Reshaping old museums for the new Russia

Art in America, Feb, 1998 by Lee Rosenbaum

Under Communism, Russia's government-subsidized art museums had no freedom but complete financial security. Now museum professionals in St. Petersburg, arguably the nation's cultural and intellectual capital, are seizing the opportunity to reinvent their staid institutions for the millennium (or more precisely, 2003, the gala 300th-anniversary celebration of Peter the Great's founding of this Baltic port city). The directors of the internationally renowned State Hermitage Museum and the State Russian Museum, the city's premier showcase for Russian art, are using their new freedom to update programs, expand and modernize facilities, and exchange ideas and art works with their Western colleagues. There's just one problem: money. They are tackling the challenge with a combination of Western finesse and Russian brashness.

"Our annual budget during Soviet times was something like $20 million," noted Mikhail Piotrovski, director of the Hermitage museum, in an interview for Art in America. When he became director in 1992, the budget had shrunk to about $2 million rising to about $19 million by 1996, compared to the $209.5-million budget of the Metropolitan Museum of Art). "My American colleagues used to joke, 'You must be the most effective museum director in the world, because you run one of the world's biggest museums in a normal manner with a budget that is not enough to be a member of the American Association of Museums." But although he was an active member of the Communist Party until 1991, he insists that he has no desire "to return to old times.... When the government paid 100 percent of the money, they gave orders for every small step we were making." (Piotrovski's father, Boris, suffered this government interference as director of the museum from 1964 until his death in 1990.)

Museums are now free to do what they want, if only they can afford it. Russian prices have soared to Western levels, but government subsidies have become unreliable and state-funded museum staff salaries still average a mere $850 a year (supplemented by the museum with money earned from such other sources as sales of tickets and image rights). Performance rewards, annual bonuses and subsidies for transportation and food from the staff cafeteria last year provided "the equivalent of two additional salaries to our staff," according to Piotrovski. In addition, he said, some staff members supplement their incomes by lecturing, writing and doing private restoration work, "but it would be wrong to say that most of the staff have other work outside of the museum."

"During the Communist time, money was nothing", observed Mikhail Shvydkoi, until recently deputy minister of culture (now chief editor at Kultura, a new national television station devoted to the arts). "There was a special term, 'to get,' not 'to buy," Shvydkoi said. "The problem was not money but how to get wood, stone, glass, equipment. Now if you have money you can build." The new economics have transformed Piotrovski and Vladimir Gusev, his counterpart at the Russian Museum, into tireless lobbyists and fundraisers.

"My specialty was 19th-century Russian sculpture. Now my specialty is money," quipped Gusev. His efforts have ranged from forming a new conduit for international private philanthropy, Friends of the Russian Museum, to renting out space in the museum-owned Stroganov Palace for a Tussaud-like commercial display of waxen tsars and tsarinas. The St. Petersburg Times recently anointed the Russian Museum as "the city's top party spot," thanks to a new program that will allow donors to throw "an all-night bash" amid the art.

The Hermitage, which has also developed international "friends" groups, lends its treasures for traditional exhibitions at foreign museums, but also exploits its renowned collections as cash cows. The most ambitious such effort is the 400-object "Nicholas and Alexandra" extravaganza, to be presented by Florida-based Broughton International, a for-profit family corporation [see "Blockbusters, Inc.," A.i.A., June 1997]. The show will occupy a series of galleries "that are architecturally enhanced to reflect the world of Tsarist Russia" (according to the press release). Opening Aug. 1 at the First U.S.A. Riverfront Arts Center, a converted 150,000-square-foot World War II ship-building facility in Wilmington, Del., the exhibition will travel to two additional U.S. venues (unnamed at this writing). In addition to objects from the Hermitage, the show will include personal and official documents from the State Archives of the Russian Federation in Moscow.

"Here we can be paid for our efforts," observed Piotrovski, who hypes the show as "a psychological blockbuster" and regards it as a vehicle not only for disseminating culture but also for supplementing the museum's income. For "Nicholas and Alexandra," he said the Hermitage will receive "several hundred thousand dollars for preparing the exhibition," as well as merchandise royalties and a cut of admissions if attendance exceeds a certain amount. The show, he said, would be "cultural-historical," rather than a conventional art display. "These are the kinds of exhibitions that most big museums don't make. The Metropolitan is a museum of fine art, but the Hermitage is a museum of world culture. In addition to fine art, the Hermitage displays numismatics, archeological finds, carriages, etc., all in a former tsarist palace with imperial interiors.