Establishment of the Hermitage-Guggenheim Foundation

On 19–20 June 2002, the first meeting of the Trusteeship Council of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation was held at the State Hermitage where the establishment of the philanthropic Hermitage-Guggenheim Foundation was announced by Hermitage Director Mikhail Piotrovsky, Director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation Thomas Krens, Chairman of the Trusteeship Council of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation Peter Lewis and head of the Interros holding company Vladimir Potanin.
The primary goal of the newly established foundation is to provide financial support and implement joint projects of the Hermitage and Guggenheim in the spheres of art, architecture, design and education.
Vladimir Potanin, head of the Interros holding company , was elected Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Hermitage-Guggenheim Foundation and Director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation Thomas Krens was appointed its Executive Director. The headquarters of the foundation are to be located in New York.
The Hermitage-Guggenheim Foundation will begin its work with undertaking a feasibility study of the restoration and renovation of the General Staff building, a major objective of the ''Greater Hermitage Project''. The General Staff building is to become a multi-functional museum complex which will house museum galleries as well as entertainment and commercial centres for residents and visitors of St Petersburg. The study will cover such problems as functioning of the new museum complex, arrangement of its collections, design of spaces for exhibitions, estimation of the expenditures, budget and profitability and finding potential partners. According to this analysis, the Hermitage-Guggenheim Foundation will assign special tasks to each of the museums.
Cooperation of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and the State Hermitage is based on the Long-term Collaboration Agreement signed by the museums in June 2000. The broad strategic objectives of the alliance are to make the each museum's respective collections accessible to broader audiences; to share resources; to implement joint exhibition, publishing, and educational initiatives, internet activities; and to facilitate each institution's long-term goals. Guggenheim-Hermitage collaboration was approved and supported by Mikhail Shwydkoi, Minister of Culture of the Russian Federation. The first concrete example and result of the partnership was the creation of the Hermitage-Guggenheim exhibition centre in Las Vegas. Its first exhibition ''Masterpieces and Their Collectors: 19th- and 20th-Century European Painting from the Collections of the State Hermitage and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation'' was opened in October 2001 and featured 45 works from the collections of the two museums.
Peter Lewis, a philanthropist and patron of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, has been Chairman of the Trusteeship Council of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation for some years.
Vladimir Potanin, a businessman and philanthropist, is the head of the Interros holding company which for seven years has been a major Russian partner and sponsor of the Hermitage. In 2002 Potanin was elected to the Trusteeship Council of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.
Established in 1937, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation operates an international network of museums, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Guggenheim Museum SoHo in New York; the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao; the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice; Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin and the Hermitage-Guggenheim in Las Vegas. The foundation's mission is dedicated to the collection, preservation, presentation, and interpretation of modern art and culture. The Guggenheim maintains a premiere collection of 20th-century art.
The State Hermitage is famous for its rich art collections and contains about 3,000,000 exhibits illuminating art and culture of the world from the Stone Age to the early 21st century.
At present the State Hermitage is in the process of realizing a development programme of the "Greater Hermitage Project" which includes art storage facilities, galleries, exhibition spaces in Russia and abroad, and new forms of electronic communication with visitors.

At the press-conference

State Hermitage Director Mikhail Piotrovsky

The Russian Federation Culture Minister Mikhail Shvydkoy

Interros holding company Vladimir Potanin

Chairman of the Trusteeship Council of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation Peter Lewis

Director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation Thomas Krens