In Russia, on one side of St Petersburg’s vast Palace Square, is an imposing, 19th Century building that once housed ministerial offices.
The walls that echoed with the daily business of Russian foreign and financial affairs are today part of The State Hermitage Museum. They are hung with hundreds and hundreds of famous and valuable pieces of modern art.
Within weeks, 65 of these paintings will be removed from the historic walls in an exercise requiring complicated logistics and meticulous care.
As well as having their own health folders, the individual paintings in the show have remarkable stories shaped by the love of art, and by war and revolution
Eight of the pictures on the list of 65 are by Pablo Picasso. Another eight are by Henri Matisse. Others are by Paul Gauguin and Paul Cezanne, Wassily Kandinsky and Claude Monet. And there are many others, all in the pantheon of the world’s greatest modern artists.
And where exactly are these jewels in the Hermitage crown going? They are coming to Sydney, in an exhibition that will open at the Art Gallery of NSW on October 13 and continue until March 2019. Its name is Masters of Modern Art from the Hermitage.
Galleries around the world line up to borrow artworks from the Hermitage, a repository of some three million works of art across many cultures. So the transportation of a large cache of masterpieces from St Petersburg to Sydney is a major coup for the AGNSW.
“It’s not a case of (the Hermitage) lending one or two pictures for an exhibition, which is unusual enough,” says AGNSW curator Peter Raissis, who flew to St Petersburg to see the works in situ.
“This is 65 pictures coming off the walls. They are not in reserve, they are on permanent display.”
Masters of Modern Art from the Hermitage follows on from the blockbuster Masterpieces from the Hermitage: the Legacy of Catherine the Great, at the National Gallery of Victoria in 2015 and, in 1988 at the AGNSW, Masterpieces From The Hermitage Leningrad: Western European Art of the 15th-20th Centuries. (St Petersburg’s name was changed to Leningrad between 1924 and 1991.)
As far back as 1979 the Hermitage was lending individual works to exhibitions being mounted by the AGNSW.
Masters of Modern Art from the Hermitage will be one half of the next Sydney International Art Series which has brought outstanding exhibitions to the AGNSW and the Museum of Contemporary Art every summer since 2010. This year the MCA will present the work of South African photographer David Goldblatt.
The SIAS, backed by Destination NSW, has so far generated more than $134 million in overnight visitor expenditure and attracted more than 1.8 million attendees, according to NSW Arts Minister Don Harwin.
Art Exhibitions Australia has been involved as co-organiser of the exhibition. And the artworks are being insured by the Australian Government International Exhibitions Insurance Program. The Hermitage exhibition is so valuable it would be impossible to show it without that support, AGNSW director Michael Brand says. The insurance premiums would be too high.
Masters of Modern Art from the Hermitage was curated by Mikhail Dedinkin, deputy director of the Hermitage’s vast department of western European fine art — it employs 45 of the Hermitage’s 300 curators — and senior curator Dr Albert Kostenevich who is 81 and a legendary Russian art scholar.
Dr Kostenevich has worked at the Hermitage since 1960.
Among the most significant works coming to Sydney, according to Raissis, are Monet’s brightly blooming Poppy field, painted circa 1890, Cezanne’s Great pine near Aix, 1895/97, and Picasso’s statuesque Woman with a Fan, 1908, which Hermitage director Professor Mikhail Piotrovsky has called one of the Hermitage’s top-ranking modern treasures.
Gauguin’s Te Avae no Maria. Month of Mary, 1899, is coming out. It’s from Gauguin’s years in the Pacific Islands. Matisse’s Nymph and Satyr, 1908/09 and Kandinsky’s vivid Landscape near Dunaberg, 1913, are also on the list.
Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square circa 1932 is coming. Deliberately unframed, this immensely famous work is being fitted with a new display case that will protect it while it hangs in Sydney. Baffling to many, Black Square represents the final disconnect between art and any depiction of reality.
All the pictures coming to Sydney have had new non-reflective, unbreakable glass installed in front of the canvas for added protection.
“(The glass) is very expensive but for transportation we are absolutely sure that in any situation it will be unbroken,” Mr Dedinkin says.
Indeed, the choice of which paintings to remove from the General Staff Building, as the former administrative building on Palace Square is known, has involved labyrinthine consultations. Spreadsheets allowed curators to trace the past and future movements of all the pictures, to ensure they had enough “rest time” between foreign loans.
Folders of information on each painting’s condition were pored over to make sure the selected works were fit for a return journey across the globe.
“All the pictures (are) like a man,” Mr Dedinkin says.
“They have their own personal health but many, many details. It is necessary to have a long and detailed conversation about each object. Also we need to respect our (Hermitage) visitors. They must have enough painting of the greatest masters here, at home. We make this very complicated calculations. We make a kind of libretto for the exhibition.”
Each picture coming to Sydney will be packed inside a custom-made, climate-controlled crate.
As well as having their own health folders, the individual paintings in the show have remarkable stories shaped by the love of art, and by war and revolution.
About two thirds of the works coming to Sydney were brought to Russia in the early 20th Century by two famous art collector industrialists, Sergey Shchukin and Ivan Morozov, who both lived in Moscow. Shchukin owned a staggering 50 Picassos and hung them all in his home.
“At the time, Picasso was a totally unknown Spanish artist,” Peter Raissis says.
“It’s really Shchukin’s taste and vision behind this exhibition.”
Dr Kostenevich says Shchukin bought his first Gauguins and Cezannes in 1903, before these artists achieved European recognition. Shchukin’s ensemble of Gauguins “was unmatched anywhere in the world”, he says. It was the same with Matisse.
The 1917 revolutions in Russia saw the collections of Shchukin and Morozov seized and nationalised. The two wealthy collectors fled Russia for good.
The Shchukin/Morozov collections were amalgamated and hung in Morozov’s palatial former home in Moscow. They were moved to the Russian city of Novosibirsk for protection during World War II. They returned to Moscow in 1944.
But in 1948 Russian dictator Joseph Stalin decreed the Shchukin and Morozov works to be decadent, bourgeois, and “ideologically empty and anti-populace”.
At this point, according to Dr Piotrovsky, the collections were under very real threat of destruction or sale abroad.
The directors of the Hermitage in St Petersburg and the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow offered to divide the works between their institutions.
The directors knew they would not be able to hang the works for fear of being accused of “ideological negligence”.
But at least the paintings would be safe. The pictures remained in storage until two years after Stalin’s death in 1953, and were gradually put on display in the 1960s and 70s.
It was Mr Dedinkin who used the word “libretto”. If the artists are the composers and the galleries are the opera houses, it is these magnificent paintings that continue to sing throughout their long and eventful lives. Even when they’re in Sydney.
* Elizabeth Fortescue visited St Petersburg by courtesy of Art Exhibitions Australia