by Janet Ashton
January 10, 2010
© Unofficial Royalty 2010
…there are plenty on sale right now at the brand new Hermitage, Amsterdam.
There are also catalogues of the new Hermitage’s excellent exhibition, “At the Russian Court”, diverse books on Russian art and history, novels, CDs, pillboxes, reproduction Faberge eggs, and other assorted memorabilia. It all marks the emergence of the Hermitage as one of the world’s most modern and impressive museums, adept at marketing its vast collections.
I first saw the Hermitage in 1993, in the course of my first visit to Russia. It was most intense holiday I’ve ever been on, the realization of a childhood dream and one which left indelible memories of the huge sky and flat blue-grey river, so wide it curves almost backward at the edges, and the distant facades of the buildings on the opposite sides seem half-submerged in water; the grandeur and decay of crumbling yellow stucco, the pot-holed roads with weeds growing through, the unreal atmosphere of thundery days after too little sleep because of mosquito attention, the dislocation of hanging out with Russian youth in the run-down $3-a-night tower block we stayed in, smoking the odd “Soyuz” cigarette and thinking about the palaces we’d been to the same day (much to the bewilderment of our Russian friends, who were unable to understand why anyone of 25 would care about the past).
I’ll confess that at that point I was still a little hazy as to what the Hermitage was exactly: I knew it to be perhaps the world’s foremost art museum, but I didn’t quite understand why the old Winter Palace now had this as its name. At the Palace, there were two entrances: one for locals and one for foreign tourists, and the latter had a long queue at it. We saw the price: $6, whereas for Russians it was 60 roubles – about 6 cents at that time. A Belarussian friend obligingly took us to the Russian entrance, told the ticket office that we were part of a tour party that had been separated and were feeling pathetic, handed over the Russian entrance fee, and we got straight in. I suppose it was mean of us: the entrance fee for foreigners wouldn’t have broken the bank, but it was amusing anyway to watch all those foreigners from their swishy hotels patiently waiting out there.
In the Winter Palace, I was mainly interested I have to confess in looking at ceilings and walls and trying to work out where Nicholas II had lived. In those days, though, my knowledge of the imperial interiors was pretty sketchy, and the Winter Palace was very much the Hermitage Museum, full of paintings and with little to indicate that it had ever been an imperial residence. The only toilets we found were in the basement and pretty basic: a stable door with vast gaps above and below, a challenge to modesty. In those days, anyone who had survived the Siege was entitled the jump a queue, and this they did with alacrity, painfully aware as pensions hyper-deflated and the oligarchs bought up every asset, from oil to property, for their own personal enrichment, that this was all at remained of the respect and privileges once accorded the elderly and the veterans of the Great Patriotic War.
The next time I was in Russia, the city of St Petersburg was preparing for its tercentenary, and its imperial history had become its most marketable asset. From new statues of Peter the Great to dynastic matryoshka dolls, to stacks of Abris books full of little-known archival photographs and paintings of the last few generations of Romanovs, to the ubiquitous postcards of Nicholas II’s daughters, there were Tsars and Empresses, Grand Dukes and Grand Duchesses everywhere. In 1993, it was hard to find the odd bust or calendar of Nicholas’s family, hidden away in a spot of significance to them; by 2002 it was just impossible to avoid them. Inside the Hermitage, there were private imperial rooms on display again, and items of furniture from the various palaces. The Jordan Staircase and throne rooms were celebrated not just as works of art but as settings for the ceremonial of a great nation. It was no longer just the world’s premier art museum; it was a palace again.
Around the same time, the Hermitage opened its first outpost abroad: the Hermitage Rooms in Somerset House in London. This small suite close to the Courtauld Institute of Art held a series of little exhibitions designed to showcase the great collections and attract further visitors to Russia. In one room was a wonderful webcam pointing at Palace Square, so people could see the façade of the Winter Palace in the summer sun, with groups going about their daily business in front of it. The best exhibition was one on Casper David Friedrich, whose works were collected systematically by Nicholas I, and which was intended to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the opening of the New Hermitage, the public art museum Nicholas set up for the people of Russia to enjoy.
The London Hermitage Rooms are now closed and gone. It has to be said that several of their exhibitions were far less inspiring than the Friedrich one, and the rooms probably attracted too few visitors to be viable. The suite was rather small and did not hold the exhibition it should have held to draw the crowds in: the mega-Nicholas and Alexandra-fest, complete with baby clothes and toys, with icons and jewelry and evening gowns. That was left to the National Museum of Scotland, and, after them, to a new Hermitage concept called Hermitage Amsterdam.
The new Hermitage reflects its parentage a little better than the London one did. Situated in a long, low building – the Amstelhof – which forms a square with a courtyard garden at the centre, and overlooks one of the canals, it is almost like a more functional, democratic version of the Winter Palace, that graceful ship of state whose long façade plays on the water of the Neva below and draws movement from it. Previously, the Amstelhof was an old peoples’ home rather than a palace, and some rooms inside are dedicated to an exhibition about that function. Even the kitchen can still be seen. There is also another permanent exhibition, tracing the connections between Russia and the Netherlands from the time that Peter the Great lived in Zaandam learning ship-building and modeled his new water-bound capital on Amsterdam, through the marriage of Willem II and Anna Pavlovna to the latest collaboration that has resulted in the Hermitage Amsterdam.
The two long side wings of the Amstelhof are given over to temporary exhibitions, and the inaugural one, about to close, is called “At the Russian court” (Aan het Russische hof). The huge Nicholas and Alexandra exhibition held in Amsterdam under the auspices of the Hermitage name predated the new building being ready, but a few of the same items appear to be on display. Each wing is as tall as the building, but has a galleried second storey running around its walls. This enables visitors to get a view of the lower rooms from above as well as while walking through them and allows huge pictures and screens to be exhibited.
One wing re-creates a court ball around 1900 and consists of case after case of ball gowns and uniforms brought from Russia, which periodically twirl gracefully around on their stands while music plays, in an attempt to recreate the atmosphere of the ball. At the same time, scenes from the court ball in Alexander Suvorov’s film “Russian Ark” are projected onto the wall, adding to the impression of grandeur and movement. Around the same walls are portraits of the nineteenth-century Tsars and Empresses, with unsycophantic summaries of their attributes (Alexander II’s Empress Maria Alexandrovna, for example, is described as a princess who was “very dour and lacked charm”). There are also interactive computer screens at various points, where visitors can get further information on everything from the people shown to the making of the clothes they wore. The upper floor of this wing has more information about the balls and parties, including photographs of the famous 1903 costume ball given by Nicholas II, and some of the costumes from it. Many of the ball gowns in this wing belonged to the last empresses Alexandra Feodorovna and Maria Feodorovna, and Zenaide Yusupova is also well-represented. Alexandra’s dresses are for the most part simpler and more elegant than those worn by her mother-in-law, which often seem to feature alarming colours and ungainly decoration. Perhaps this is a function of when they were made, though not entirely, as some of Maria’s dresses date from her son’s reign. Even Alexandra, though, owned a horror or two – off-white brocade, anyone?
The other wing is themed as “an audience with the Tsar” and shows off the clothes worn by pages and footmen, chamberlains and other officials, with cases full of china and table ornaments used at dinner parties and of presents given to the imperial family on their official travels around Russia and the world. There are also coronation menus and tickets, and literally hundreds of fans and shoes belonging to Maria Feodorovna, thereby conveying the reasonably accurate impression that she was an extravagant woman with frivolous interests. One section looks at the relationship between the church and state, with lots of priestly vestments, while another is called “behind the scenes” and has exhibits relating to the upbringing of the imperial children. This part features a truly horrible-looking set of guns given to the infant Nicholas II, as well as a maternity dress worn by Alexandra and a baby dress and teddy bear belonging to one of their children. Most of the material about childhood at court is, however, slightly disappointingly general, with much about aristocratic children of the nineteenth century and little about earlier Romanov offspring, so devotees of “OTMA” need not rush off to catch the exhibition before it closes: despite some commonalities this is not “Nicholas and Alexandra II”, and the emphasis is overwhelmingly on official rather than personal lives.
The exhibition continues until January 31st, so those who live in the Netherlands or can get there easily (hey Europe – it’s just a train-ride away! – and there are about a million ways to get there from the UK) can still catch it. The next exhibition, which opens in March, returns to more conventional art museum themes with lots of works by late nineteenth and early twentieth-century pioneers of modern art. It will be called “Matisse to Malevich”. After that comes Alexander the Great and the spread of Greek culture across the Middle East, which also sounds as if it will be really fascinating, even to someone like me who cold-shoulders the ancient world in favour of modern history.
No-one should underestimate the vast amount of work involved in mounting exhibitions: the expertise behind the selection of items; the registering and escorting and care of them during the show; the design of the display and of the publicity. It is a huge gamble with money and time, and the Hermitage has now committed itself to a permanent presence abroad which will require this type of work to go on constantly on a huge scale – on top of the work necessary to loan individual items to other museums. But “Aan het Russische hof” has paid off: it has been a resounding success in terms of the sheer numbers who have visited it, and St Petersburg itself – which counted the original Hermitage as its most significant selling-point, even in communist days when it was so much less visited – has now apparently overtaken Venice as the favourite European destination for culture and “romance”.
For those who can get to neither city, there are still the exhibition catalogues; and also the websites: –
http://www.hermitage.nl/en/ (Hermitage Amsterdam’s surprisingly sketchy effort, which will no doubt grow and improve) and
http://www.hermitagemuseum.org/ which is quite simply the single most impressive website I know of anywhere. It that won’t sell St Petersburg to you, I don’t know what will.
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