian Museum Union is to work out a criterion of success.

- And who are the judges?

- It is not even clear who should judge. Different people have different attitude. One would exclaim "It is wonderful, everything is in perfect condition!", another would say after seeing the palaces in the movies "It's a bit dark here and the corner is chipped". The visitors' impressions have always been interesting to me. When you lead the people who own castles and palaces you can have a pleasant talk about the restoration works - what to do with the chandeliers or the floor which wears off under the feet of thousands of visitors. And people who have seen the palaces only in the movies complain that there's not enough glitter or there’s a wrong door.

In my opinion the Russian museums have shown themselves marvellously during the last 10-15 years. They preserved themselves and their exponents. So many hands were and are outstretched to them but we managed to preserve, to survive and to find a new field for the museums. This field is significantly bigger and more important in the society now than it used to be.

- Does the Hermitage abroad fit into your "maximum accessibility plan"?

- We are an aggressive institution. We have the Hermitage and the centres beyond its limits. The saying "we don't care if it's London or Kazan" is ours. Following the maximum accessibility tendency we organize big exhibitions abroad. And it is not like when someone just takes our objects, no, we work out the concept ourselves and we end up not just showing the interesting and beautiful things but the history of their existence in Russia. We represent the Russian Hermitage Museum. I believe we are the first to demonstrate abroad a product and not raw material. Then an idea to create permanent Hermitage scientific and exhibition centres emerged. Representing the Hermitage and promoting the country is more important than matryoshka dolls and so I forbid selling souvenirs in the museum. This is a story about Russia as a great cultural empire which called for and adopted the great masters. Rembrandts living in the Hermitage Museum are our Russian Rembrandts. They have lived here for several centuries.

The general scheme is as follows: we are the planet and around us there are the artificial sputniks. We can transfer them from one orbit to another one, launch and draw back. We can change the content. And it is a dynamic system. For example, in Amsterdam there is the Hermitage Embassy and we organize a new exhibition once every half a year. Right now a big building is being restored there and the year 2009 opened with the Imperial Ball in the Winter Palace exhibition. The story there is full of delight, even the flats are sold with a view on the Hermitage.

Recently we have opened the Hermitage-Italy scientific centre in Ferrara; it is a Russia academy in Italy where one can conduct scientific researches. We organize exhibitions there as well. Right now we have opened an exhibition of the Ferrara artist Garofalo. We collected his works from 15 world museums and we thought to bring a huge painting from Khabarovsk. But how do we have to transport it? No insurance company would agree to transport it in a lorry and it doesn't fit into any train. Thanks to the Minister Shoigu it was brought to Moscow on the Ministry of Emergency Situations planes and from there it was transported on tracks to Ferrara.

The Las Vegas Centre which was opened along with the Guggenheim Museum moved to Europe seven years later. We decided that we completed our mission and brought art to Las Vegas. And also the system must be dynamic, we must constantly move. So that's how we came up with the idea of a New Arts Museum in Vilnius.

- Was it your idea to let the children inside the Museum for free?

- When I am asked about what I had done for the Hermitage it is the only thing I mention. At first the ushers couldn't understand why the children should be let in for free if they just run to the canteen to buy coca-cola (it was the time when it just arrived for sale) and they don't care about the museum at all. I explained that while they are running to the canteen they will pass on their way five sculptures and a part of the Hall of Ancient Egypt. That is good already and let them run back with their coca-cola.

- Children of actors grow up behind the curtains. You are a son of the Hermitage Museum director so have you grown in the museum halls?

- As you understand I did grow up in the Hermitage. By the way my brother and I liked to collect the acorns and to see who had more. We looked for them in the Alexandrovsky Garden and they also let us into the Winter Palace Garden since it was closed for the visitors. There were no people and we collected a lot of acorns. I don’t even know why because we haven't done anything with them. But it was interesting.