Mikhail Piotrovsky on the Hermitage’s Most Interesting Exhibitions

The international exhibition project devoted to the memory of the outstanding Russian art collectors Sergei Shchukin and the Morozov brothers has received a special award at the Art Newspaper Russia prize.

1.    The Topic of China

In the Year of Peter the Great, the exhibitions devoted to him in the Hermitage were quite imbued with the theme of the East – and relations with China.

In Peter’s reign, all those diplomatic arrangements in relations with China were forged that are working to this day and open up diplomatic channels for us.

When Peter was gifted the Taurida Venus, he was not allowed to export from Italy, he in response granted European missionaries permission to travel across Russia in order in return to be able to bring the statue to Russia.

We also had an amazing exhibition in which we showed Peter’s eastern-style robes.

2.    Egyptomania

For all its romantic character, the wonderful, highly attractive “Egyptomania” exhibition about Egyptian motifs in European art and about Champollion turned out with us to be at the same time very controversial.

Because we are living in the time of the second stage of decolonization and in conditions of hysteria about that: “Former colonizers, on your knees! Apologize 10,000 times and give back everything you’ve got!”

Regarding our Egyptian exhibition, it’s fashionable to say: “Yes, of course, Egyptian motifs in European art, but that is theft of Egyptian culture, its exploitation, incorrect understanding and distortion. Egyptian culture is something else.”

Within the exhibition we feature a wonderful dining service from Kuskovo. According to their interpretation, Napoleon, who failed to conquer Egypt, elevated himself by having a service with Egyptian motifs made and presenting it to Alexander I. In that way, he was showing how great he was. That too, in their opinion, might be an example of the “exploitation” of Ancient Egyptian culture.

Our response: “That is highly debatable!” If Egyptian culture had remained within the borders of Egypt, then it would now be a sort of cultural Disneyland for tourists. However, due among other things to wars, which happened before Napoleon as well, and the clashes of cultures inevitable in them, Egyptian culture passed into the flesh and blood of European culture and became common property. Meanwhile the culture of Central America, for example, is absent from the majority of world museums. It remains in isolation – that is interesting, splendid, but it does not form part of the culture of each person all over the world, while Egyptian culture does.

Regarding decolonization, we have our own very significant Russian example – we have already been through all this. We declared our country “an empire – prison of peoples” and then chose our own means of decolonization, which was implemented, incidentally, through the efforts of museum people, with Iosif Abgarovich Orbeli at their head.

Yes, history had its oppressors and oppressed. In the current view, the children and grandchildren of the oppressors should kneel down, apologize for everything, pay compensation and give the whole lot back.

In the Soviet Union, though, there was a totally different method of decolonization. The oppressor was indeed condemned, but the oppressed were raised up. In the Hermitage an Oriental Department was established to that end (with Iosif Orbeli in charge), and it gathered eastern objects from all over and created an image of the great cultures of the East. The museum demonstrated and told of the East’s greatness. It produced a series of remarkable celebrations – of Shota Rustaveli, David of Sassoun, Navoi, Nizami, Ferdowsi. Those were major occasions, marked by translations and publications, so as to show how great was the heritage of peoples previously considered deprived and only of interest to scholars of Orientology. Then that grew into a policy. The result was the creation of many peoples: their self-awareness arose within the framework of the Soviet Union. And within the framework of the Soviet Union’s decolonization policy specifically, they became aware of their heritage, which was studied and exalted…

In the 1920s, everything that expeditions discovered was brought to the central museums, but then they started to make museums at a local level, universities, their own institutes of archaeology. And that experience of decolonization of ours allows us to look calmly on the stories about decolonizing hysteria after which comes talk about restitution. All this needs to be approached with a resolute mind and heart: correcting the errors of the past does in the least necessarily mean simply turning back history.

3.    The Birth of Modern Art: Sergey Shchukin`s Choice

In speaking about this exhibition, I should like to point out that we are ever more strongly enriching our museum displays with a large number of items and the most diverse meanings.

Besides the account of contemporaries’ shocked perception of the paintings in Shchukov’s collection and the role that they played in the formation of the Russian avant-garde, this remarkable exhibition was also memorable for the “tapestry hanging” [with paintings tight up against one another] – an idea that people throughout the 20th century condemned: that’s crude, no good – there should be a white cube, a large hall, a single picture. That is even now fixed in the minds of very many art scholars. In the Hermitage, though, people have got used to us constantly increasing the number of paintings on the walls. Like in an iconostasis – many, many adornments, everything decked out over and over; it might seem that you can’t see so well, but no-one needs directed light so as to single something out. Because everyone is roughly aware of what is there – what subjects, what pieces. It is the same with tapestry hanging. A whole discussion is underway prompted by this exhibition that was very successful in terms of museology.

4.    Items from Russian Imperial Services, the Eighteenth to Early Twentieth Centuries. The Gift of Mikhail Karisalov

The Karisalov exhibition is a scholarly gift. We were presented with examples from 12 imperial table services – some 150 different pieces that greatly expand our knowledge, show what true museum collecting is and how important it is for a museum to have large stocks. Almost all the services were already present in part, but a museum needs to have all the plates and not just one on display in a showcase. And we produced a very distinctive exhibition, particularly bringing to the fore the symbolic items, such as the Meissen St Andrew Service that was a gift to Empress Elizabeth and became the impetus for the creating of Russian porcelain even before Vinogradov (the father of porcelain-manufacturing in Russia). Elizabeth in her time engaged in a sort of import replacement for European luxury goods – porcelain, glass bugles, silver.

We are also showing the first yacht service from among those that they started to produce for Catherine II. Services for use on a yacht are a distinct genre. It is interesting to know that during the Siege, the last imperial yacht, Pole Star, the service from which we also displayed, provided the Hermitage with electricity, and that was used, among other things, to fire in a crucible the little porcelain pictures that Nikolai Mikhailovich Mokh made in beleaguered Leningrad for the major anniversaries of Navoi and Nizami.

We have some of the plates lying upside down – that makes it more interesting to hold a scholarly discussion about them, seeing the other face – the rulers’ monograms. When turned over, a little cup may be found to bear a hammer-and-sickle mark, yet it comes from an imperial service made at what was already the Leningrad Porcelain Factory.

5.    Crocus and The Birth of the Avantgarde

We have many exhibitions of porcelain – imitations of Sèvres, the secrets of porcelain. I want to draw attention to exhibitions devoted to the Imperial Porcelain Factory and the avant-garde. One took place before this in Amsterdam, featuring paintings by Malevich and Kandinsky hanging next to avant-garde porcelain. We showed how that was born out of the imperial porcelain –the Peoples of Russia, the portraits of emperors…. And the new porcelain became not only a vehicle of the avant-garde, but also the only sphere in which that avant-garde survived in an unbroken line down to our own time.

Porcelain became a mass-production item and at the same time a luxury. And that delicate luxurious thing not only introduced avant-garde aesthetics, but even carried them on through Socialist Realism. We look at the absolutely Suprematist Suetin, but then we see how the remaining avant-garde aesthetic principles break surface in the time of Socialist Realism.

The museum is preparedness for a special chic

Mikhail Piotrovsky: Images of the Hermitage provide an opportunity to think, to reflect, to penetrate.

What’s more important, for example, the painting or its creator? When it emerges that a picture was not painted by Leonardo da Vinci, does that make it worse or not?

We have hanging in the museum Cesare da Sesto’s Holy Family that came into the Hermitage as a Leonardo. Stendhal reckoned it the finest thing that he painted. Now, however, it is clear that the work is not a Leonardo, and perhaps it has indeed become worse because of that. Flora, though, which also came to us as a work by Leonardo, is now considered a painting by Melzi, but it is none the worse for that.

These are all questions with no ready answer. Each person has their own. Like the pleasure of pondering something. That exists.

The average age of our visitors now is no longer 50­60, but 35–40. And we have acquired a new kind of visitor, one that I sometimes characterize with the phrase “they’ve been to the Prado”. When there aren’t the crowds, you can see the way these people spend a long time looking at things that don’t come straight out of the guidebook. They find that interesting.

This material from Yelena Yakovleva has been published on the website of the Rossiyskaya Gazeta newspaper. The Russian original can be found here.