A RUSSIAN WINTER FOR THE ARTS : Hermitage Falls Victim to Chaos

Yevgeny V. Mavleyev, curator of classical sculptures at the world-renowned Hermitage museum, shook his head in despair as he surveyed a hall of ancient Roman statues.

Two 1st-Century white marble sculptures were missing from the otherwise symmetrical display in the elegant pink hall of the 19th-Century palace.

The curator was not grieving over a robbery, but something he considers even more devastating. The statues had been removed to make room for air-conditioning units being installed in the museum.

Progress--almost--has hit the Hermitage.

Curators at the museum say the air-conditioning system--bought without consulting art experts and from a foreign company with no experience working with museums--will cater only to sightseers’ comfort and not the climatic needs of the artworks, and could actually bring the historic home of the czars tumbling down.

The scandal surrounding the $2.3-million air-conditioning system is just one of the misfortunes and mishaps facing the grand museum, which holds one of the world’s most extensive and valuable art collections but is becoming poorer and poorer as the economy of the disintegrating Soviet Union takes a nose dive.

* Conservators at the museum--some of the world’s best--are running out of the paint and other simple materials they demand for their trade, and they don’t have funds for more.

* The security system at the museum is so elementary that people have just walked out with valuable artworks.

* Curators, art historians and conservators at the museum earn such miserly pay that they either moonlight or live near the poverty line.

* The Hermitage does not have enough money to insure its artworks, so it can no longer send exhibits abroad in exchange for exhibits from other museums. (Because American museums cannot afford to insure their permanent collections either, traveling exhibitions are heavily insured and costs are shared among reciprocating institutions.)

* The central government in Moscow, which had been financing the Hermitage’s yearly budget of almost 30 million rubles ($17 million at today’s commercial exchange rate), ran out of money two months ago. The Russian government of President Boris N. Yeltsin has taken over most of the old central government agencies, and with the Soviet Union all but defunct, no one is sure how the museum will be funded.

The problems at the Hermitage are the direct result of the museum administration’s philosophy, said Mikhail M. Devyatov, a prominent St. Petersburg professor of art conservation.

“The administration makes decisions based on its administrative priorities, and no matter how loudly the artistic specialists protest, the administration does not listen,” said Devyatov, who has been closely acquainted with the operation of the Hermitage for more than 30 years. “The way things are going, the Hermitage cannot fulfill its cultural moral role in society.”

The air-conditioning system is the most poignant example of how chaos seeping into everything in the crumbling Soviet Union has infiltrated even the country’s most prized showcase--the Hermitage.

“I gathered up my sculptures with tears in my eyes, realizing that the people will no longer be able to come and gaze at their beauty,” Mavleyev sighed as he gestured at the places where the statues used to be.

Reluctance about giving up some of his exhibit space is not Mavleyev’s biggest worry. As head of the labor organization at the Hermitage, he leads a group of curators who fear that the air-conditioning system may doom the museum and the masterpieces inside.

“It’s idiocy--no, criminal is the word,” Mavleyev said with a look of deep concern on his narrow face. “It will strongly influence the climate in which our artworks have dwelt for over 200 years.”

The coordinator of research and exhibits, Nina P. Lavrova, is equally distressed: “I feel horrible about what will come from these air conditioners. On the wall hangs a priceless masterpiece. Under it is this ugly box. When this box starts to work, what will happen to the painting? No one knows.”

To install the new system in Mavleyev’s hall of 1st-Century Roman sculptures, holes of about three feet in diameter will be cut into the room’s pink-toned artificial marble walls, themselves a rare example of an architectural style popular in the first half of the 19th Century. In some of his other rooms, the holes and large air-conditioning units are already in place.

“I can’t make any sense out of it, when I see those huge holes in our halls of antiquities, where there was never a problem with stuffiness--it is always cool there, even on the hottest days,” Lavrova said.

Similar holes will have to be made in 18th-Century frescoes that were commissioned by Catherine the Great in another hall of the vast museum--which fills five buildings and has 1,500 rooms.

Ironically, no one knows when there will be enough money to buy more units to install in the rest of the rooms, including exhibition halls where Impressionist works are displayed, which are heavily trafficked and very stuffy.

“It’s tragicomedy--stress on the tragic,” said Mavleyev, who is chief of the museum’s department of Greek and Roman antiquities. “The museum has no money for the follow-up work on the air conditioners, or to buy the next set of units. It’s like buying a car when you will have no money to buy gasoline.”

Fortunately, the tubes for the new system could be inserted into the Hermitage’s old ventilation canals behind the walls. But cleaning soot from the old passageways almost proved catastrophic.

“A few times this soot spilled out,” Mavleyev said, “and there was one time when the soot came very close to a Rembrandt.”

Architects have told Mavleyev that the air-conditioning system will damage the building, whose foundation is built--like the rest of St. Petersburg--on swampy ground.

“When the air conditioner starts to work, the vibration from it could demolish the whole building,” Mavleyev said.

Boris G. Ustinov, an architect who has studied the Hermitage’s condition for more than 20 years, said the building is in such fragile condition that installing the air-conditioning system constitutes “barbarism.”

“We can expect only destructive effects from this system,” he said.

Vladimir Y. Matveyev, head curator and acting museum director, said that he, too, is not a proponent of the air-conditioning system.

“I’m critical of the system; I think a lot could have been done better,” Matveyev said. “But the need for a system is obvious--to say that is easy. It isn’t easy to say, however, that it is without problems.”

This is not the first time the Hermitage has bought a problematic air-conditioning system, Devyatov said.

“There was a time when they bought a system of air conditioning and it turned out to be made for use in greenhouses,” he said. “It had to be pulled out, and the money was lost.”

But there were strong arguments in favor of installing air conditioning.

In a room full of Flemish paintings hangs Rubens’ masterpiece, “Bacchus.” The muscular god and the goddesses surrounding him are covered by thick, yellowed shellac and in some places are discolored.

One recent day, a thermometer and humidity gauge placed near the 17th-Century masterpiece showed the temperature to be almost 10 degrees higher than it should be and the humidity to be about 20 degrees too dry.

“In the summer, the conditions are reversed,” said Anatoly B. Alioshin, a prominent conservator from the Repin Institute of Paintings, Sculpture and Architecture. “Of course these conditions have a negative effect on the Rubens.”

In other rooms, conditions seemed to be even more extreme, although there were no nearby gauges.

“But it’s difficult to know whether the new air-conditioning system will be even harder on the paintings,” Alioshin said.

Not all of the curators at the Hermitage are disturbed about the climate problems.

“I don’t think the climate is different here than it is in the Metropolitan or the Louvre,” said Alexander A. Babin, curator of 19th-Century French paintings. “It is a problem of large museums. It is very difficult to control temperatures and humidity in large museums. Air conditioners are not so much for preserving the paintings but for the visitors, because it is very stuffy in the exhibit halls.”

In the museum’s non-public rooms, where the conservators do their work, it quickly becomes clear why the staff has not gotten around to Bacchus and other masterpieces.

In recent months, two of 18 conservators who work on paintings quit, as it became harder and harder to live on their low salaries. In addition, workers say, conservators had been overworked doing cosmetic restoration of paintings being sent abroad for exhibitions.

Now the packed exhibition schedule of the last few years has been reduced to almost nothing, Lavrova said, because the museum cannot afford to pay its share of insurance costs for traveling exhibitions.

Although the conservators work in the luxurious Hermitage, full of crystal chandeliers and gold-plated walls, their cramped, modest workrooms lack proper lighting fixtures to illuminate their painstaking work.

Natural light is not adequate in St. Petersburg, where for several months a year there are only a few hours between sunrise and sunset, and even then the sun is low on the horizon and diffused through thick clouds.

Alexander V. Kuznetsov, a senior conservator, took a break from his work on a huge 16th-Century work by the Dutch artist Joachim Wtewael, “Lot and his Daughters,” to discuss his living and working conditions.

“The last time we got paints was four years ago, and some colors have run out completely,” Kuznetsov said. “We don’t know when we will get replacements.”

Sturgeon glue, which Hermitage conservators formerly used exclusively, has become very rare and very expensive, so they have had to start using other types of glue.

On his monthly salary of 420 rubles, less than $5 at the market exchange rate and just 10% over the official poverty line, Kuznetsov cannot hope to support his family. He does side jobs on nights and weekends, intensifying the strain on his eyes and nerves.

“Look at the contrast--they work surrounded by priceless objects of art and earn a pittance,” Mavleyev said.

Alioshin, who has worked as a consultant for the Hermitage for many years, said that the problem of shortages is not a new one for conservators at the museum but that it has been aggravated by the country’s skyrocketing inflation.

“We never had enough paints, but we always found a way to make do,” Alioshin said. “But now it’s a horrible situation. Prices on all the materials we use have increased 100 times.”

Many of the best conservators have already been attracted to higher-paying jobs abroad, Devyatov said, and the exodus is bound to grow as economic conditions get even worse.

“Specialists will leave because of the niggardly pay,” he said. “The only reason anyone will stay is out of great, great love for the Hermitage.”

Inflation has raised the incidence of art thefts, museum workers said.

Now that the ruble is rapidly dropping in value, people are obtaining anything that will not lose its value. Recently, small works of art--and even some big ones such as a shoulder-high vase sculpted by Russian craftsmen out of malachite--have disappeared from the museum.

A few months ago, Mavleyev discovered a 1st-Century Greek double-headed bust of Ariadne and Dionysus missing from his collection.

As it turned out, a night watchman stole the tiny sculpture, hid it in a locker at a train station, then forgot the combination. He asked station administrators to open the locker and wrote down its contents to prove it was his. Needless to say, police met him as he tried to reclaim the sculpture and the piece was returned to the museum.

But Mavleyev was so upset by the incident that he gathered all of his sculptures weighing less than 15 pounds and put them in storage.

Smaller thefts have also plagued the museum. Elegant 19th-Century fixtures have been taken from windows and doors. Stone inlays have been stolen from antique furniture on display. And anything else that could be picked up or taken off has been carried away--much of it during off hours by museum workers.

“I remember from my visits to the Hermitage as a child that everything was beautiful, including the handles on the doors,” Alioshin recalled. “Now they have all been stolen. It is very depressing.”

Although the problems seem obvious to many, others working at the museum seem not to have noticed anything is wrong.

“People don’t want to think about it,” Mavleyev said. “It’s inertia. You know your efforts won’t have an effect anyway, so it’s better to keep to your own business--even if the walls are falling down around you.”

Although Mavleyev and others have appealed to the museum administration, city officials and the Ministry of Culture in Moscow, which has had jurisdiction over the Hermitage, no one has responded to their pleas for help.

“Now, when there’s nothing to eat--when everyone thinks about how we’ll get through the winter--no one wants to hear about the Hermitage, even though no one knows whose jurisdiction the Hermitage lies in or how it will be financed in the future,” Mavleyev said. “But something must be done urgently. We’re not talking about the destruction of Soviet or Russian valuables, we’re talking about treasures of the world.”

If neither the museum administration nor the Ministry of Culture takes steps to stop the installation of the air-conditioning system, install an effective security system and establish a dependable supply of materials for conservation and salaries for the museum employees, then drastic measures must be taken to save the paintings, Mavleyev said.

“We must decide whether we will preserve these artworks or not,” said Natalya A. Zakharova, who has worked as a curator in the museum for 30 years. “If not, we should send them out to other republics or other countries--or they will just perish.”

Natalya Shulyakovskaya, a reporter for The Times in St. Petersburg, contributed to this story.