A new issue of the Hermitage magazine has come out

“The whole world is playing with digital technology. The Hermitage is no exception. Having constructed the clear foundations of the Greater Hermitage on the ground, we are building its reserve copy – celestial, cloud-based, more precisely, digital. It is already a reality, the main illustration of which so far is the virtual visit with its many digital branches. At the same time, we do not forget to remind people that a digital image, the digital world has its limitations and peculiarities that are absent in the analogue world. We are fond of paradoxes,” Mikhail Piotrovsky, General Director of the State Hermitage, comments.

This issue is devoted to the Hermitage’s exhibition, restoration and public education work, as well as projects in the sphere of inclusion. The main topics are “New Secrets of Leonardo's Paintings”, “From Gothic to Goya”, “Alexander Sivkov, Architect: Restoration and Reconstruction of the Hermitage Buildings” and “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen in Russia”.

One of the most significant exhibitions this year has been “ARS VIVENDI. Frans Snyders and Seventeenth-Century Flemish Still Lifes”, while the exhibition “...and let us make us a name...’. Tobias Verhaecht’s Tower of Babel” and the article entitled “The Flemish Pyramid” are devoted to a conservation project.

The Hermitage’s exhibition activities are represented by some incredible projects elsewhere in Russia, including the Hermitage Days at the Hermitage–Kazan Centre featuring the exhibition “ ‘Believe not thine eyes.’ Trompe l’oeil in Art”, as well as the Hermitage Days in Volgodonsk with the display “In Battle and on Parade. Masterpieces of Protective Equipment from the collection of the State Hermitage Museum” and the inclusive exhibition “Invisible Art. Expanding the Boundaries of What Is Possible”.

An important place is taken by a report about the exhibition “Ilya and Emilia Kabakov. Monument to a Lost Civilization”. The installation was donated to the museum by its creators in 2014, and will be presented for the first time within the walls of the Hermitage as a mark of respect and commemoration for the recently deceased artist Ilya Kabakov.

A special topic is the section “The Hermitage in the War Years” which tells about the memorial exhibition project devoted to events and people in the heroic days of the Siege of Leningrad.

Great interest is being aroused by the publication “The Philosophy of the Russian Arcadia. From the Villa Rotonda to the ‘Exile of Trigorskoye’”.

New acquisitions made by the Hermitage are covered in the articles “Furniture from the Imperial Yacht Polyarnaya Zvezda and “Mikhail Karisalov’s Porcelain Gifts to the State Hermitage”.

Deserving of separate attention is the story about the first joint project between the State Hermitage and Rossiya Airlines, which will acquaint the inhabitants of our country with the real diversity of the museum’s encyclopaedic collection.

The magazine is published in Russian and includes a brief English translation of the materials. The latest issue was worked on by Zorina Myskova – editor-in-chief, Liudmila Ivakina – design and typesetting, and Andrei Sheliutto – layout.

The issue was created as part of the State Hermitage’s Iskusstvo zhits’ [“The Art of Living”] project. The general partner of the project is the retail company Magnit.

The magazine can be purchased in the Hermitage shop in the Main Museum Complex and the General Staff building.

Foreword

NOUGHTS AND CROSSES

The whole world is playing with digital technology. The Hermitage is no exception. Having constructed the clear foundations of the Greater Hermitage on the ground, we are building its reserve copy – celestial, cloud-based, more precisely, digital. It is already a reality, the main illustration of which so far is the virtual visit with its many digital branches. At the same time, we do not forget to remind people that a digital image, the digital world has its limitations and peculiarities that are absent in the analogue world. We are fond of paradoxes.

In this atmosphere, the Hermitage’s exhibition programme suddenly reveals a certain mystical component, a duality of meanings and structures that chimes with the binary system which forms the basis of digital culture. It is not a direct embodiment of it, not a dichotomy, antinomy, antonym or binary opposition. It is simply a sort of mystical imprint – an image, a sign, at times resembling a watermark.

Pairings are unexpectedly emerging in the Hermitage’s programmes. The splendid exhibition of Spanish paintings from the Pushkin Museum is based on discussion around pairs of paintings – twinned in the artist’s own conception or by the layout of a museum display. A whole series of exhibitions at the Hermitage form complex, non-identical twins: two Shchukins, two Morozovs, two Denis Diderots, two pictures from the Impressionists’ celebrated first exhibition.

The monumental exhibition of still lifes “centring on” Snyders plays polemically with the opposition between “knowing how to live” and memento mori. This brings to mind Jan Fabre’s “stuffed creatures” that aroused sharp protests from viewers, and even tour guides, whom one would believe accustomed to Flemish “dead creatures”.

“Munchausen” brings together a search for the sources of the celebrated yarn and the real-life history of foreigners in service at the Russian court. Inclusive exhibitions play on the difference between visual and tactile sensations, while the trompe-l’oeil exhibition brings us back again to the dual meaning of the still life – dead/alive. The tangible and ever so eloquent siege-time crates and drawings strangely come alive in a different way in the new “virtual” – “illusory” – display about the siege.

Exchanges of “halls” or “corners – between the Hermitage and Muscat, the Hermitage and Erebuni – is becoming a form of museum diplomacy, while a twin of the famous Kostroma deer ups and turns into an aeroplane, as if for the Scythian shamans. In the porcelain table services, a conscious and fascinating exchange begins between the original pieces, later replacements and additions. The daring exhibition about the mysteries of Leonardo’s involvement in the works of his pupils turns into a game of “doubles”. One suddenly starts to see the Kabakovs’ deeply philosophical “Lost Civilization” against the background of Piranesi’s majestic ruins.

This is, of course, no more than perceptions, echoes that arise randomly and are easily set aside. They come back though, reminding us of themselves involuntarily and subconsciously, or sometimes not at all, rather waiting to be recollected. Or not recollected – in the way we fail to remember that beautiful pictures and sounds that can even jangle our nerves are generated by an interplay of only two digits –zero and one. Or, more simply, “noughts and crosses”.

The Hermitage displays, exhibitions and “promenades” are like an iceberg, another two-sided symbol that has appeared in museum events this summer, reminding us of the specific character and fundamental simplicity of the artistic interpretation of a multipolar world. The museum, while playing, penetrates to the essence of that world, adorns it, finds unexpected juxtapositions and echoes – and in doing so makes it at one and the same time more comprehensible and more interesting.

Mikhail Piotrovsky

General Director of the State Hermitage Museum