Arguably the most vibrant Russian museum today is the Hermitage, in St. Petersburg. The Hermitage was the first museum to have a virtual gallery on its Web site and have digital paintings available to be downloaded to mobile phones. Now, several thousand visitors to the Hermitage's Web site each month can download, for a small fee, about 30 paintings by Paul Gaugin, Rembrandt, Leonardo da Vinci and Pablo Picasso to their mobile phones.
The Hermitage, in partnership with the Guggenheim Museum, was also the first to open an art museum in Las Vegas, a city not generally associated with the fine arts. Initially, many museum professionals, including the director of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, Philippe de Montebello, reacted negatively to the museum. However, the Metropolitan Museum of Art soon opened a store in Las Vegas, while the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Philips Collection also held exhibits at the Guggenheim Hermitage Museum at the Venetian.
In many respects, Mikhail Piotrovsky, the elegant director of the Hermitage who replaced his father, Soviet art critic Boris Piotrovsky, is responsible for the Hermitage's energetic activity. He is darling of reporters and one of modern Russia's most serious scholars.
"I believe," he said, "that a museum is not an agency that organizes exhibits, but rather a platform for scholarly research. Only a scholar has the right to direct a museum like the Louvre or the British Museum. A scholar can become a good manager, but the opposite is rather problematic. A manager will always remain a businessman, so commercial interests may prevail over scholarly ambitions at some point."
The Pushkin Fine Art Museum in Moscow is pursuing a more conservative policy than the Hermitage, but it has been equally effective. The museum's recent event, "Picasso: Reflections and Metamorphoses," brings together the classical masterpieces that inspired Picasso and the artist's own pieces. For instance, Diego Velazquez's "Portrait of Infanta Margarita," is displayed opposite Picasso's version, in which the princess' facial traits are so distorted they almost seem like a caricature, yet they are full of graceful expressiveness and charm.
This unusual exhibit features paintings from the Pushkin Museum's own rich collection, as well as graphic series from museums in Paris and Barcelona.
Meanwhile, a branch of the Pushkin Museum is presenting an impressive exhibit of 20th century art from Deutsche Bank's collection. This is the first time Max Beckmann's original paintings and sculptures have been publicly shown in Russia.
Pushkin Museum Director Irina Antonova's strategy is more reserved but no less ambitious than that of her Hermitage counterpart. She promotes unique combinations, concerts in an art museum, and mutual exchanges of artwork. Due to her efforts, the museum's fine collection was exhibited abroad for the first time.
The Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, a treasure-trove of Russian art, has taken a different route. It is developing partnerships with provincial galleries and museums in Russia. Russia is very big and Moscow's art lovers cannot travel a long way to go to see collections from Omsk in Siberia or Arkhangelsk. The Tretyakov Gallery gives Muscovites the opportunity to get a glimpse of provincial museums' collections without leaving Moscow.
The provincial museum phenomenon is Russia was a result of the Soviet Union's cultural policy which methodically scattered art masterpieces throughout the country. Occasionally this policy led to the breakup of collections. But at the time, cultural education was veryimportant. As a result, museums throughout Russia may have masterpieces by Konstantin Somov or Arkhip Kuindzhi. In regard to paintings by Ivan Shishkin and Ivan Aivazovsky, which are popular at Sotheby's and Christie's, almost every Russian art museum has one.
Museums in Moscow and St. Petersburg are now beginning to show, although somewhat reluctantly, some of their collections in the provinces. Recently, the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg showed a ceremonial portrait of Catherine the Great by Dmitry Levitsky in Novosibirsk.
The hype around Russian art at Sotheby's and Christie's has been created largely by Russian millionaires who are ready to pay 766,850 pounds for Ivan Shishkin's "Forest Landscape." Most of these purchases are made anonymously because wealthy Russians are traditionally discreet about their identity and wealth.
Moscow and Paris are now competing with each other to become the world's third largest arts and entertainment center, after New York and London. Schedules for local art events may be confusing because there are too much of them. On any given day, there may be more than a hundred exhibits in Moscow. Currently on display in Moscow are installations by Ilya Kabakov, photographs by Andy Warhol and Helmut Newton, Socialist Realism artwork, drawings by Parmigiano, original dolls, avant-garde Christmas trees shaped like angels and cocktail straws, paintings by Valentin Serov (as part of an exhibit marking the 140th anniversary of his birth), Spanish posters, Sergei Beklemishev's watercolors depicting Biblical scenes, and medieval Russian paintings.
