Mikhail Piotrovsky: There were exchanges between Russian and American museums even during the Cold War

The first international congress devoted to the reputation of museums has been held in the Spanish city of Pamplona. On the fringes of the event RIA Novosti correspondent Yelena Shesternina talked with one of the forum’s participants – Director of the State Hermitage Mikhail Piotrovsky. He spoke about plans to open new centres abroad, assistance in the restoration of the Palmyra museum and about where “in fairness” the collection of Scythian gold over which Ukraine and Crimean museums are arguing should be returned from Amsterdam.

– You have said that Russia is prepared to provide assistance in the restoration of the Palmyra museum. How specifically will the work proceed?

– We take the situation with the monuments in Syria close to heart, in particular that in Palmyra. Saint Petersburg is the Northern Palmyra. We have a proposal for the Syrian side that is now under discussion – that the Hermitage help in the re-creation of the museum of Palmyra, not Palmyra itself, which has been ruined once again, but specifically the museum. The museum needs to be re-created because that means jobs, a general optimistic mood; it means tourists and so on. We have already carried out a geodesic 3D survey that will be presented to the Syrian government and passed on to the Palmyra museum. It was created in the Institute of the History of Material Culture. We will produce a computer-based architectural reconstruction of what Palmyra was like once, when those buildings stood in their original form. We are prepared to offer such modern things, to receive restorers so that they participate in our exhibitions and then, together with our own restorers, participate in the revival of the Palmyra museum. Now the proposals for an agreement are being discussed with the Syrian side.

– All the restoration work will be done on Syrian soil? Nothing will be brought to Russia for restoration?

– We will train people on our premises. We have enough objects from Palmyra. All the restoration work will be carried out on Syrian soil. We will not bring anything over. If we do, it will cause an international scandal.

Now we are preparing an exhibition of photographs and drawings that will be titled “Two Palmyras”. It will be an account of the way Petersburg architects, including Carlo Rossi, used knowledge of ancient Palmyra, transforming it into devices in their own Classical architecture. That will be very interesting.

– In July the appeals court in Amsterdam postponed the final decision on the Crimean collection. All the exhibits will not be moving to Ukraine but will remain in the Allard Pierson Museum until the final verdict is delivered. Why is the case dragging on? What might the end result be?

– The longer the case goes on, the better, The less journalists discuss it, the better it will be. We have a complicated situation. In Ukraine there is a state museum fund [collective stocks]. When items from the state museum fund are taken abroad, they are exported by the state. The state gives permission for their export, so it was Ukraine that did the exporting. However, the agreement was between museums, so they should be returned to the museums. This is a dilemma that cannot be resolved right now. Hastening to a decision should be avoided, because at the moment everything is very highly politicized. In fairness they should go back to the museums. But fairness and the law are two completely different things.

We had a similar situation when the Hermitage held an exhibition from Kuwait. Kuwait was occupied. We crated up the exhibits and did not hand them over. Then we gave them back to the owners.

We need to wait. It’s clear to everyone that they ought to go to the museums. There’s no gold, no Scythians. These are items from local museums that are important for those museums and not needed by anyone else besides the museums. The gold came from Kiev and it went back to Kiev.

– The Hermitage is planning to open a branch in Barcelona. How is that going to be done? What other branches might be opened?

– There will be a Hermitage Centre in Barcelona. We don’t use the word “branch”. This is not a branch – it is a different arrangement: all the infrastructure is created locally, it is a local legal entity, we provide the content, the display. We have Hermitage centres in Amsterdam and Kazan. Another’s opening in Omsk. The Hermitage Italy is completely different: that’s a representation. But in all cases they are legal entities of the place where they are located. Branches would be when we were responsible for their upkeep and when the money runs out that would be the first thing to close. These are centres, though.

In Barcelona we still do not have permission to build. It’s a bureaucratic place. But we are in no hurry. We have already been through that in different places. The funding is private. Everything will be ready, when it’s ready. A couple of years after building starts. But the building work hasn’t begun yet. Some sort of permit still needs to be obtained.

– Are there plans to open more centres abroad?

– Yes, we have an agreement with China about opening a centre in Shanghai. Initially there will be a high technology virtual museum there, until the building is completed. The arrangement is the same – people provide the funding and the upkeep, and we bring in exhibitions.

There will be centres in Vladivostok, Kaluga, Omsk, Moscow and Yekaterinburg. The one in Omsk is opening already in November. Yekaterinburg will be next year – construction is still going on. In Vladivostok our idea of creating a Hermitage centre gave birth to the concept of a huge complex with many museums. It is still under construction. In the old building that it was first proposed to allocate to us we are now holding exhibitions and “Hermitage Days”. That is, incidentally, an important element of reputation: not just to deliver an exhibition, but also to organize lectures, films and master classes given by restorers.

A month from now, there will be “Hermitage Days” in Doha, then in Riyadh. That means exhibitions of a single item, plus conferences, cinema, meetings with people. The living Hermitage is not just pictures, but everything around that: research, restoration, informing people about that, creating films. Then the significance of a museum grows.

– With which foreign museums does the Hermitage have the best relations? With which would you like to establish them? What joint exhibitions are planned for the near future – both in the Hermitage and abroad?

– We have a strong programme in Italy. The Hermitage Italy is a centre that organizes various working visits, exhibitions and interaction with Italian museums. We have had several splendid exhibitions together with the Archaeological Museum of Naples – exhibits from Pompeii from them, Antonio Canova’s sculptures from us. Our Leonardo has just been to Perugia in Italy, while Piero della Francesca came from there. Botticelli’s Madonna della Loggia is now in Vladivostok; then it will come to us. The exhibition of the Marquis Campana collection was held first in the Louvre, then with us. That collection is mainly divided between the Louvre and the Hermitage.

We have not had museum exchanges with the United States for many years now. Not just the Hermitage, but all our museums. Because the USA won’t agree to provide official guarantees from the authorities for the return of pictures. They tell us: “We have good laws that provide protection.” The laws aren’t bad on the whole, but in the present situation there is the possibility of a whole number of claims against Russian state property, and we know how Russian state property is protected in the United States. In the event of claims, things may be sequestered, and we need guarantees. The Americans say that they have the law, and they don’t give guarantees. However, we are accustomed to a different situation: we have more faith in someone’s word of honour than laws that, in principle, can be got around if desired, or else are hard to implement. Negotiations are underway now, both officially and semiofficially. There was public discussion in Dallas. Now a gathering of lawyers in Washington is being planned. Because the situation is impossible. There has been nothing like this. Even at the height of the “Cold War” there were exchanges of exhibitions. One day we will overcome this.

– You and I have met at the first international conference devoted to the reputation of museums. Reputation is a very broad concept with many component parts. All the same, if you had to name the three main ones, what would they be?

– We have become absolutely bogged down in primitive arithmetic. Around the world, the success of a museum is reckoned to be visitor numbers and takings. That is primitive mathematics that does not reflect anything. Now all successful museums are groaning because they have so many visitors.

– How many do you get a year?

– Four and a half million. That’s a lot. And the main thing is that those visitors are chiefly tourists who just get shown a little and that’s it – that’s all they want. But then the museums have no time to work with the local people who are genuinely interested and with children.

All the time – not only in Russia, everywhere – we are calling on people not to say that we are “providing a service”. We have a mission. But we get the reply: “That’s all understood, but what criteria should we use to count the money? Service is understandable, income is understandable. But how are we supposed to evaluate your lofty factors?”

Reputation is something intangible. It’s a loftier category. Something like higher mathematics. Therein lies the question: you are given money, but how do you describe the results. How do you describe the success of a cultural institution that everyone knows? How do you do so to make it understandable to everyone? It’s no easy matter. Far from everyone manages to do it. Now there’s a chance to take a look, maybe we’ll succeed in learning to measure it.

We have begun working with the European University so as to see how to define reputation, how to evaluate it, how we can count it. Not with simple figures, with something more complicated.

The Hermitage was the first in Russia to calculate the economic benefit from museums. In our case it is how much money was taken from the state budget (the Hermitage is a separate item in the budget) and how much is brought into Saint Petersburg. That is the economics – how many jobs are created around the museum, for example. That is an important calculation. People are using our method. We were not original in this – we used what others worked out for the Louvre.

How do you determine reputation from within? From outside? What kind of visitor? At a round table we discussed whether museums were prepared to please visitors. In actual fact, museums educate visitors. If you just create a tourist attraction and take in money, you’ll get a bad reputation. Many museums that make tremendous money have a bad reputation.

– Recently the question of safety and security has become more pressing than ever with the fires in Notre Dame and the National Museum of Brazil, the incidents in the Tretyakov Gallery. How difficult is it to provide security in museums and other cultural objects of comparable scale?

– A museum is a risk. The only way to ensure complete safety is to close up and not let the public in. Things like this are always happening, and so museums are always working on safety, constantly enhancing it. That is why there are huge queues to enter museums. People and objects have to be screened. We are constantly heightening security – against terrorist acts, fire prevention, anti-vandalism, but that does not make life easier either for the museum staff or for those who visit. The majority of our paintings are behind glass. That is very bad. Even anti-reflective glass is intrusive.

– At a forum on security, Oleg Boyev, the head of the Hermitage’s security department, said that a high level of security in museums could be provided by the introduction of a fourth line of protection that would reduce the human factor to a minimum, that the ideal solution would be the use of a biometric face-recognition system. Are such systems already in operation?

– The faces of staff are already recognized with us. Boyev was referring to face recognition for visitors. The way systems identify demonstrators.

– You said that 4.5 million people a year visit the Hermitage. Russia’s museums, in Moscow and Petersburg, are currently showing enormous visitor numbers. Are they working at the limit of their capacity?

– There should be a different approach here. Some places are working at the limit of their capacity, others aren’t. Both halls and museums. That is why we need to disperse people. We have the General Staff building, which is visited considerably less than the main halls of the Hermitage, although all the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists are there, the Shchukin and Morozov collections, the gifts made to the imperial court. There is just as much there in terms of value and attraction as in the main building. We need to teach people to go to other halls, to teach them to view not just the Benois Madonna, but things that are more unique. Gradually all museums are doing that. You need to spread people out, then there is enough for everyone without queueing.

– In the past few years there have regularly been exhibitions that attract enormous queues – Aivazovsky, Repin, Serov and so on. How popular could exhibitions like that be abroad?

– Not so many exhibitions in the West attract crowds, but there was the exhibition of the Shchukin collection in Paris. That drew enormous queues. Now the Morozov collection exhibition will go there and also create queues. The venue for both is the building of the Fondation Louis Vuitton and they know how to advertise, which is why the queues form. Queues are created in two ways: either by security checks or by very good advertising, when everyone comes to see.