SEASON’S READINGS : Better Than Being There
“Great Art Treasures of the Hermitage Museum,” a handsomely boxed, two-volume work that weighs in at over 20 pounds, is one of the luxury items in bookstores this season. In that category, however, it is a real bargain, with over 1,500 impeccably produced color photographs and a succinct series of texts and labels written by the curatorial staff, full of precise and valuable information. It is unusual in its stress on the extraordinary diversity of the St. Petersburg museum holdings, rather than just on the paintings, which are the largest and best-known part of the collection.
The Hermitage is one of the few museums--along with the Louvre and the Metropolitan--that contain not only painting and sculpture, but extensive archeological collections, ethnic and decorative arts: furniture, textiles, ceramics, glass, clothing, metal works, and so on, endlessly. The building that houses it, the Winter Palace of the Russian czars, is itself of historical and artistic importance.
How was such a huge collection amassed in this Northern city? The stories of how the pieces arrived in the collection collectively offer the reader a fascinating look inside the Russian empire, as they outline purchases of large, privately owned collections in mass by Catherine the Great, confiscations of private collections by the Communist Revolution, important archeological digs and chance discoveries.
It is striking that, unlike most such catalogues, these volumes are very politically correct, not only in their emphasis on diversity and ethnicity, but also on their refusal to suggest any differences in value between what used to be called “Fine Arts” and “Minor Arts” or crafts. Another very up-to-date aspect is the organization of the illustrations, primarily notable in the section on painting, where the divisions by country and date seem rather loosely applied. The illustrations seem to be arranged largely by subject matter, juxtaposing portraits or still lives or landscapes of very different periods or schools, presumably for provocative comparisons. The method has its drawbacks. One of the most famous elements in the Hermitage is the large number of very fine Rembrandts, and having the illustrations of his works widely scattered diminishes the impact of the Hermitage’s real riches in this area. For the general reader, however, this is almost certainly a more stimulating way of enjoying the collection.
What troubles me most about this work is that while it demonstrates magnificently the enormous beauty and value of this great museum to the entire world, it never suggests that the collection is in dire peril. With the possible exception of the great Antiquities Museum in Cairo, the Hermitage is the only truly world-class museum that is not being maintained as it should. The building--and therefore everything in it--is severely imperiled by damp, always a major problem in water-logged St. Petersburg. This is creating dry rot to a shocking degree, and opens the structure to the danger of mold and the disintegration of the stucco on the exterior. The whole building lacks fire-proofing or adequate protection. While very large sums of money and brilliant workmanship have been lavished on the restoration, and even reconstitution, of the great palaces around St. Petersburg that were virtually destroyed in World War II, the Winter Palace, having escaped the war’s destruction, has been allowed very quietly to decay.
The Hermitage has been sending out loan shows of some of its greatest treasures in an attempt to raise funds, as Cairo has done with its traveling show of the Tutankhamen treasures; but that is a lengthy process and, at best, a stop-gap measure. Time is increasingly on the side of disaster. Moreover, such shows always mean that the very things visitors go to the museum to see are too often not there. A second problem is that large parts of the Hermitage are closed to the public for various reasons, including the simple lack of money to keep the whole place open in financially strapped Russia.
In looking through these volumes, I was struck by the number of pieces illustrated here that were simply not on view the last time I visited the Hermitage a year and a half ago. This included not only the “treasure rooms” where the unique gold objects of Scythian, Greek and Sassanid workmanship are kept, but also a disturbing number of fine paintings. The Rembrandts were on view; yet of what is called here “the largest collection of Spanish paintings outside of Spain” there was on display only a small group easily equaled and even excelled in a dozen other museums.
These volumes are clear evidence of just how much the Hermitage owns that is truly exciting but that the museum can’t afford to show to the public. This is a genuine tragedy.
Art of all kinds requires constant care, conservation and cleaning--particularly in our time, when the air itself is full of pollutants, a danger never faced before. The Hermitage desperately needs the kind of intervention that UNESCO often gives and the kind of international intervention on the scale of the cleaning of the Sistine Chapel by Japanese backers, the donations made by the J. Paul Getty Trust to such treasures as the cleaning and conservation of the tomb of Nefertari in Egypt, or the “Save Venice” campaign (though one would hope for more efficiency than that organization has shown).
Abrams has produced this sumptuous work and made it a valuable as well as a beautiful product, not simply a showy piece of conspicuous luxury. It sets out its information clearly and simply, avoiding value judgments and letting the photographs speak for themselves. It is, frankly, somewhat unwieldy and not designed for reading in bed, but it is a great pleasure and a book to which one can return again and again. We can only hope that it remains a guide and a reminder, not a memorial.*
GREAT ART TREASURES OF THE HERMITAGE MUSEUM, ST. PETERSBURG
introduction by Mikhail B. Piotrovsky
essay by Boris Piotrovsky
(Abrams: $195; two volume slip-cased set, Vol. 1, 664 pp., Vol. 2, 856 pp.)