The Hermitage by Geraldine Norman

Author:Geraldine Norman [Geraldine Norman]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781912690091
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc.
Published: 2018-09-02T16:00:00+00:00

The battle between museum curators and Antiquariat was not restricted to the Hermitage. A 1929 letter from Viktor Lazarev, keeper of the Moscow Museum of Fine Arts – now the Pushkin Museum – to the head of Glavnauka, the section of Narkompros that dealt with educational institutions and museums, suggested ‘the radical reorganisation of the staff of Antiquariat through the replacement of those employees who comprehend nothing of antiques and carry out one act of sabotage after another with those party comrades who would feel the deep and principled difference between trading in pickled cucumbers and Rembrandts’.

In the 1990 official history of the Hermitage Boris Piotrovsky, the former director, quotes from a letter the museum received from Antiquariat in January 1930 in which they demanded “superfluous” gold and platinum objects, 250 paintings with an average value of not less than 5,000 roubles each, weapons from the Arsenal to the sum of 500,000 roubles, Scythian gold “to a sum to be agreed with the administration of the Hermitage” and duplicate engravings’. Only the Scythian gold was denied them.

Almost every department still mourns losses from its collection. A two-volume book on the Hermitage silver collection was published by the keeper, Baron Ariny Foelkersam, just before the Revolution from which Antiquariat selected the material it wanted for sale – the lost pieces are neatly identified. For instance, only forty-six items from the famous Orlov Service – ordered from Roettiers in Paris by Catherine the Great for her lover Count Grigory Orlov – are left in the Hermitage collection. There were over 1,000 pieces before the Revolution.

The duplicates sold from the Print Department included the original set of Piranesi engravings Count Ivan Shuvalov sent Catherine the Great from Rome and about which she wrote with such enthusiasm to her confidant Melchior Grimm. There are still plenty of Piranesis in the collection but Catherine’s historic folios have been lost. Or again, most of the battle paintings commissioned by Nicholas I from contemporary Russian artists were sold off. Nineteenth-century painting was out of fashion at the time and the Hermitage curators, no doubt, felt that such paintings were easier to part with than earlier and more distinguished works, but a whole, historic unit has disappeared for good.

Now that they were preparing to sell on a massive scale, the Soviets turned to auctions rather than private dealers. The first two sales took place at the end of 1928, one at Rudolf Lepke’s auction house in Berlin and the other at the Dorotheum in Vienna, both devoted mainly to applied arts and furnishings with only a smattering of minor pictures. The Lepke catalogue was a very grand affair, with many illustrations and an introduction by Wilhelm von Bode, director of the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin and one of the great connoisseurs of his day. It contained more than 400 items from the Hermitage and confiscated aristocratic collections. Local émigrés made a small splash by trying to stop the sale and some items were withdrawn on the orders of a Berlin court – but the ruling was subsequently cancelled by a higher court in Leipzig.

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