In the Hermitage Kings Feel Humble

You once said that the only just wars are those for culture…

Mikhail Piotrovsky: I put it even more bluntly: culture has to be fought for. The defence of cultural monuments is a reason, grounds and an occasion for war. Palmyra was liberated for that reason.

On 5 May last year you participated in the famous concert in the liberated Palmyra. Are the plans for its reconstruction still valid?

Mikhail Piotrovsky: Yes. Russian specialists managed to make a complete 3D survey of the whole of Palmyra using drones, but ISIL (a terrorist organization banned in Russia) went on the attack and the scientists flew out when they already came under gunfire. Now, thank goodness, Palmyra has been liberated a second time. Although the situation there is still fluid and it’s not possible to do work yet.

But we are continuing international negotiations. We have understandings with Canada, the Aga Khan Foundation, the Louvre. In the “Petersburg Dialogue” we discussed joint work with German colleagues. And, most importantly, there is close collaboration with the Syrians. In my briefcase I have the texts of agreements that we are going to sign with them. UNESCO will coordinate all the work, but it will not finance the reconstruction of Palmyra. It will be hard for the Syrian state to do so after the war. Russia will probably be able to do it only partially. So finance will still have to be found. That is why we are creating a foundation that will bring together our Russian architectural, restoration and financial organizations and, I hope, will collect money.

But the first thing that realistically needs to be done is to restore the museum of Palmyra. In order for the inhabitants to come back to the city and live off that museum. And then Palmyra, even in its demolished form, will start to draw people. But to restore a monument without restoring the life around it is a pointless exercise.

So there are plenty of plans with regard to Palmyra. We’re itching to start, but can’t do so yet. We need the war to be over.

In Europe, incidentally, they have found five to seven things from Palmyra. And we and the Germans intend to launch a joint project to study the European market in antiquities. Otherwise ancient cultural artefacts are plundered, but for some reason nothing surfaces anywhere.

Argument over the “inkpot”

In the year of the centenary of the revolution museums are having to go through some highly contentious events. In St Petersburg the debate over the museum or ecclesiastical status of St Isaac’s Cathedral has developed into a serious confrontation.

Mikhail Piotrovsky: St Isaac’s is a special church, similar perhaps only to the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour [in Moscow]. In general it was clear that gradually it was becoming and would have become the chief cathedral in St Petersburg. Besides the everyday ones, services were held there on major festivals. Empress Maria Feodorovna’s funeral was held in St Isaac’s Cathedral…. But where did this strange haste come from?

Now, because of the arguments over it, the cathedral has become remarkably famous. Going by intellectual readers’ ratings, it is now the most important thing there is in St Petersburg. Although it has always been considered a building with fairly mediocre architecture. People with us used to call it the “inkpot”. And now it is particularly significant, like the European University as well. Even a negative fuss can have its benefits.

St Isaac’s, like almost all St Petersburg cathedrals, has a memorial significance. It is no coincidence that with it as a base – and this was an innovation – the museum of four cathedrals was created that simultaneously financed their restoration, made it possible to tell people about them as historical monuments and also to hold church services.

But here feelings were offended. That is a favourite theme with us now – the offended feelings of believers. But, at any rate with St Isaac’s, we have an example of the offended feelings of citizens of St Petersburg and museum workers. They were offended by a decision that in itself might be logical, but was announced without discussion with the other side.

I wrote a letter about all this to the Patriarch…. Before he had even read it, he announced publicly that he was prepared to meet with me so as to discuss all these matters. (Admittedly hardly anyone except TASS reported that for some reason.) At the same time, there was a declaration by the Patriarch’s press secretary along the lines of “of course we are open to negotiations” and a declaration by the [St Petersburg] eparchy to the same effect. But some clergyman not invested with the authority raised a row and everyone took that to be the position of the Russian Orthodox Church. People then phoned me from the one place and the other to apologise…

Have you met with the Patriarch?

Mikhail Piotrovsky: Directly with the Patriarch – no. But I am in constant contact with [his vicar] Bishop Tikhon [Shevkunov]. And with the eparchy. In a couple of days’ time I will be presenting the catalogue of the catalogue of the Byzantine exhibition along with the Theological Academy and its rector, Bishop Amvrosy.

We will be holding a round table devoted to museum matters. Our relationship is fine. It’s just this burst of haste that that has dispirited everyone. I think that gradually we will reach agreement on everything. Especially as joint work in a place of worship of the Church and a museum is something new and unprecedented. And it will elevate the “sacredness” of the museum. For me a museum is also a sacred place anyway.

Will the museum remain in St Isaac’s Cathedral?

Mikhail Piotrovsky: We shall see. I think the ideal thing would be to leave everything as it is. And even to increase the role of the museum, both in Smolny Cathedral and in the Sampsonievsky Cathedral. But that will be something new, and new things always irritate everyone. So there are various considerations about what to do with the museum. Still, in any case it will be carrying out the monitoring of the state of the building.

Will there be a Hermitage in Shanghai?

In July this year it will be 25 years since you became head of the Hermitage. What is the main thing you have managed to achieve?

Mikhail Piotrovsky: Our absolute innovation is that the Hermitage has become a global museum with satellite centres and societies of friends throughout the world. Now, admittedly, that is under threat due to the international political situation.

One more fundamentally new thing is that we have created a tremendous open repository with a special style of presentation.

We have turned our face to the city and are trying to make the museum a city-forming enterprise (something that’s important even in a major city).

We have brought so-called “trophy art” out into the light of day and entered into an intensive discussion on its fate.

We have published a large number of documents on the plundering of the Hermitage after the revolution, the sales of paintings and their transfer to other museums. Now those subjects are again making themselves keenly felt in connection with talk of a museum “redistribution”, the museum fund and a single unifying state catalogue that will lead to who knows what.

We have restored almost the entire Hermitage, including the Eastern Wing of the General Staff building.

I think that I and my colleagues have managed to elevate the very word “museum” to an appropriate level.

But in a museum alongside striking innovation it is also important to have a high degree of constancy. That is why we consider it a success too that the Hermitage has not changed particularly. It is what it is. It simply accords with the time. And with greater globalism.

I can’t say this was all my doing. The foundation was laid by the previous generations; it proceeded of its own accord, but I did not hinder it.

You created Hermitage centres not only in London and Amsterdam. but also in Kazan and Vyborg. Do you have plans to expand your presence in the Russian regions?

Mikhail Piotrovsky: We Petersburgers are an arrogant lot. For us there is St Petersburg and “everywhere else”. So London, Kazan, Moscow – it’s all the same to us. Especially as the opening of a Hermitage centre in Russia requires just as much complex organizational work and often the same sort of money. We have plans to create Hermitage–Yekaterinburg, Hermitage–Omsk and Hermitage–Vladivostok centres. We are discussing the ideas of a Hermitage–Shanghai and a Hermitage–Barcelona. And, of course, the Hermitage–Moscow.

But as soon as we arrange something in our own land, representatives of officialdom immediately snatch up their pencils and it starts: “Provide information by 3 o’clock tomorrow on the state of affairs…” Because since the Hermitage is creating satellite museums, let’s have other museums do it too. But in actual fact it’s custom-made each time. It takes a few years working just on the “mentality of the place” where you want to set up. Because everything will go well if you engage the local authorities, local people and local finance. If people simply expect money from the Hermitage, or the Ministry of Culture, nothing will come of it. And it will only get in the way of the local museums. While our prime condition is that our plans and programmes should not “suffocate” the local museums. Even in Holland, we promised never to bring Dutch paintings. And we stuck to that for 15 years, until they themselves started to beg us to. So, don’t expect any profusion of plans and openings. That shouldn’t happen.

All that glitters

A Dutch court has taken the decision not to return the “Scythian gold” to the museums in a Russian Crimea to which it belongs. Are there any chances of disputing that?

Mikhail Piotrovsky: An appeal will be submitted. But the whole thing is, of course, a complicated business. All the deadlines have passed and the items are already on Dutch soil illegally. And a Dutch court is deciding to whom to hand them over. We had a similar situation once with a Kuwaiti exhibition. Kuwait was occupied and we were holding an exhibition from a private museum in Kuwait that needed to be returned. But to whom? We also kept hold of it for a long time back then. After which we found a solution: we returned to the owners and they organized exhibitions around the world, but finally it came back to Kuwait. In such situations, it is always possible to show good will. And in the case of the “Scythian gold” we will put our hope in that. And in the work of the lawyers.

Much, though, depends on the changed geopolitical situation and it is bound up with the whole bundle of international relations with the Netherlands. We would not at all like to see the negative side of those relations influencing the Hermitage’s links with Holland. When everything becomes strained, we should not forget that the bridge of culture is the last that should be blown up. But when other bridges start to be demolished, we should fight for culture.

The Hermitage often gets loutish threats over exhibitions of contemporary art that are not always understood by the man in the street. Perhaps it would be better to simply keep quiet and call in the police?

Mikhail Piotrovsky: Here we need to be very careful. Today we call in the constable to protect an exhibition from hooligans, and tomorrow a constable called by someone else comes to take down our paintings. We need to try to forge and uphold the opinion – well, if not of the elite, then of the professional community, an opinion that people would listen to. And it should be said, so far they do listen.

The Union of Museums of Russia that recently marked its 15th anniversary consolidates the museum community remarkably. Can it help to solve the dispute at the Vladimir-Suzdal Museum Preserve, where someone has been put in charge who closed the excursion office and broke up the library…

Mikhail Piotrovsky: Simple personnel changes may make the situation worse. That is why we have agreed with the Ministry of Culture on the creation of a joint commission to discuss a development concept for that museum. In the course of the discussion we will set matters right. The Vladimir-Suzdal Museum Preserve is a very complicated place and there is a variety of pitfalls there. Again that same acute issue of museums and the Church. And in this case not just one church, but several. In actual fact it’s interesting, though, and provides a field for experimentation.

And how can the public Roerich museum be protected from state bodies that have seized its paintings?

Mikhail Piotrovsky: If a museum has a powerful patron, it is stronger than any state. And when they do have one, people’s museums have to be regarded as already being semi-private. And what goes on in semi-private museums is not always clear. I don’t know all the details, but it would seem that the patron of the Roerich museum acquired paintings with loans that he made to himself. It’s a shady business.

The paintings have been removed for the moment by law-enforcement bodies. We had a similar story when the French collector Garig Basmadjian was murdered outside Moscow. The paintings in his collection were being taken back. Customs opened the collection and discovered some discrepancies. Everything was packed up and sent off to the Hermitage. And we still have it, all packed up. His family in France are asking for its return; we are asking for it to be returned, but everything has ground to a halt. And we don’t even have the right to open the crates. We say to the customs: “Open them up, at least to check,” but they don’t have the right either.

Something of that sort might await the Roerich paintings. Although the museum should not suffer for the sins of its patron. My view is that it is better for a museum to become state-owned than for the building to slip into the hands of a private sponsor, while the paintings are stacked up in the cellars for safekeeping. Anyhow, an investigation is underway. Let’s wait and see.

Resting Danaë

Mikhail Shvydkoi recently wrote in the Rossiyskaya Gazeta that paintings need to have a rest from us. Is there a need for a limit on visitor numbers? What is it for the Hermitage?

Mikhail Piotrovsky: Every museum has its limit. When they created the Grand Louvre, they reckoned on 5 million and the Louvre began to do everything to ensure they came. Now they have 8 million visitors. You can hardly ever get into the museum. The halls are packed with people and the custodians are quite justly going on strike.

The limit for the Hermitage is around 3.5 million, 5 together with the General Staff. At the moment we get four, but we want to add another million, actively directing visitors specifically to the General Staff building.

The most important criterion worldwide that determines how many visitors a museum can take is fire regulations. Ours lay down that there can be 7,111 people in the main ensemble at any one time. Three times 7,000 and you have the full daily quota. In MoMA in New York, for example there are signs in the halls saying that only 358 people are allowed there at once. And that’s it. They’re very strict.

What about prolonged days? Is the “Long Night of Museums” something important for you, or just an obligatory calendar occasion?

Mikhail Piotrovsky: We introduced late opening on Wednesdays and Fridays, but the visitors don’t appear as they are used to going to the Hermitage at other times. On Fridays we are still short of 500 additional visitors, but gradually people are becoming used to it.

As for the “Long Night of Museums” on that occasion there is always a hidden contest going on: will the museum become part of the nightlife or will the nightlife become part of the museum. And on that score we have to be very careful. Access to culture shouldn’t be at the level of “let’s have a few drinks and then off to the museum”… On that night we usually open that part of the museum to which we want to attract people. The repository first and foremost.

At a UNESCO congress on culture you spoke as one of the initiators of the creation of cultural or creative industries? Have they put down roots in Russia or are they withering?

Mikhail Piotrovsky: The production of discs, music, cinema and tourism exploiting high culture and turning it into a semi-mass form is making people money. But that is the “third category” of culture. There is a first – pure, fundamental, and a second – the state commission. They can also earn money, but they cannot be forced to do so: that is not their main purpose. A failure to understand that is one of our foremost problems. Now they are already beginning to write into our plan how much non-budgetary income we should earn; the next year the figure increases and then they try to cut back on subsidies. But high culture should not have to live by the laws of creative industry.

In Paris there was an exhibition devoted to Shchukin in which the Hermitage also participated. Are there plans to bring it to Russia and show it completely here?

Mikhail Piotrovsky: There were a few things in the exhibition that Shchukin might have bought and I think that they should be brought here. But there is no need to repeat the actual exhibition here, because many of the works are more than well-known both with us and in Paris, but the organizers of the exhibition managed to create a stir through a combination of the entourage with the names of the collectors and strong advertising. We need to think up our own joint exhibitions and we will do so. We and the Pushkin Museum have some ideas on that score.

Corruption is not a family matter

Mikhail Borisovich are there relatives working in the Hermitage – fathers and sons, spouses, siblings?

Mikhail Piotrovsky: Of course, there are dozens of people working in the Hermitage who are related to each other and at the same time subordinates one of another. And it’s the same in all other museums. People get married, their children grow up in the museums and then they come to us to work. And that’s right and proper.

But a certain resolution from the Ministry of Labour recommends that the heads of creative institutions, and museum directors in particular, dismiss very close relatives. Oleg Tabakov had to get rid of [his wife Marina] Zudina at the Moscow Art Theatre and Georgy Vasilyevich at Mikhailovskoye [the Pushkin family estate museum] his wife Nadezhda.

Mikhail Piotrovsky: And should I repudiate my father?

That’s a joke. But Vasilyevich did divorce his wife.

Mikhail Piotrovsky: That resolution is under review on the initiative of the Ministry of Culture. When people, undermining the already low trust there is in society, begin to monitor us for corruption in this way, we try to remind them that we too do not always have solid grounds for trusting those who are checking up on us. We live in a society where a culture of distrust reigns. There is no longer a presumption of innocence.

What are the most interesting purchases that the Hermitage has made on the art market recently – worldwide and in Russia –and which ones are planned?

Mikhail Piotrovsky: Our last major purchase was an album that belonged to the Wittgenstein family containing watercolours from Pushkin’s time.

We will probably buy one of Bill Viola’s video installations that he showed in the Hermitage. The money has already been found.

And – something new for us – we have also begun to buy African art. It is not easy to buy, because everything is smothered by the souvenir market, but there are a few places where from time to time some remarkably interesting pieces appear from the old collections of colonial administrators. And there are sponsors prepared to help us with this. This year we will already be opening a hall of African art in the General Staff, but we shall put some of the pieces in the halls of the Impressionists and Picasso. Incidentally, we bought a small ivory statuette that belonged to Derain. We shall place it next to his works.

I won’t say yet what else we intend to buy.

Quite recently there was a case that caused a stir (and went all the way to the Constitutional Court) over a Briullov painting. Before that there was the notorious trial of Yelena Basner, inspired by the art market and affecting the reputation of the Russian Museum.

Mikhail Piotrovsky: The details of the matter with the Briullov painting are not very clear. Someone imported a painting and can’t export it, because suddenly it was determined to be by Briullov. Apparently when it was first brought in, it was not documented at all going through customs.

Museums should theoretically be friends with collectors. Collectors bequeath and donate paintings and help us to buy them. In the West, conflict with them has almost disappeared. With us too things seemed to be heading that way. When we had a theft from the Hermitage, the antique dealers quickly checked their stocks and brought all the items back…

It was very unpleasant for us, though, when in the Basner affair the name of the Russian Museum suddenly began to be bandied about in a negative context. The museum certainly did not have anything to do with the story of her poor advice to a collector, but today it has become almost the done thing to link a museum to a scandal.

That causes us to look on collectors and antique dealers with greater caution, with the exception of those whom we know very well. Basner was found not guilty, by the way. But look how much time and nervous energy it took.

Museums today require strong legal protection. The exhibitions we take abroad should also be protected.

During the Hermitage’s 250th anniversary celebrations your theatre auditorium was filled with top officials and oligarchs. Miller sat on the steps; Yakunin didn’t have a place; Potanin had to look hard for one. How do you manage to keep on friendly terms with oligarchs, so that it’s not you asking them for something, but them coming to you? Is that how the Hermitage influences them?

Mikhail Piotrovsky: Yes, that’s the influence of the Hermitage. A great museum, a great institution; it does the work for us all. And we just pretend. That’s why people shouldn’t interfere with it doing what it does.

The rich are human too. That is why making a fuss and currying favour are not necessary. And we are not friends with all of them by any means, only with those who take an interest in the Hermitage. And the Hermitage makes everyone equal. Compared to it, we are all small fry, whether you’re the Queen of England or the Director of the Hermitage.

Key Question

History in the museum

In the Hermitage there is a clock that was stopped during the storming of the Winter Palace. You said at some point that there was an idea to set it going again in the anniversary year. Will you be doing that?

Mikhail Piotrovsky: Now there is a lot of talk about the diktat of the crowd and we always stress that there are things that a museum will not start asking visitors about. We have a huge display: if you don’t like Fabre, go and view the classical collection. But regarding the clock, that is worth asking. I did, for example, ask some journalists. They told me to be careful because something might happen. So we haven’t decided yet. But we shall come to some decision before 25 October.

Incidentally, we recently asked the public whether the Winter Palace should be repainted its proper colour. It was never green historically… But it turned out people are not ready to bring back the original ochre colour of the palace. But you need to act without breaking with established practice. We are gradually making the shade paler, more pastel, and little by little we’ll get back to the old colour.