“You can’t cancel culture”

“The Hermitage is concentrating”

Vladimir Kozhemiakin of aif.ru – Mikhail Borisovich, have you heard the opinion voiced that it’s a pity that while the world was open, the Hermitage took all the best things from its collections abroad rather than to the Russian regions?

Mikhail Piotrovsky – We are in point of fact concentrating on Russia, but roughly in the same spirit as Chancellor Alexander Gorchakov formulated it as head of the Foreign Ministry of the Russian Empire. And it’s often people who do not go to the Hermitage and do not keep track of what is really happening in the museum who speak of it being a pity: they have heard, for example, that there is a Hermitage Exhibition Centre in Amsterdam and start to get outraged – “Why is there nothing like that in Kazan?” Except there is one in Kazan! We in the Hermitage are a bit conceited: we reckon that there is Saint Petersburg and then the rest of the world around it. And within that, it doesn’t matter whether the talk is of Amsterdam, London or Kazan. The project that we call the “Greater Hermitage” envisages the creation of the museum’s global centres everywhere. There have long been Hermitage centres in Kazan, Omsk, Yekaterinburg, Vyborg, Vladivostok and other cities in this country.

– Is the fact that Russia has lost the opportunity to influence the world by means of its soft power (culture, art) a very bad thing? And for whom is it worse – for us or for them?

– Some people get irritated when I speak about culture in military terms, such as a Russian cultural offensive in the world. Culture is a form of soft power that not only brings people pleasure, but also tells them about us: what we are really like. Not long ago, representatives of the Hermitage were telling people abroad about the Russian rulers who were favourably disposed towards the arts, but today that topic arouses a negative response there.

The foreign media ask, “Why is the Hermitage promoting its emperors to us?” Now our activeness is an irritant – “Enough is enough,” they say. In psychology that’s termed “ressentiment” – dissatisfaction with what you yourself have, seeking some guilty party and a sense of hostility towards whatever someone regards as the cause of their own shortcomings. In the internal practice of cancellation with which the Western world has become absorbed, people have begun, as part of what is called “post-colonialism”, to throw down Voltaire and Columbus from their pedestals – and they have already gone too far and have realized that themselves. Just then, Russia cropped up as a convenient object upon which to unload all one’s sins.

Both sides lose, however, from an absence of cultural exchange. Fortunately, it always exists in one form or another – even during the time of the Iron Curtain in the USSR. The museum today has many means and opportunities to maintain a presence in the world. Such as the myriad latest technologies that are accessible to everyone and make it possible to broadcast everything that we do, irrespective of whether the borders are closed or planes aren’t flying. Recently we launched a project under the title of the “Celestial Hermitage” or “Hermitage in the Cloud” – a whole series of digital copies of artistic masterpieces that are deployed in cyberspace. Of course, nothing can replace the real thing, but between the original and its reproduction there are a host of different alternative ways to present an artwork that can be just as good as a conventional exhibition.

“Orders from above”

– What might “cancel culture” lead to with respect to Russia in the West – a ban on Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and others?

– A “war of memory” is taking place in the world, but you can’t really cancel anyone’s culture. Things like that have already happened in the history of civilization, but they weren’t successful. Russia itself is an example. We quite often cancelled our own culture: first the tsarist variety, then writers who were serf-owners, or simply from an insufficiently working class-peasant background (including that same Dostoyevsky), the Russian Orthodox Church, and after that Soviet culture. Now we are cancelling post-Soviet culture… As it turns out, we have no immunity to all of this: we merrily set about cancelling seams of the nation’s history that don’t suit us, again and again. In that sense, we do not learn from history. We are not alone in that, though: Christians in their time destroyed pagan culture. Protestants that of the Catholics, the Americans the culture of the native peoples, the colonizers of Australia the culture of the Aborigines…

Yet, despite all the cancellations, culture always returns. Downcast and destroyed monuments are returned to their places, including architectural monuments such as the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. It’s possible to ban someone’s concerts, to swap one set of performers for another, but art itself is greater than such specifics. That is why the interest in our collections does not pass. Museums support a dialogue of cultures, in the course of which people come to understand that the differences between them are something marvellous. That it is a very fine and important thing when someone else is not like you, and there is no cause to consider them an enemy a priori. That is what museums teach. There ought to be dialogue even where differences are present and even in such highly charged situations as we have now. There is no escaping the reciprocal contribution that our culture has made to European culture and vice-versa. We probably would be able to live in a primitive sense without one another, but we could not develop.

The question is why is has this cancellation suddenly appeared, this animosity – it’s not straightforward, after all, but with a certain emotional charge. Not like with the customs, when they simply say: “Today we are not letting this or that through, and no arguments, because new rules have been brought out.” We need to understand why people are so furiously keen to “shut us down” and to oppose that with some correct emotions. And under no circumstances should the response to such cancellation be to cancel others. We should not get upset: “Oh, no, cancellations! What should we do?” We need to work out what’s going on.

– When might the “closure” of Russian culture end?

– There is no closure as such. There is an attempt to cancel Russia’s contribution to world heritage. We need to counter that with a normal, active cultural life at home, within the country, and all attempts of that sort will simply wither away. We are not so easy to defeat: “You’ll wait for that in vain,” as the saying goes. All the more so since it is not the entire world that is engaged in this, but a fairly small number of psychologically peculiar people in particular countries. On the other hand, there is a certain order from above not to take anything Russian. What can I say? The negative characteristics of the Soviet Union have now shifted to the West. They will not last long there, though: such orders go against the grain of humanity’s normal development and are counterproductive for those who “cancel” a culture.

Not simply “men in trade”

– Recently you took part in the presentation of the exhibition of Mikhail and Ivan Morozov’s collection, the Pushkin Museum’s main project for 2022, continuing the account of the great dynasties of Moscow-based art collectors. In Russia the collecting of artworks was something mainly engaged in by merchants and industrialists – men without degrees from the Sorbonne or profound cultural knowledge. What motivated them?

– In Russia, art was also collected by the rulers, as was the case all over the world. However, a tradition like that in the House of Romanov, when the autocrats created museums and joined museum buildings onto their own palaces, did not exists anywhere else. One of the prominent representatives of Russian art-collecting was, for example, the geographer, explorer and economist Piotr Semionov Tian-Shansky. The 20th-century Muscovite art collectors and patrons, including the merchant and philanthropist Sergei Shchukin, the merchants and entrepreneurs from the Old Believers’ milieu Mikhail Morozov and his brother Ivan, and the businessman and banker Pavel Riabushinsky, were only a part of the world of Russia’s great art collectors and patrons. They were members of the emerging capitalist class who operated along these lines: one generation accumulates money, the next spends it, sometimes by making merry, while the third sets about putting it to work, for charitable purposes – hospitals, theatres, music and also collecting. The Shchukins and Morozovs were in fact educated people and not simply “men in trade” of the sort you find in Ostrovsky’s plays. They spoke foreign languages well, travelled to Europe frequently, and some even resided there. When Morozov or Shchukin did go to Paris, they were not regarded in any way as outsiders. Sergei Shchukin introduced Matisse to the Russian icon, and that had a distinct influence on the French artist. It is said that Pierre Matisse, the famous painter’s son was once asked if Henri Matisse could have produced his Dance and Music for anyone other than Sergei Shchukin, and he replied with just two words: “For whom?” A good client is if not half then at least a third of the matter when it comes to art.

I think that the Russian art collectors of days gone by were driven by the curiosity characteristic of entrepreneurial people: they looked ahead like good businessmen and, if they realized that they had something extremely interesting in front of them, they would have a rough idea of how much it might be worth in, say, 10 to 15 years. Sergei Shchukin was not keen on Picasso’s particularly radical pictures at first, but he realized that the future belonged to such art and forced himself to study it. He educated himself. Those collectors sought to defeat their European competitors on a world scale, and they proved themselves more far-sighted and intelligent than many.

– And if it had not been for them, what would we have in the 19th- and 20th-century art sections of our museums and galleries today?

– Russia is a repository of many works of world art, but we also have, for example, the Russian avant-garde, whose heyday came in the period 1914–22 and is in no way inferior to its European counterpart. The collectors bought that up too. That was an astonishingly fruitful era. In one of the exhibitions of Sergei Shchukin’s collection, we attempted to reproduce that effect: when small, totally un-museum-like rooms were densely hung with, you might say, masterpiece upon masterpiece, which were something entirely new for the time. That quite literally staggered the visitors, artists included, and then they themselves began to produce paintings that boggle the mind.

There are art collectors like that today, too. They probably can’t be compared to Shchukin or the Morozovs, but the example of those giants and exemplars of art collecting does inspire many. Russia has a lot of private collections that are kept in private museums: the Fabergé Museum, the Museum of Russian Impressionism, the Museum of the Russian Icon. Now in the Hermitage, in the Menshikov Palace, we are showing works by the Brueghels from a private collection. They belong to the Russian collectors Valeria and Konstantin Mauergauz. The way the collection was consciously put together reminds me of Semionov Tian-Shansky’s manner of collecting. In the spring, we opened an exhibition of 15th-century Florentine sculpture, the “quiet sensation” of which was the Italian relief compositions that the Hermitage acquired in 2020 from the Saint Petersburg collectors Larisa and Oleg Shushkov. The remaining exhibits were Renaissance sculptures and reliefs accumulated by the Russian nobility that came into the museum in the 1920s and ’30s. Meanwhile, in the General Staff building of the Hermitage there was an exhibition from the private collection of the Karisalov family – masterpieces by cult figures in the realm of fashion photography.

Present-day collectors are moved by the same love of art that their predecessors had and by the desire to tell the public about their tastes. A few years ago, a group of Russian art collectors and patrons presented over 500 works of contemporary Russian art from the late 20th and early 21st centuries to the Pompidou Centre. For the moment those paintings have been removed to the storerooms due to sanctions, but time will go by, and they will be returned to public viewing. They are now forever in the Centre national d’art et de culture in Paris and that is a remarkable act of Russia’s soft power. And the PR with which we have provided Shchukin and Morozov in recent years is prompting collectors in this country to turn their attention to not especially well-known artists, to discover them for the world and to promote them in the market, where their works will get bought. In Russia there are collectors who purchase works by very young painters who are just starting out, and sometimes they really hit the mark.

The Russian text of the interview can be found here.