Solo for a Glass Blower's Pipe

On 20 June 2006 an exhibition featuring about 150 glass objects made by contemporary Russian artists opened in the Arab Hall and the Rotunda of the Winter Palace. These exhibits are part of the collection of one of a kind artistic glass which was created by the curators of the Department of History of Russian Culture and was enlarged in 2002 with the addition of hundreds of objects donated to the State Hermitage by the ROZISO Gallery in Moscow.

The exhibition is divided up according to the urban centers of glass production, and the visitor can thereby trace the development of artistic glass in our country over the past 40 years. The exhibition presents not only works by masters in the largest glass factories but also works coming from small private studios that were selected by the curator and received by the museum on loan for temporary safekeeping.

The Leningrad Factory of Artistic Glass is represented by several famous names: B.A. Smirnov, Yu. A. Muntian, N.M. Goncharova, Yu.M. Biakov and N.B. Tikhomirova. B.A. Smirnov's decorative composition entitled Glass Blowers was chosen as the programmatic work of the exhibition.

Contemporary trends in artistic glass fabrication in St Petersburg can be seen in the original works by the Makgraf Group; by V.P. Samoshkina and I.B. Tomsky, teachers in the Department of Ceramics and Glass of the St Petersburg Industrial Arts Academy; and also by the owners of private glass workshops: N.P. Malevskaya-Malevich, N.B. Yuzhakova and the Ivanov family, among others.

The Gus-Khrustalny Factory, which was founded in the middle of the 19th century in Vladimir Province, exhibits works by the master glass makers V.S. Muratov, A.S. Kurilov, V.S. Zaitsev and O.I. Kozlova.

The Diatkovsky Crystal Factory in Bryansk Oblast was founded in 1790 by the Maltsov family of industrialists and merchants. It is represented by well known works of Soviet and Russian artists: the Golden Fern by I.V. Machnev and the Country Wedding by V.I. Kotov (1980s).

The exhibition also includes original works by S.M. Beskinskaya, V.Ya. Shevchenko, E.Yu. Esikova and K.N. Litvina – artists of the Red May Glass Factory, (starting 1923) in Vyshni Volochek. This factory was originally founded by the Bolotin merchant family back in 1873.

Solo for a Glass Blower's Pipe is the first exhibition of unique pieces of artistic glass in the Hermitage. In 1967 and 1989 the museum had retrospective exhibitions of artistic glass which also showed modern works. Today's exhibition provides a much more complete survey of different trends in the art of Russian glass production during the 20th and 21st centuries.

A scholarly catalogue of the exhibition has been published. It covers works that are held in the glass collection of the Department of History of Russian Culture, as well as in private collections.
The curator of the exhibition, author of the introductory article and compiler of the catalogue is leading researcher in the Department of History of Russian Culture Tamara Alekseevna Malinina.

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At the opening ceremony of the exhibition

At the exhibition

The exhibition catalogue