Piotrovsky: One should take pride not so much in having a “good” history as a complex one

How could Potemkin be more than a tsar? Is culture doomed to fight with bureaucracy or does cultural policy give us a chance of becoming better than everyone? Why should one not fear being an empire and not be ashamed of being a colony? What money would museums do better to turn down? Do museums expect a slow- or fast-moving person? Mikhail Piotrovsky, Director of the State Hermitage, visited the Rossiyskaya gazeta for a “working breakfast”.

At the Hermitage’s anniversary celebrations, you called it one of the greatest phenomena of Russian culture. But only very recently, in the 19th century, the celebrated critic Stasov spoke of the Hermitage as a failed project, precisely, it would seem, due to its non-Russianness.

Mikhail Piotrovsky: People always say nasty things about the Hermitage and Saint Petersburg. And even Stasov is among those who did so. We have one means of countering all that talk about a “failed project” – raising the bar to the point where it is unreachable: we are the foremost museum in the world.

In everything that concerns historical memory, the museum is like a book… But not for light reading, for careful study.

But the Hermitage is indeed above all a collection that manifests the good taste of emperors, the nobility and the rich.

Mikhail Piotrovsky: No, the Hermitage is not simply other people’s art collected with taste. It is a great museum, created out of an understanding – very necessary for Russia! – that having good collections of art is as important for a country as a good economy or army.

Well and, of course, it is a produce of that very Russian cultural responsiveness that has repeatedly been noted. Pushkin loved to visit the Hermitage at a time when it was difficult to get in.

The Hermitage is the whole of world culture in a Russian wrapping. An encyclopaedia of world culture written in Russian. And to a considerable degree the world perceives Russia as a country dear to it through the Hermitage. When we showed Sokurov’s Russian Ark in America the whole of “Russian Washington” came to watch. People who have spent their whole lives working seriously against Russia were happy to see it through the Hermitage.

The Hermitage is also an assimilation of world culture. And a manifesto: Russia belongs to European culture! And it is home to one of the foremost European museums.

Rare collections and attractive colonialism

You are currently holding an exhibition of Assyrian art from the British Museum. How did you manage to get it?

Mikhail Piotrovsky: It is a truly unique exhibition. We have never had one like it and who can say when we will again.

Did it help that the British Museum is closed for reconstruction?

Mikhail Piotrovsky: No, it’s not a matter of the reconstruction, but of an adequate exchange. We quite recently gave them a large exhibition of our Scythian art and they sent us the Assyrian reliefs in response.

We were also helped by the fact that today the British Museum is under attack from all sides for Britain’s colonial past. Since there is hardly anything British in it, people boldly say that it is the most imperial and colonialist museum in the world, having seized everything from everywhere. And the museum in response, attempting to demonstrate its rights and merit, is doing a great deal for all the communities and nationalities of London – “Come and look we have the finest specimens of your culture.” And it is taking its art around the world a lot. The Hermitage and other museums in this country in fact have always done that… But now both the Louvre and the British Museum have begun taking their art around the world.

But the Hermitage is also to no small extent a museum of art removed from elsewhere…

Mikhail Piotrovsky: Yes, but bought with money. That same Assyrian exhibition is an example that shows it was no bad thing that people took ancient art away – whether to London or to Petersburg. Otherwise there would be nothing left of it.

But Macron has promised to give everything back to those from whom it was taken.

Mikhail Piotrovsky: I think such matters should be decided by museums and not politicians. I do not in general acknowledge the principle of “giving back”. Everything that finds its way into a museum becomes a part of its organism and there is nothing to “give back”. We wouldn’t give someone our own arm or leg, would we?

Although, if there are things in a museum that are sacred for another country… We in the Hermitage, for example, took the decision to hand over the stained-glass windows from the Marienkirche in Frankfurt an der Oder. I took a long time to get it through, being convinced that for Germany they are a hundred times more important and we are able to tear them from us. The Germans are now going to hand over to Namibia some things from their museums, because they are the result of blatant military seizures and sacred for that country. When a museum ends up having sacred objects of another people or another public institution, that becomes a problem. Icons, for example, can perfectly well be in a museum, but there are icons that should perhaps be given to the Church. Miracle-working ones, for example. But that has to be decided each time individually, and not for the sake of political interests. So, Macron has spoken, and what next? People will begin to throw mud at France: “Disgusting country, plundered everything…” Not only museum people, the whole country will have to wash it off. It’s time to somehow put an end to this post-colonial ideology and culture with its penitential mindset. We in the Hermitage recently proudly opened a display of the ancient colonies on the northern Black Sea coast. Those “colonizers” brought Russia the right to call itself Europe. So, there are different sorts of colonization! Now, when all countries are independent, people are beginning to figure out that one should not be afraid to speak the truth on the topic of colonialism and imperial history. And the truth is also that the removal of antiquities to European museums has saved them from destruction. If the Hermitage’s celebrated Palmyra Tariff had remained in Palmyra, just imagine what a splendid target it would have made for 21st-century machine-gunners! They would have shot it to pieces just for amusement. And when you think that it used to stand almost next to the spot where they cut off people’s heads…

What money is it better to turn down?

Did the Scythian exhibition in London go well?

Mikhail Piotrovsky: Yes, if you set aside the fact that it was sponsored by British Petroleum and on the opening day protestors scattered black and white pieces of paper in front of us saying BP is ruining the environment, its money is “dirty”.

But all money is dirty. And charitable activities are not an amusement either, but as a rule an attempt to atone for sins. And. incidentally, the best way of doing so.

For us in the Hermitage this is all a little funny. Our money comes mainly from the state, but in Europe and America protests like that are becoming a problem.

When at the recent conference on the reputation of museums held in Pamplona we were discussing the high rating of the Van Gogh Museum, its former director told us how he had it out with such protesters, asking them to leave the museum and go elsewhere. (Which they did, by the way.) Still, the Dutch university professors who compiled the museum ratings said that he had behaved wrongly: he should have allotted them a separate room in the museum itself for protest debates.

It's my opinion that you can take money from oil companies. They do not do anything bad and environmental pollution is more the result of the development of civilization as a whole. But I don’t think you should take anything from, for example, private military companies that kill people. I would point out that it isn’t always good to take money from the state either. Its money can in some instances be no less toxic than BP’s. It’s not the people in the street who should decide that, though, but the museum. In the Hermitage (where I decide), there have been occasions when we did not take money from sponsors…

Favourites and Achievements

Your second hit exhibition is “Tis Potemkin Himself!”. What story is the museum – one of the chief custodians of historical memory – telling about our history?

Mikhail Piotrovsky: In everything that concerns historical memory and historical forgetting (today there is a branch of learning about that, too), the museum is a very important institution. It’s like a book… But not for light reading, for careful study.

A historical exhibition in the museum is a scholarly essay, and a comic book, a newspaper, a novel and a philosophical investigation. Most importantly, though, it gives people the opportunity to think for themselves and discuss. It seems to me that the best means of acquainting people with the facts is through the example of museum objects, because in everything else – books, newspapers, TV – a ready-made idea can be seen.

The Potemkin exhibition is a splendid occasion for telling about what favouritism is. And about what women’s rights are – today and in the 18th century. In the Winter Palaces the walls remember Potemkin. He actually lived in the imperial palace, walked around it in uniform and in his dressing gown… So we do not forget to tell about Orlov and Potemkin, nor about the story of the “Potemkin villages”.

That’s a myth after all?

Mikhail Piotrovsky: A piece of theatre. In Russia many things are done through theatre. Catherine “staged scenes” about how to vaccinate against smallpox, but people started to do it. And Potemkin certainly did everything theatrically. When during Catherine’s journey to the Crimea, the whole company of nobles was feasting at Inkerman, a curtain hung on the balcony, then Potemkin pulled it aside and everyone saw the newly constructed Black Sea fleet anchored out in the bay. And the review of it began. There you have the “Potemkin villages”.

Do such accounts give history back its worth?

Mikhail Piotrovsky: Above all they give it back its complexity. And the more complex history is, the greater its worth. One should take pride not so much in having a “good” history as a complex one. If history is not boring, you can already take pride in it.

A slow-moving person

Recently, on Mikhail Shvydko’s talk-show Agora, you said that in principle it’s possible to go around the Hermitage in 2½ hours. But those 2½ hours are spent in the museum both by someone who has only come to say they have been there and someone who came to the Hermitage to see something. That’s a different slow-paced life, a slow-moving person. That kind are more important for the Hermitage that those who dash rounds and are gone.

Mikhail Piotrovsky: In the museum everyone’s important, fast- and slow-moving. The person who’s dropped in for 10 minutes and the Queen of Britain, whom I showed the whole Hermitage in 40 minutes. We have plenty of everything for “fast-movers” and “slow-movers” – architecture, history, beautiful things, an accurate account. And plenty of knowledge saves one from the press of the crowd. For me any museum, if I already know it, is interesting even for a five-minute visit. I simply know where I should go and which painting I should stand in front of.

In the museum everyone should get what they need. For the profound viewer, we have evening opening until 9 o’clock. At that time, you can see people in the museum who have a different look on their faces. Admittedly now Chinese tour companies have found out about it, so there are already crowds appearing then too.

Of course, people with very “high demands” in the museum are very important to us, but there aren’t all that many of them. Only a few dozen have been coming for the evening opening of the Potemkin and Assyrian exhibitions so far. The rest, for the most part, want the Peacock Clock, the mummies, Catherine II and the Litta Madonna. The kind of visitor you are talking about needs to be nurtured. We have a lot that is aimed at particular categories of people, but it is important also to have the reciprocal striving to get into those categories.

Who is your main audience?

Mikhail Piotrovsky: Children, students and pensioners. We try to maintain a social programme of “free tickets for pensioners”. Our pensioners are not the American sort who begin travelling around museums when they retire; no, ours will go to a museum if they have been going there all their lives. And by that alone they have earned their free entry to it.

Why are you trying to get the average Petersburg (and probably Moscow) intellectual to come back to the Hermitage?

Mikhail Piotrovsky: We need to raise the intellectual level of the city (we talked about that recently at a meeting with Governor Beglov) and to educate our citizens.

One should take pride not so much in having a “good” history as a complex one. If history is not boring, you can already take pride in it.

There are two ways: one is to create special conditions for friends of the Hermitage who come to us specially, the other, a bit simpler, is to open multimedia galleries in large shopping centres. Millions of people, passing through the shopping malls and our galleries within them, are drawn into a conversation that then becomes much more serious.

And, of course, we are trying to build a relationship with young people. We hold absorbing intellectual marathons – debates, conversations, poems, performances, artists with paintings on display for a single evening. We continue until three in the morning. Towards the end we read the Iliad…

Cultural policy as a chance to become better than everyone

What is your opinion about current cultural policy in Russia?

Mikhail Piotrovsky: Recently the magazine Diletant risked compiling my pronouncements into a position with regard to cultural policy in Russia.

But to be serious, I think we have very good chances of becoming better than everyone.

The state’s cultural policy with us is determined by fairly good laws that are constantly being improved, so we do have every chance. And if we adhere additionally to a few important principles, chief among which is that state policy in the sphere of culture is still not the whole of culture…

There are things that the state might not like in culture, that seem repulsive… But it needs to accustom itself to them, like Shchukin did with Picasso, whom he didn’t like at first.

Culture as state commission, as the culture industry and as “work for eternity” should coexist without any one having the right to victory over the rest.

We have commissioners for human rights, for the rights of the child. Is the Council of Museums not a sort of collective commissioner for the rights of museums? Does the state listen to it?

Mikhail Piotrovsky: Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t. But in principle, of course, it does. Although, while listening, it does what it wants. But afterwards it will again pay attention. I don’t think we gain all that many victories, but there is a dialogue. Sometimes just for show, but sometimes a real dialogue…

This year sees the 180th anniversary of Tchaikovsky’s birth. His museum in Klin wants to be elevated to federal level. How competent and progressive are the people in charge there?

Mikhail Piotrovsky: Now all appointments are being made after the candidate director’s public presentation of their concept for the development of the museum and with the participation – which is something new – of official representatives of the Union of Museums of Russia. That’s important. The decisions are still taken by the minister, but we have achieved a situation where they are discussed before that, although we did not, of course, form the Union of Museums so as to confront the ministry. Still, we cannot but remind people that the present-day world and its interests are by and large not so important for museums. Culture and museums are made for the future and the past. Museum people, who know that well, should also help administrators of all kinds to take a broader view of things.

The Principle of a Thousand Pieces of Paper

Is it true that you need to agree every business trip with someone upstairs? And that you don’t have the right to fly first class?”

Mikhail Piotrovsky: No, the Hermitage rules do allow me to fly business class but paid for with “other” non-state funds. Regarding trips, yes, now, according to the rules, a director needs to obtain permission for everything.

But things aren’t that fatally bad. For example, I managed to get the ministry regulation that a business trip should not last more than three days changed after explaining to the minister that while you can fly to places from Moscow in a day, from Petersburg you can only do it in two.

That’s the main calamity, that an excess of regulations from above and below engages the “principle of a thousand pieces of paper”. Since the ministry is constantly sending papers, our lawyers and departments start demanding “Where’s Mikhail Borisovich’s written decision?”, while previously you could just say over the phone.

When there are too many rules and laws, nothing good comes of it. That is why I am on a commission for a regulatory guillotine and we cut off quite a lot of laws.

 You are one of the most interesting and effective museum managers. How much time do you spend on strategic, tactical and everyday work?

Mikhail Piotrovsky: I am probably a bad manager, because I do everything as the mood takes me. Today I am going to consider strategy, and everyone should leave me in peace. Then tomorrow I urgently summon everyone to discuss a new exhibition.

Besides the rules for management, there are people alongside you, their great experience and inner mood.

Being director is a creative business and in creative work mood is important. There are hardly any standard situations and if you do start to standardize them, it all turns out badly. That’s a matter for bureaucracy…

And everyday work is a creative business?

Mikhail Piotrovsky: No, it’s not always creative, but it should always be emotional. That doesn’t mean shouting and swearing, but the emotions have to be engaged.

What do you think is important in the new definition of a museum proposed by ICOM?

Mikhail Piotrovsky: It’s a dreadful definition. It’s a good thing that the museum community rejected it in Kyoto. It reflects one of the main tendencies worldwide, when culture and the museum start to consider themselves part of the leisure and entertainment sphere, primarily there to make money. That dangerous tendency undermines the proper ideology of a museum and culture – to nurture a complex human being. We should bring a person pleasure, but through knowledge and the application of considerable effort and not simple entertainments. Its like sport –you put in the work and only then you get the pleasure, not like wine, where you drink it and feel good. But people are trying to shift us in the direction of wine.

Why can’t you replace a great painting with a fake?

The more first-rate a museum is, the more relevant and dramatic the question of thefts from there. Museum thefts in the 20th century are a plot for detective stories worldwide. Do new technologies, such as 5G, help?

Mikhail Piotrovsky: Of course, new technologies are needed, but psychology is important too… The tragedy of the Hermitage thefts was that the museum was robbed by people who worked there. Museum people being complicit in thefts was something impossible even 20 years ago. A museum worker should be incapable of stealing from the museum, but for that to happen, the power of money needs the decline somewhat. And that’s difficult.

And we should instil a reverent attitude to culture, an understanding that a museum object is not property, but something sacred. As it was 20 years ago, both for museum visitors and for the staff.

Do paintings undergo expert examination when they are returned to a museum after a theft?

Mikhail Piotrovsky: A favourite topic for the idly curious… No stolen paintings return to us without checks and expert examination. Besides that, museums have a detailed description of the state of preservation, including every little crack made by restorers, so replacing a work with a copy is practically impossible. Unless it’s something that no-one needs and has therefore gone undescribed, but not with a serious painting. Ten years from now, when people have come up with methods of precisely replicating paintings, we’ll return to this topic. So far, though, it’s merely romantic fiction.

The classic as the contemporary of the past

The Hermitage is justly regarded as a citadel of classic art. Last year I went to the Kabakov exhibition in the General Staff building. Is that contemporary art or already classic?

Mikhail Piotrovsky: Kabakov, of course, is already classic. That exhibition, incidentally, was in the Tate, with us and in the Tretyakov Gallery and in each place it passed off differently, which is also proof of the high merits of Kabakov’s works.

In point of fact we are a citadel of art full stop, and not contemporary or classic. Classic art, after all, was also contemporary at one time. Catherine II collected art of her own time, so did Nicholas I. Right now, we are holding an exhibition of a young Romanian artist (one of the most expensive with pictures going for 5–6 million dollars) – Adrian Ghenie, whose vital, powerful painting is very much oriented on classic art. When he was growing up, by the way, he had a guidebook to Dutch art in the Hermitage and he began painting by making watercolour copies from that. And in a little while we will be featuring the remarkable Chinese artist Zhang Huan, a new, fashionable figure who pulls stunts. In the spring, we will perhaps be holding an exhibition of Marc Quinn in the halls of Classical Antiquity, although not all that department are prepared to receive him.

You draw yourself. What would you draw during our meeting, if you had a free minute?

Mikhail Piotrovsky: You’re always trying to extract secrets from me. Just now I am working “to commission”. I’m supposed to draw some illustrations for stories – written by myself and my teacher, Piotr Griaznevich – about the journey we made together to Hadhramaut.

My skills as a draughtsman come from Hermitage study groups that are really intended to teach a person to appreciate art.

Mikhail Piotrovsky’s bookshelf

Just now I am reading Prilepin’s Yesenin and Houellebecq’s Serotonin. But the best of the books that I am reading at the moment was written by the German philosopher Aleida Assmann about forgetting and memory. Assmann is the main specialist on historical memory, studying it through examples of the Holocaust and the whole German conscience. The book contains a great many important things for museum work.

Reader’s Question

In a situation where the activities of UNESCO are effectively paralyzed in Russian Crimea, don’t you consider it would be useful to create under the aegis of the Union of Museums a council for the public and professional monitoring of the World Heritage Sites on the territory of ancient Tauris?

Mikhail Piotrovsky: We are doing that. The title “UNESCO site” does not, you know, bring any benefits or money. It is only an indication that the cultural site will be monitored to ensure it accords with that title. Saint Petersburg has so far not been stripped of the badge (although it may be, due to new buildings), but Dresden, for example, was – because it built two bridges. In the Crimea UNESCO did not recognize Chersonesus and does not accept reports from there. But at some point they will.

We though, who actively work there, know that Chersonesus is alive, does meet the UNESCO criteria, and it has interesting plans for development. All our discussions of its present and future get sent to UNESCO, but they – it goes without saying – have not replied so far. But everything will come right in the end, I think.

A far more difficult problem is the south shore of the Crimea that has been actively built upon in both Ukrainian times and our own. That threatens the loss of the cultural monuments.

Excursions for presidents

Whish head of state sticks in your mind as the most memorable visitor?

Mikhail Piotrovsky: As I was opening the Potemkin exhibition, I recalled taking George Bush around the museum. When I showed him the painting The Apotheosis of Catherine II, he asked where Potemkin was. They prepare themselves, of course, before coming to us… More often I remember the tours that brought results. When, for example, I was walking past Leonardo da Vinci with our president and the Chinese prime minister, we agreed about the creation of a Hermitage–China Centre. With the prime minister of Mongolia it was about a major exhibition from his country and I presented him with a copy of the Genghis Stone with an inscription that tells how Genghis Khan’s nephew shot an arrow…