ART REVIEW : A Jewel in the Crown : Hammer Museum Unveils Treasures From Imperial Russia in ‘Catherine’

We presently watch the former Soviet Union dissolve and reformulate like some demented amoeba. It might seem to memory like a creature created by the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.

In fact, the genesis of the empire goes back to the 17th and 18th centuries when two larger-than-life leaders Westernized Russia. The 7-foot czar, Peter I, called Peter the Great, turned a backward geographic behemoth suddenly into a major European power, crowning his own achievement with establishment of the elegant city of St. Petersburg. His spiritual inheritor was the czarina, Catherine II.

That’s just one of several reasons to contemplate a visit to the traveling exhibition “Catherine the Great: Treasures of Imperial Russia,” just opened at the Armand Hammer Museum and Cultural Center.

Catherine was a German princess brought to Russia to marry Peter III. She detested her husband nearly as much as she admired his predecessor. At the first opportunity she staged a coup engineered by her lover, Count Grigory Orlov). The czar abdicated, but it didn’t save him. He died a few days later, probably poisoned.

Catherine the Great is remembered by history as a reformer, intellectual and patron of the arts who wrote satire and corresponded with Voltaire and Diderot. It is from such leaders that the adjective “enlightened” came to be linked to the noun “despot.” When the advanced ideas she had entertained jelled into the rationale behind the French Revolution, Catherine turned reactionary, imposing serfdom on Ukraine, carving up Poland with Austria and Prussia, crushing a Cossack rebellion and shoring up the privilege of an already pampered gentry.

Potential viewers of particularly bully liberal sensibilities might want to skip an exhibition about Catherine on ethical grounds. Those with intensely practical sensitivities might shy away from a general admission of $9.50 as a bit steep, even though it includes the audio-tour. The art-for-art’s sake crowd could well choose to pass up a show so long on historical portraits, architectural prints, glittery bibelots and ingeniously bedizened works of decorative art on the grounds that it just isn’t recherche enough.

Anyone in the middle, however, anyone who thinks it’s OK to sneak off to a seasonal production of the “Nutcracker” ballet, is liable to find this extravaganza just the ticket for the holidays. It has most of the credentials required to qualify as a card-carrying spectacular, including banners on Wilshire Boulevard (rather small ones), big mural graphics in the museum courtyard and a sumptuous installation. More important, the substance of the exhibition encompasses works selected from St. Petersburg’s legendary State Hermitage Museum, 300 of them never before seen outside what used to be the U.S.S.R.

Decidedly, this is an exhibition of art-as-history, and on that level it works extremely well. It has a literary subtext that casts Catherine as the central player in a mental “Masterpiece Theater” biography, slightly fictionalized by the viewer’s imagination.

Early on, we see a portrait of Peter the Great by the French painter Jean Marc Nattier. The czar looks like a hybrid of Clark Gable and Douglas Fairbanks. Clearly, this is the lover Catherine longs for but will never know. Eventually, she will commission a famous equestrian statue of him for St. Petersburg.

An early portrait of herself by Georg Christoph Grooth shows a slip of a girl in yellow, too pinched to be pretty, too smart to be stopped. Peter III’s portrait is cold, obdurate and smug--a perfect admirer for his hero Frederick the Great of Prussia. She would find a more spirited lover in Orlov with his hussar’s helmet and slightly brainless cherry-lipped 18th-Century smile. Clearly he was useful.

Catherine’s portraits track her blossoming into handsome, short portliness--a woman whose dignity was only outstripped by voracious appetite. There is such contempt in the picture of the foppish son she begat with Peter III she might have painted it herself. No, the man for her--after Orlov--was Prince Grigory Potemkin, who manages to look like a combination of eagle and bulldog. They may have been secretly married, but at any rate he fought her wars for her. No wonder they named a battleship for him.

So there is a story for the mind. For the child’s holiday eyes there is bedazzlement--Catherine’s 22-foot gilded coronation carriage looks like nothing if not Cinderella’s coach. It was ordered from Paris’ Gobelins factory by Peter the Great and drips with eight gilded crowns, 18 vases, paintings by Francois Boucher and more. Catherine’s coronation jewels are represented in miniatures by Faberge encrusted with 4,400 uncut diamonds and 1,300 brilliants.

An ornate carnival sled is carved into the life-size shape of St. George slaying the dragon. A Turkish tent presented to the czarina hangs sumptuously.

You can think about it--the carriage as an imported European status symbol intended to intimidate the natives--like an oil sheik driving around in a Rolls. The sled can stand as a fantastic symbol of orthodox faith, the tent as a clue to an expansionist foreign policy. Or you can just have fun and marvel at the wretched, delightful excess of it all.

Why did men allow themselves to be squeezed into ornate suits that dictated “Thou shalt have no shoulders,” or feel it necessary to have tiny time pieces mounted on alabaster columns and studded with jewels?

Why did the church need gilt screens, chalices barnacled with rubies and icons sculpted out of repousse gold sheet?

It was all about a wrong-headed notion of how to become civilized. Refinement and culture are an end product of freedom and civility, not its beginning. The czars got it backward but made some progress. The Bolsheviks got it wrong, too, but added a step toward equality. Now the peoples of the shattered empire are picking up the pieces again. Civilization takes a long time.

Armand Hammer Museum and Cultural Center, 10899 Wilshire Blvd. to April 12. Open daily (310) 443-7000.