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The Globe and Mail (Canada)
December 5, 2002
To Russia, with love
By working on a knowledge gap, Canada aims to help the bountiful State Hermitage
Museum achieve its full glory
By JAMES ADAMS
TORONTO -- The State Hermitage Museum in Russia is one of the outstanding art museums of the world. Except for the fact it really doesn't know how outstanding.
Created by Empress Catherine the Great in the capital city of St. Petersburg in the mid-18th century, the Hermitage reportedly has three-million paintings, sculptures, drawings and decorative objects on its six-block site. But it's not entirely sure of that number or precisely where among its 400-plus rooms all that stuff is located, since it's never done a complete inventory in its 250-year history.
Canada is helping to fill that knowledge gap and, by doing so, hoping to bring the Hermitage into the modern age, more or less, and on a footing equal, more or less, to that of the Louvre, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the British Museum.
Earlier this year, the Hermitage took delivery of the computer system that it will be using over the next five to eight years to log its holdings. The $3-million needed for the project is being raised by the State Hermitage Foundation of Canada, created in 1998 by Robert Kaszanits, former assistant director of the National Gallery in Ottawa.
The Canadian foundation is one of three -- there's also a U.S. Hermitage association and a Dutch one, as well as one currently in the planning stage by British Hermitage enthusiasts -- formed in the wake of the Soviet Union's collapse in 1989 to assist with the preservation and conservation of the Hermitage's treasures.
The Dutch, Canadian, U.S. and British contingents are holding their first-ever summit of sorts today through Sunday in St. Petersburg, where they're meeting with Hermitage officials, "comparing notes," and exchanging information on what the Hermitage needs from them, and what they need from the Hermitage.
Canada is concentrating on preservation and education. It's already provided plastic for the museum's windows to reduce ultraviolet-ray damage to its paintings, which includes masterworks by Rubens, van Eyck, Hals, van Dyck, Matisse, Gauguin and Picasso, among many others. The automation of the Hermitage, done with the consultancy of the Canadian Heritage Information Network, is also part of the Canadian contribution to the museum's preservation. As Kaszanits observed recently, "You can't protect it if you don't know where it is."
Three years ago, Kaszanits helped establish the volunteer, non-profit wing of the Canadian foundation, the Canadian Friends of the Hermitage, to help with the education initiative. The Friends have established scholarships to permit Canadian and Russian graduate students, art specialists and archivists to travel between the two countries. Last month, the Friends held a fundraiser screening in Toronto of Russian Ark, Alexandr Sokurov's single-shot take on Russian history filmed entirely in the Hermitage, shown to great acclaim at the 2002 Toronto International Film Festival. The screening raised $12,000 for the cause.
Of course, the Hermitage is giving as well, most notably in its loan of art for exhibitions. Currently at the Art Gallery of Ontario is Voyage into Myth, a crowd-pleasing display of 75 French paintings from the Hermitage collection that will travel to Montreal's Museum of Fine Arts early next year. It's the second of three shows of Hermitage holdings scheduled for Canada -- the first was a 2001 exhibition of works by Rubens and his contemporaries -- with the third, titled Paris on the Neva, set for Toronto, Montreal and possibly Vancouver in 2004-2005. The last will be an unprecedented display of decorative works.
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