Twenty years have passed since the first edition of this book was published and Mikhail Piotrovsky has carried on fighting to amazing affect! The museum is run by him autocratically. To some extent, he is the museum.
He has spread his wings, establishing branch museums round the world. The first was in London in 2000, the Hermitage Rooms at Somerset House, and the second was in the USA, the Hermitage Guggenheim in Las Vegas. Both ran for seven years and then closed down – teaching him, perhaps, what not to do. He moved on to set up the very successful Hermitage Amsterdam, the first small opening in 2003 and a grand opening of the whole beautiful 17th century building in 2010 attended by the Queen of Holland and President Medvedev. Then he started on Russia, opening in Kazan, Vyborg, Omsk, Vladivostok and Ekaterinburg. Further branches in Shanghai, Barcelona and Moscow are under discussion.
With over 3 million items in the collection, only 5 % of which are on show in the museum itself, this is a splendid way of getting them exhibited.
He has also built – in stages – a vast open storage facility at Staraya Derevnya, on the edge of the city, which allows him now to boast that 80% of the collection is on view or available to the public in the open store. You can take a guided tour or ask to see particular pieces.
He has continued his father’s tradition in sending individual exhibitions to museums round the world – the two most memorable were, perhaps Houghton in England and Shchukin at the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris. Houghton in Norfolk was built by Sir Robert Walpole, Britain’s first prime minister, and the decoration of the rooms and the architecture has not changed since Catherine the Great bought the collection of his paintings in 1789. With the help of Lord Cholmondeley, a direct descendent of Walpole who still lives at Houghton, the paintings were brought back and hung precisely where they had hung in the early 18th century.
The Vuitton Foundation show was a very different affair, celebrating a great Russian collector, Sergei Shchukin, whose home and collection were nationalised at the time of the Revolution. The collection is now split between the Hermitage and the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. His collecting showed him as a man ahead of his time with a focus on Gauguin, Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso. Bringing the Moscow and St Petersburg pictures together stunned art lovers and brought in over a million visitors, an all time record for any temporary exhibition.
At the same time, Piotrovsky has found the money to gradually restore the old galleries of the Hermitage, presenting them in their historic beauty but cleaned and polished. The gilding of the church is dazzling and must have cost a fortune.
The reign of Mikhail Piotrovsky is characterised by a strong attachment to tradition combined with daring innovation. Perhaps his most important innovation has been to launch the museum into the field of contemporary art – which, he says, everyone in Russia hates. However, the museum should never be left behind and must embrace the contemporary but show it as the continuation of the Old Masters. It was started experimentally in 2007 when he appointed Dimitri Ozerkov to run the ‘Hermitage 20/21 Project’, saying: ‘You must remain the curator of 18th century French prints. This experiment may not work.’ It was called 20/21 since it encompassed the 20th century after 1917 and the 21st century. The experiment worked and in 2012 Ozerkov was appointed head of a new Contemporary Art Department. The Moscow branch is to be entirely devoted to the ‘20/21’ project.
How has Piotrovsky done it? A mixture of the right contacts, imagination, intelligence, charm and sheer hard work. He spent 12 years as the deputy chairman of the President’s Council on Culture – the chairman was the president himself, Vladimir Putin, who grew up in St Petersburg and loves his home city. That helps. But he has also lectured, held conferences, chaired university departments and a plethora of other organisations. He rarely says ‘no’ and is always prepared to take risks.