The Madonna versus the Peacock

At the Saint Petersburg Cultural Forum, they just held an evening intellectual marathon entirely devoted to the display of the Russian pavilion in Venice and the public’s reaction to it. So, was it a triumph or a flop at the Venice Biennale? Why did Bernard Arnault come to the Hermitage and what secrets of the Red River in Vietnam did cultivated Petersburgers learn? Where has the Litta Madonna gone and why do the Peacock Clock and the mummies exceed it in entertainment value? The Hermitage recalls the main events of the year. Mikhail Piotrovsky talks about them to the RG.

One of the main events for the Hermitage this year was participating in the Venice Biennale. You devoted an intellectual marathon to it at the Saint Petersburg Cultural Forum and intend to show it at the Hermitage. Will you be showing it in Moscow?

Piotrovsky: Yes, and at our satellite centres.

The Hermitage as the chief subject of Russia’s display – that was the idea of the Russian commissioner of the exhibition Sergei Mikhailovsky. As such influential people usually do, he offered us his artists, but we decided that since the topic was the Hermitage, then its curator will be the Hermitage. Not me, kindly note, but the museum. Further, Alexander Sokurov devised everything, and Shishkin-Hokusai added to it.

Sokurov’s chosen theme of the Prodigal Son was the main thing in our pavilion. It is the theme of great mercy, the symbol of which Rembrandt’s painting is. One Protestant pastor told me: “Give me that picture for half a year and I will bring 300,000 people back to Christ.” In such cases we usually allow the showing of its reproductions in places of worship.

What did Sokurov do?

Piotrovsky: Recruiting some wonderful young sculptors who made sculptures of the father and son, with a face, without a face, he took them out of the picture and the result was absolutely staggering.

The teacher of Velazquez back in his time (you can read about it in Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things) believed that the image should emerge from the picture. The picture is something that is the opposite to the computer, which we “enter” and view what’s “inside”.

In this installation, Sokurov, as it were, asks us the necessary questions afresh. What has the son done? What is the father forgiving him for? Perhaps there are sins here of the kind that cannot be forgiven? What will he do after he’s forgiven? And won’t the well-behaved older son say to the father: “And now give me the second half of the inheritance!”?

The answers to those questions can’t be found without looking at the world around. Which is often horrific. Here are two soldiers captured by ISIS with fuses for explosives leading up to them. And a voice off-camera says they are going to be blown up. And horses gallop, as if carrying their souls away, in accordance with a Turkish belief.

And what should happen to mercy in such a world? And how should we understand what will happen to us?

How was that statement received at the Biennale?

Piotrovsky: On the first day the Financial Times published a list of the five most interesting pavilions and ours was included. Then – for the first time in many years! – the Russian pavilion was visited by people from the committee that makes awards and our representatives were invited to the ceremony. That means we had a real chance. But the Lithuanian beach won.

Our artistic approaches, though, evoked shock. It wasn’t what they are used to there.

It seems to me that no-one ever did understand Sokurov. It is indeed a bit complicated. You have to look for at least 15 minutes and to do so standing, while visitors want things quicker, easier and sitting down. And just for a stroll around – the Russian pavilion with Rembrandt is too serious for that.

Perhaps the yardsticks of contemporary art don’t match the boundless character of the Prodigal Son? Even Rembrandt spoke to the world of his own time in a new way. And Sokurov speaks in an even newer one.

Well, and people were probably hoping to see in our pavilion something along the lines of “Russia is ruining unfortunate Syria”. That, now, would have been accepted.

But that was not what there was. Instead of that, Sokurov issued a challenge entitled “This is serious”.

Still, despite the reaction, we will persistently continue to teach people that “serious”. Because art should do that. It is, if you like, a provocation towards a new vision of a horrific world. And towards discussion about it.

What caused the main dissonance between Sokurov’s work and the context of the Biennale?

Piotrovsky: In works of contemporary art, which is often financed by the rich and the very rich, everything is usually light-hearted. Even blood. And among the universal tragedies of supposedly burning, yet wrapped up like chocolates, present-day issues (minorities, migrants) Sokurov presented real pain. And he shouts out: look around you, see what’s happening. According to Sokurov, we live in a world full of cruelty. It is coming back to us, sometimes almost of the sort seen in the 1920s. But, of course, many did not like the question Sokurov posed in a fundamental way about the cruelty within ourselves.

But in my opinion everything turned out superbly in his piece. Although I always considered that art should soothe the soul, I understand that it should also shout out. If we want to stand our ground for culture, we need to sharpen the discussion. In Venice we did that.

Already paid for

Meanwhile in Russia this year the Hermitage has been saying a lot about famous collections and collectors?

Piotrovsky: Yes, this year we have had a “year of collectors”. When it comes down to it, Matisse is more important than the Shchukins, and Van Gogh than the Morozovs and the fate of their collections, but a museum should know how to commemorate the collectors.

Italy, for example, is not very fond of recalling how it was left high and dry, failing to acquire the collection of the bankrupted and imprisoned collector Campana in time. It was bought up by the French, the Russians and the British. And our recent joint Campana exhibition with the Louvre (its director came to us for the occasion) in the Hermitage turned out to be another story about divided collections and the way they all end up in museums. Collectors sometimes understand this and establish museums themselves.

Nowadays we have a “low-grade” average intellectual, often lacking in taste, who at the slightest thing is ready to run to the procurator’s office and demand that a museum be punished for something they fail to understand.

We also managed to tell about the amazing Stroganovs, among whom we singled out Pavel Stroganov. The greater part of our Italian primitives that came to us already after the revolution were collected by him. All these “Simone Martinis” are down to his taste. Plus a totally remarkable Watteau.

While in the Pushkin Museum they told about Shchukin through the history of a merchant family and the history of the Muscovite merchant caste in general, we in the Hermitage risked looking at the Morozov brothers’ collection in the context of world culture. When Bernard Arnault [a French businessman, president of the Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy group, one of the richest people in the world] came to us for that exhibition and we took him to look at Matisse’s Music, which he hadn’t seen. we went through the halls of Picasso, Matisse and the Impressionists, and he was staggered. We didn’t tell visitors about how much Ivan Morozov paid for the pictures, but about how his acquisitions appear in the wider Hermitage context. And in the context of super world-class works he shone. Next to the portrait of Mikhail Morozov painted by Serov hung the first Van Gogh that he bought. And next to Serov’s portrait of Ivan Morozov was the still life by Matisse that is depicted in that portrait. And Serov looked no worse than those two great pictures.

We created an amazing diptych of Russian Renoirs – our Madame Samary that was bought by Mikhail Morozov and your pink one from Moscow. And we also had three halls of choice “Morozov” Cézannes.

When people embark on jealous talk, saying “the Hermitage took everything”, I reply with Sokurov’s words from The Russian Ark: “But it’s already paid for.” We paid for the Matisses with Rembrandts, Murillos, Poussins. Let’s not forget, by the way, that hundreds of paintings were taken from the Hermitage as well, for sale or to be transferred to other museums in Russia, including the Pushkin Museum.

The return of the average intellectual

How are visitors to the Hermitage changing? They are clearly different from those in Soviet times, and probably already different from those in the ’90s?

Piotrovsky: So far our main visitors are either those who go to everything and know everything or else very ordinary folk with all their lack of understanding.

And there are very few people who, without being absolute fanatics, nonetheless do understand and appreciate art. That average intellectual visitor is very important to us.

Actually, the idea of bringing the average intellectual back to the museum arose in a conversation with the Governor, with whom we somehow spent an hour and a half talking about this topic. He, for example, believes that the intellect of the city needs to be saved. And the museums in particular are very important intellectual potential for St Petersburg and a bridge between the intelligentsia and ordinary people. And in that he is absolutely right.

That bridge is a very important thing.

We are not bound by the necessity to produce a blockbuster exhibition every time so that people come running. Not being fond of measuring effects only in money and takings (you can’t take all the money and people queue up to get in with us anyway), we hold the exhibitions that we considered necessary.

Permitting ourselves such gourmet items as “exhibitions of a single picture”, now from the Louvre, now from Milan, we think about the average intellectual, who while going around the displays will see something “en route” like the Vietnamese “Treasures of the Red River” exhibition and will never forget it. (If you only knew how pleased the Vietnamese prime minister was with it!)

And what if ordinary folk come in droves of the dim-witted and tourists? Generic Japanese. Endless Chinese.

Piotrovsky: Tourists are, of course, a heavy load. In the summer the air conditioners in the Rembrandt Hall can’t cope. But tourists bring money.

We need to educate the Chinese tourists. In the Prado, 40% of the visitors are Chinese, but they are different – in groups of 8–10 people with intelligent faces. They aren’t noisy and they have a good Chinese guide with them who tells about El Greco in a serious way. While we keep hearing all the time from the guides tales of how Peter… killed Catherine. That needs to change. The museum knows how to change visitors.

After all, our Russian visitors did change. In Soviet times, they at first came in droves and didn’t understand a thing, but gradually they were “manufactured” into people who signed up for Hermitage lectures and began to visit us more often. From students, who came to Leningrad to study from all corners of the country and the world and knew little about art, new Hermitage visitors grew up.

But now the city needs to be brought back to the museum on a massive scale?

Piotrovsky: Yes, the city needs a high intellectual level. And that is determined by the average intellectual. Just as in a huge and unexpected expansion of property-ownership the “middle class” is important, when it comes to intellectual level that sort of middle stratum is important. And it is the very thing that is being eroded. When people say that “the best minds are going abroad”, let’s not forget that those are four or five people and they can be bought back or be born again. But when that middle intellectual stratum disappears, that intermediary between the high intelligentsia and the other strata of society, that is far worse. Nowadays we have a “low-grade” average intellectual, often lacking in taste, who at the slightest thing is ready to run to the procurator’s office and demand that a museum be punished for something they fail to understand.

Yes and the museum is the most democratic institution in the world, not only because it is open to everyone, but because it has something for everyone. For the educated, for the poorly educated, for the highly educated and for the uneducated public, and for schoolchildren, even for infants.

The Peacock Clock yet again.

Piotrovsky: Well, everyone views the Peacock with delight. And the mummies too. When visitors are asked what attracts them most in the Hermitage (and we will never get away from that entertainment function) they first mention the Peacock Clock and only then the Litta Madonna.

But there is a shortage of the visitors with the unforgettable faces from the ’50s and ’60s. We have seen them in photo albums, and they became a symbol of the time.

Piotrovsky: Yes, back then there was no shortage of such people. And the more ordinary visitors took their lead from them. But now there is a shortage of them.

You one said that Saint Petersburg educates and nurtures its inhabitants through its very architecture.

Piotrovsky: Yes, and paintings too. But that educating and nurturing needs to happen. Putin says that we were forcibly taken –every week! – to the Hermitage or the Russian Museum, and I can see that was the right thing to do. You can tell by him that he is a person who grew up in Saint Petersburg and knows what the Hermitage is. He has a certain kernel of taste. Other politicians frequently lack it.

I was once showing Bill Clinton around the Hermitage and we stopped by Rembrandt’s celebrated painting The Fall of Haman, which is also known as David and Uriah. It turned out that no-one in the American President’s retinue knew the story of David and Uriah. The Baptist Clinton had to explain to them all what it was about.

Theology in paints

Are theological interpretations of great pictures important for the Hermitage?

Piotrovsky: There are many theological interpretations of great pictures. In the West whole books have been written about them. There are so many versions attaching to Michelangelo’s sculptures! And so many theological nuances in them! We in the Hermitage, too, are now beginning to speak about a deeper and more varied understanding of paintings, including by theologians. And it would be good to organize discussion of great works of art with Orthodox theologians. Bishop Amvrosy and I, when he was the rector of the Saint Petersburg Theological Academy, spoke a lot about our pictures and the students of the academy came to us for lessons.

Olga Sedakova, who is known for her theological works on Dante, would be a splendid conversation partner here…

Piotrovsky: Yes, and she has written about Rembrandt too.

Her celebrated Travelling with Eyes Closed.

Piotrovsky: It would be very interesting for us to discuss with theologians why this or that subject gets transformed. Why there are many apocryphal details in paintings. Or to discuss Rembrandt as a Protestant in a Jewish milieu. I attempted somewhat provocatively to intrude into theological subjects when I gave a lecture on El Greco’s Peter and Paul. And yes, such attempts do give rise to interesting subjects.

One wants good, interesting discussions that distract people, not even from their struggles – let them struggle – but from too much utilitarianism. And from different sorts of nastiness.