From Russia with love - traveling exhibition from Hermitage Museum, various artists, Art Institute, Chicago

National Review, July 8, 1988 by James Gardner

FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE James Gardner

ART

THE IMPRESSIVE collection of Old Masters that comes to us from the Hermitage in Leningrad, and that has now moved from New York's Metropolitan Museum to the Art Institute of Chicago, inspires me to mediate briefly upon the soul of the Russian people. It might seem odd to think such thoughts in the present connection, since the painting in question are th Dutch and Flemish acquisitions of czars hell-bent on making Russia much less Russian and much more European. But the very abundance of treasures in the Hermitage, and the grandiosity of the structure itself, were born of an energy and appetite that, to Westerners, must seem shockingly out of control. Before glasnost, just about the only Russian word known to most foreigners was bolshoi -- big. And the Hermitage, with its forty thousand drawings, 500,000 engravings, and eighty thousand paintings, is surely one of the big things on the planet.

Another feature of the Russian character that transpires through the present exhibition is an essential conservatism, verging upon sloth. Western visitors to the Soviet Union are often surprised by the local taste for those big black cars with fins that Americans were driving back in the Fifties.. One is forcefully reminded of this stalwartness by the catalogue of the traveling Hermitage collection, written entirely by Societ curators. To the newest batch of Western art critics and historians, trained to apply to everything the criterion of social and political relevance, this catalogue, in its attentiveness to issues fo style, form, and provenance, must seem hopelessly reactionary. It would be hard to conceive of anyone more bored by issues of class conflict, surplus labor, and the dialectics of materialism than the curators of the Hermitage.

And yet few areas of art lend themselves more readily to such analysis than what the Dutch produced during their mysteriously fertile Golden Age, which spanned most of the seventeenth century. This period saw the creation of the kind of bourgeois art that was to dominate the nineteenth century and beyond. The comfortable middleclass interiors of Elinga and Ter Borch, the homely Landscape with an Oak by Jan van Goyen, the cow picture by Aelbert Cuyp -- all of which appeared at the Met -- were to have countless imitators throughout the nineteenth century.

Indeed, the Dutch art of the Golden Age is surely the most nineteenth-century of all art before the nineteenth century. The Soviet Union, in turn, is probably more rooted in the nineteenth century than any other contemporary culture. For it was then that Russian culture, as we now know it, acquired the identity it retains today. The soviets are in love with virtuosities of all kinds, things that are big and impressive and hard to do, like playing Liszt, or dancing on point to Tchaikovsky, or writing involved narratives with a cast of thousands as Solzhenitsyn and Sholokhov have done in the past generation.

In the ethos of the Soviets, there is little patience with minimalism, or "art brut," or any of the infantilism by which artists of our time have struggled to overcome the awesome manmountainism of the last century. The Soviets want to be astonished and impressed, and they know that there have rarely been artists as devoted to skill, to human dominion over nature and over one's own frailties, as the Dutch Masters. Consider the almost superhuman minuteness of Jan van Huysum's still-life in this collection, with its obsessive detail in the rendering of flowers; or the silks and satins of Gabriel Metsu; or the shaggy rugs, lemon peels, and brazen goblets of Willem Kalf. The Russians love this sort of thing -- and I confess that I do too.

Russia's admiration for Holland dates from the end of the seventeenth century, when both nations strove with Sweden for supremacy in Northern Europe. Peter the Great learned the art of ship-building in Holland, and he also acquired there an enduring admiration for the over-achieving, secularized, and anti-aristocratic, Dutch bourgeoisie, as well as for its art, much of which he took home with him. Peter's tastes, however, seemed hopelessly eccentric in his own day. While most of Europe was dazzled by the late-baroque fripperies of Maratta and Giordano, and mad Russian preferred such unheard-of fellows as Pieter Bruegel and Jan van Eyck.

Only one of his acquisitions, a pleasant still-free by Jan Fyt, is featured in the present show. For most of its Dutch and Flemish paintings, over 1,800 of them, the Hermitage may thank Catherine the Great, who was so avid of ownership that on average she acquired at least one new Dutch for Flemish painting every week of her long reign. It was she who purchased the fine Rembrandts to be seen in the Hermitage collections. The beautiful depiction of the painter's young wife, Saskia, a the goddes Flora, the sensitive Portrait of a Scholar at his books, and such Biblical operatics as the Sacrifice of Isaac and Haman Recognizes His fate. Catherine also had a taste for the more aristocratic paintings of the Flemings Rubens and van Dyck, some fine examples of whose works also appeared at the Met.