Russian Ballet. Homage to Edgar Degas. Photographs by Yury Molodkovets

The year 2024 is rich in notable anniversaries. On 15 April, a celebration was held to mark 150 years since the First Impressionist Exhibition, while 19 July will be the 190th anniversary of the birth of Edgar Degas (1834–1917), the most complex artist among the group of French Impressionists.

The Hermitage has prepared an exhibition in tribute to the oeuvre of the artist, whose pastels, sculptures and paintings are on display on Floor 4 of the General Staff building. The exhibition will continue the series of Hermitage events devoted to the jubilee of Impressionism.

“The Eastern Wing of the General Staff building is destined to be a laboratory of museum innovations. The paintings of the Impressionists are on display in these spaces; here music is often heard and ballet performances take place. Today they have merged together in another favourite genre of new art – photography. Degas and the ballet through the eyes of a Hermitage artist looks like something long familiar and fresh at the same time, something exotic and an integral part of the display. That is in the traditions of the Hermitage,” Mikhail Piotrovsky, General Director of the State Hermitage, noted.

In the new exhibition, the curators present a project inspired by Degas’s artistic experiments, where key images and devices employed by the celebrated master are developed further in contemporary authorial photography. Edgar Degas was more closely connected with the then-new medium than the other Impressionists: his paintings and pastels with their unusual framing of the image and sharp angles of view had a shaping influence on the aesthetics of photography.

The theme of the exhibition is no coincidence either. It echoes a leitmotif in Degas’s oeuvre – the ballet. The artist depicted ballerinas in rehearsal rooms, on and behind the stage, while training and relaxing, exploring the expressiveness of their everyday gestures, prosaic poses and impetuous movements.

The exhibition in the Red Transformer Hall will feature some 60 works by Yury Molodkovets. The photographer took inspiration from Degas’s artistic practice and worked for a number of years on his own cycle “Russian Ballet. Homage to Edgar Degas”, shooting ballet rehearsals and performances. In his works Molodkovets does not visually quote Degas’s compositions, but rather takes up and transforms that master’s ideas on conveying movement.

The exhibition curators are Natalia Borisovna Diomina, a researcher in the State Hermitage Department of Western European Fine Art, and Yury Alexeyevich Molodkovets, artist-photographer of the State Hermitage.

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Yury Molodkovets has worked in the Hermitage for over 30 years. He is the creator of photographs for more than 200 catalogues and illustrated albums devoted to the museums collections, as well as for books on the history and architecture of Saint Petersburg.

Over his career, Yury has produced more than 40 large-scale photographic projects that have been presented in exhibitions in Russia and Europe. Among those devoted to the Hermitage were the cycles “The New Hermitage”, “L’Ermitage la nuit. Lieu de retraite”, “The Hermitage. The Age of Photography” and “Sun in the Museum”. He is also curator of the Museum Art Photography project and operates several accounts in the Hermitage’s social media.

The photographer’s works can be found in the collections of Russian museums and also in private collections in Russia, France, the UK, USA and Israel.