Commentary : Palace Intrigue : A German couple has donated 139 Picassos and other treasures to Russia’s Marble Palace, an ironic gift in light of a continuing post-Cold War art squabble.

The 50th anniversary of Victory Day on Tuesday will have special resonance for the residents of this beleaguered metropolis, where 18th-Century imperial grandeur stands shoulder to shoulder with the glum residue of Soviet-era decay. Victory over Nazi Germany in World War II came at the unimaginable cost of more than 20 million Russian lives and an unrelievedly brutal siege of this graceful city. The event has always been of decisive significance to Russia’s national psyche, but its stature has grown larger still since the Soviet Union caved in nearly six years ago.

The collapse meant that the communist revolution had failed and the Cold War against the West had failed. It also meant that the defeat of Nazism in 1945 would now stand as the last, unambiguous internationally scaled triumph for a people who have seen their world turned upside down not once but twice in this century.

The shared victory in World War II ranks as an iconic, unassailable symbol of success in the identity of modern Russia. Its people want it to endure. President Clinton understands that symbolic power, which is one reason he decided to participate in Tuesday’s Victory Day celebrations in Moscow.

The symbolism is also fundamental to understanding the continuing fight over so-called Russian trophy art--the paintings, drawings and other cultural loot taken from German private and public collections by soldiers in the Red Army during the chaotic closing days of the war. The current, widely publicized exhibition of 74 French paintings hidden away for half a century in storage rooms in the great Hermitage Museum here has been the lightning rod in the explosive debate, which has raised labyrinthine legal and moral questions about whether or not trophy art should be returned to the heirs of those from whom it was stolen.

Yet, as the international spotlight has been trained on the Hermitage, with its show of Cezannes, Van Goghs and perhaps the most magnificent picture Degas ever painted, all looted from German private collections, another art institution nearby is displaying two quiet but oddly intriguing exhibitions. The neighboring shows have nothing to do with trophy art, per se, but they sure raise eyebrows, given the present art-related struggle between Russia and Germany.

At precisely the moment when tensions are running high over the fate of trophy art once owned by German collectors but now held in Russia, a prominent German couple has made a lavish art offering to the Marble Palace, an imposing edifice recently annexed by the State Russian Museum.

Peter Ludwig, who made a vast fortune as a chocolate manufacturer, and his wife, Irene, who met her husband in 1947 when both were studying art history at Germany’s University of Mainz, announced in March the whopping gift of 139 paintings, drawings, sculptures and ceramics by Picasso--reportedly the largest private cache of Picassos in the world--to the Russian Museum.

And that wasn’t all. The Picasso bequest joined a smaller, more eclectic Ludwig gift, donated last year but also currently having its exhibition debut: 33 paintings, sculptures and mixed-media works by contemporary American, European and Russian artists, including a 1959 painting by Jasper Johns that would be the pride of any museum in the West.

The irony of this Russo-German art pact is further deepened by Peter Ludwig’s youthful service in the German army during World War II. (He was inducted in 1943, at age 18, taken prisoner by American soldiers and released in 1945.) Every aspect of life in Russia has been in turmoil since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and--plainly--cultural life is no exception.

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At the Marble Palace, the Ludwig gift will shape the direction of a brand-new art museum that suddenly appeared on the horizon. Until recently, the mansion had housed the St. Petersburg branch of Moscow’s Central Lenin Museum. Every self-respecting Russian city had a Lenin repository during the Soviet era. A kind of reliquary for the miraculous talismans of the secular saint, St. Petersburg’s was prominently located on what was once known as the Millionaya--Millionaire’s Row--in a none-too-subtle declaration that what had once been the private preserve of the aristocracy now belonged to the people.

For 52 years the Lenin Museum had housed about 10,000 artifacts related to the life of the leader of the communist revolution. In 1989, the secular shrine to Lenin abruptly lost its reason for being.

The hulking Marble Palace is a short walk east of the Hermitage, the fabled art galleries of the czars’ Winter Palace. (Its proximity is a legacy of the likewise fabled passions of Catherine the Great, who built the marble-clad house for her lover, Count Grigory Orlov.) With the demise of Leninism, however, the Marble Palace was annexed instead to the Russian Museum, a short taxi ride away.

If the merger is geographically a bit awkward, it makes sense in terms of continuity in national history. The Russian Museum chronicles the thousand-year history of Russian art. Most notable are four incomparable galleries of icon paintings; substantial works by Ilya Efimovich Repin (1844-1930), the gifted realist painter sometimes called Russia’s Courbet, and works by such modern avant-gardists as Vasily Kandinsky and Kazimir Malevich.

A pressing question arose for the Russian Museum’s new annex, though. If the Hermitage is home to classical antiquities and European art dating until the first decades of the 20th Century, and if the Russian Museum is a national survey beginning in the late Middle Ages and also continuing through the early years of this century, then what kind of art would the Marble Palace display?

The Ludwigs’ Picassos and contemporary paintings and sculptures provide the beginnings of an answer. The aim seems to be to nudge the Marble Palace toward becoming St. Petersburg’s first showcase for contemporary art. And the international range of artists represents a sharp departure in the traditional holdings of the Russian Museum.

At the Hermitage, one of the many crowning glories is the group of about two dozen paintings by Picasso, almost all of them from 1907-14, the Spanish expatriate’s most adventurous and influential Cubist period. They form the single most extraordinary public display of Picasso’s art in the world.

At the Marble Palace, the Ludwig survey is much broader. The collection boasts several works related to Cubism, among them a wonderful small sketch of a standing woman related to the 1907 watershed “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.” However, there are also small paintings, drawings and sculptures made between 1899 and 1904, which predate the Hermitage’s drop-dead holdings, while the bulk of the collection dates to decades after 1940. The emphasis is on the prolific artist’s later years (Picasso died in 1973), although they aren’t his best.

The Hermitage Picassos will always be the main event, but the Marble Palace Picassos make two assertive points. First, a mini-museum dedicated to a Spanish artist yet housed inside the annex to the Russian Museum alters forever its exclusive national focus. Second, its emphasis on postwar Picasso insists that he is an artist of our time, not just the distant past.

The Ludwigs’ gift of American, European and Russian contemporary art, which also includes Picasso’s 1969 painting “Large Heads,” echoes the double thrust. Internationalism and artistic contemporaneity are bolstered.

St. Petersburg hasn’t much of a contemporary art scene. In recent decades interesting Russian art activity has mostly happened in Moscow. The Ludwig gift seems planned to offer Petersburgers some essential, primary information on developments in Western art during the shuttered years of the Cold War.

The dates of the contemporary collection virtually traverse that period. The earliest work is an evocative 1949 bronze by Germany’s Joseph Beuys, in which a fragment of a voluptuous female torso is poised atop a horn or funnel-like shape. The most recent is a large 1989 Conceptual work by the little-known, Moscow-based artist Dimitry Prigov, in which Malevich’s famous modern Russian icon of a black square on a white field is evoked as an ink stain spilled across the pages of a daily newspaper.

The big news in the gift is Jasper Johns’ extraordinary 1959 “Shade.” Its delicate, waxy strokes of black, white and gray encaustic paint are laid down atop an actual window shade, affixed to the surface of the canvas, in a witty and decisive obliteration of the once-entrenched idea that painting is an enlightening window, opening onto a hidden interior world.

Installed near the exhibition’s entrance, “Shade” is at the side, without prominence, sort of tucked away next to a window. The juxtaposition makes a terrific counterpoint. Still, you have the sense the Russians don’t quite know what to make of this art.

Nearby, for example, German artist A. R. Penck’s “Snow Maiden” (1988), a plush, toylike sculpture of brightly colored stuffed felt, sprawls across the floor like a playroom wrestling match. On the day I visited, its descriptive label was not to be found on a nearby wall or on the floor. It had been placed, instead, atop the sculpture.

This made for easy reading--and a queasy stomach. St. Petersburg’s museums aren’t famous for having kept up with modern conservation techniques during the long decades of Soviet neglect. On a surreptitious tour of basement rooms in the Hermitage I saw lime-infused stalactites dangling over big pools of standing water. In one gallery at the Russian Museum, the solution to oppressive steam heat was to fling open the window and let the freezing, snowflake-dotted air of St. Petersburg blow inside.

Contemporary art, like modern conservation, is an alien presence here. The Ludwig gift will not make up for that, but it’s a start. The collection boasts first-rate Pop paintings from the 1960s by Richard Artschwager and Roy Lichtenstein and Neo-Expressionist ones from the 1970s by Georg Baselitz and Jonathan Borofsky. Also on view is the single interesting collaborative painting by Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat I’ve ever seen.

Artists involved with the Soviet-era Moscow underground, especially Erik Bulatov and Natalia Nesterova, are creditably included. A lovely, melancholic Conceptual work juxtaposing abstract painting with poetic text (it’s in Russian, with no printed translation) shows why Ilya Kabakov is the most important postwar Russian artist.

And there’s a lot of minor stuff, including outright junk. Slightly more than half the collection is trivial. Aspiring Russian artists could be profitably spared the high-priced silliness of Tom Wesselmann’s laser-etched steel reliefs, while Claudio Bravo’s Photo-realist Surrealism is reactionary-times-two. And the picture of a corpse in a snowy wood by Vincent Desiderio, a young artist from Philadelphia, is an academic bore.

Their presence in museum galleries confuses me as much as Jasper Johns’ “Shade” seems to confuse Petersburgers. But then, confusion is the name of the game in Russia these days.

Not that the Russian Museum doesn’t know what it’s up to in designing its program for the Marble Palace, which means to begin to integrate Russian art with world art in the 20th Century. The museum’s curators have even turned to a lofty precedent for the move.

In the small catalogue produced for the Ludwig show, a recently discovered 1923 essay by Malevich is published for the first time. The formidable artist praises the Russian Museum’s forward-thinking decision to show work by living avant-gardists, rather than only deceased masters. Furthermore, he goes on to urge the display of foreign artists influential to Russian Modernists.

Malevich’s appeals were in vain. By 1924 Stalin would begin to sweep away all possibilities of internationalizing the museum. Official opposition to the avant-garde as a “leftist deviation” hardened, in part because the new Soviet public of soldiers, workers and peasants had no experience of art beyond traditional religious and folk expressions. Now, 70 years later, the Russian Museum is picking up the thread.

The Ludwigs have provided the catalyst. When the Picasso gift was announced in March, the St. Petersburg Press wondered aloud what many puzzled over in private: What, if anything, is the quid pro quo for the German industrialist’s costly gift?

No answer was forthcoming. But the Ludwigs have been major players on the international art scene for many years, and their art collections have formed the core of more than one museum. Two of those are in Germany--in Cologne and nearby Aachen, where the couple live. In 1983 their extraordinary assembly of 144 medieval manuscripts, spanning the 9th to the 16th centuries, was purchased as the centerpiece of a new department by the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. They also underwrote Cuba’s Havana Biennial last year (in exchange for all the Cuban art that was shown).

The answer may be as simple as further jump-starting the second-largest city in Russia in order to bring it in line with larger cultural shifts. The wide-open internationalism of the art world in the last 15 years has mirrored the explosiveness of the commercial marketplace into global terrain. Both directions, it seems, are now being reflected in the Ludwig collections at the Russian Museum.