The State Hermitage Museum: Hermitage News

Issue Nr. 6 of the Hermitage Student Club's newspaper, The Golden Ratio

The newspaper has come out once a month ever since March 2004. Named after Leonardo da Vinci's well-known artistic formula, the newspaper carries articles discussing lectures and guest appearances in the Student Club as well as exhibitions and projects going on at the Hermitage and, more generally, cultural events in St Petersburg. The column entitled Professions publishes interviews with people in various professions who work at the Hermitage. The last sheet of the newspaper is open to contributions of prose, poetry and philosophical reflections by members of the Club.

The Golden Ratio, š1 (6) 2005

In the latest, March issue of The Golden Ratio, the column on Professions carries an interview with Yuri Alekseevich Molodkovets, staff photographer at the State Hermitage and creator of the photographs which have accompanied more than 100 catalogues and albums devoted to the Hermitage collections and books on the history and architecture of St Petersburg. The photographer reflects on his work in the museum, on his craft, and on the sense of creative activity. "What is specific to museum work is that each object was made by a master who has invested his talent and his labor in it. The photographer's task is to highlight this, to see and reveal this mastership. the tsbort in itis that each object was mde ical refletns who work at the Hermitage.tage and more gnerMany exhibits are put on the stage for one month, two, or three and then are returned to the storerooms and live on in the public eye only in catalogues. The photographs alone determine whether the item will stay alive," says Yuri Molodkovets.

On the third page of the issue, there is extensive material about a Siberian painter, holder of the title Honored Artist of Russia, Vladimir Kapelko. Kapelko's work bears witness to his times, his travels, and the peculiarities of his own biography. The Putorana Plateau, Samarkand, Bukhara, Khiva, Yalta, Bakhchisarai, ancient Khersones, Mana, Lena, Tuva, Khakasiya..."My long-standing curiosity drove me to go, paints in hand, from place to place, from sea to sea. And so I have traveled the Earth these 40 years without taking days off or vacations," Kapelko writes of himself.

The remarkable and beautiful "small" world of medals, gems, plaquettes, snuffboxes, and carved objects in ivory is explored in Viktoria Bolshakova's article entitled The Gift of Self-Oblivion (section on The Artist and The Poet) about applied art and its place in museum displays:

"An object can possess such spirituality, so much apparent energy of creation. You will find nothing like this in the monumental abstraction of a painting. However, the spirituality is hidden deeper down, concealed as it were; it exists and reveals itself in other conditions and forms. An object can be deceptive due to its utilitarian aspect, its existence as a 'thing.' It can be more productive to see this as a separate category of artistic thinking, a special way of registering spirituality, all of which means that a special method of deciphering and understanding it must be applied."

In the next issue of The Golden Ratio, readers will find materials on the history of the English Club, on the work that goes on in various sections of the Lomonosov Porcelain Factory, impressions from travels through Italy, and much else.

Issue Nr. 6 of
The Golden Ratio