Reshaping old museums for the new Russia

Art in America, Feb, 1998 by Lee Rosenbaum

A major stumble in the Hermitage's dance with foreign partners was its 1989-96 alliance with an American company, Transatlantic Agency, which created the Hermitage Joint Venture to sell, distribute and license products and services related to the museum. This failed enterprise "was forced into receivership in America in 1995," according to Geraldine Norman's book, a casualty of "the museum's financial inexperience" and the inadequacies of Transatlantic Agency's founder, a former Hermitage porter and Russian emigre, George Garkusha. "In the various depositions he made in the course of legal disputes in America, he [Garkusha] never revealed any other commercial experience" beyond a stint working for the Soviet trade department after he moved to America, according to Norman.

The Russian Museum also covets foreign economic and professional assistance, but such alliances "are more difficult for us, because the Hermitage is well known all over the world and Russian art is not as well known," Gusev observed. International touring exhibitions, he said, have boosted the bottom line by about $500,000 annually. Among the most successful was a 1990-91 Malevich exhibition at the Met, Armand Hammer Museum and Washington, D.C.'s National Gallery, which earned a profit of about $100,000 for Gusev's museum (one of several lending institutions). The Russian Museum charges up to $1,000 per object for loans to outside exhibitions, Gusev said.

Artistic Freedom

Money permitting, Russian museum professionals are now free to show cutting-edge art and make international contacts that could have cost them their jobs, if not their liberty, in the Communist era. Alexander Borovsky, head of the Russian Museum's contemporary department, last fall visited the art-filled New Jersey home of Russian-born collectors Yuri and Nelly Traisman to arrange a show of their contemporary Russian holdings at the Marble Palace next fall. Their collection includes nonconformist Soviet art from the mid-'50s to the '90s by such artists as Eric Bulatov, Ilya Kabakov, Mikhail Chemiakin, Komar and Melamid, Yuri Kuper, Natalia Nesterova and others, (The show, "Forbidden Art: Postwar Russian Avant-Garde," will first appear at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Feb. 21-May 3, and later travels to the Pushkin Museum's new Museum of Private Collections in Moscow.) In November, Borovsky mounted a sound-and-video installation at the Marble Palace by Brian Eno, the British rock musician and producer who moved to St. Petersburg in April '97. Neither his move nor the show would have been likely under the old regime.

Before the new construction [in the three recently acquired palaces], we hadn't shown contemporary art, and about one percent of our collection was on view," said Gusev. "When we finish our construction, 10 to 15 percent will be on view... Five years ago, we had 12 exhibitions all year. In 1996, we had 36 exhibitions." The contemporary art space in the partially restored Marble Palace will continue to grow as funding permits. Meanwhile, some areas remain a jumble of rubble, and Lenin's revolutionary slogans still adorn some of the walls of what had once been a museum devoted to the Communist progenitor. The slum rapidity with which the physical evidence of the Communist past has been transformed from fetish to artifact was underscored by a room reconstructing a Soviet-era environment in the "Color Red in Russian Art" exhibition. It seemed to reduce Communist tracts, music, objects and images to the status of quirky installation art.