Increased Cultural Isolation of Russia: Hermitage’s International Board of Museum Leaders Is Suspended UPDATED

UPDATE: In response to my query, the National Gallery, Washington, sent me this explanation as to why Kaywin Feldman, its director, was no longer on the Hermitage’s International Advisory Board:

Kaywin resigned from her Hermitage IAB board service in early March, consistent with the spirit of guidance issued by the U.S. Departments of State, Treasury, and Commerce, as part of a broad U.S. response to Russia’s unprovoked actions in Ukraine.

Art, creativity, and our shared humanity stand at the center of the National Gallery of Art’s mission. We therefore stand in support of the people of Ukraine and their cultural patrimony. The National Gallery recognizes the urgent need to protect and preserve Ukraine’s cultural heritage and museum community. 

While it’s not as big a deal as Russia’s leaving the Council of Europe (announced yesterday), the announcement (also yesterday) by Russia’s State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, that “the activity of [its] International Advisory Board has been suspended following the joint decision of the Museum’s Directorate and the Board members” is the artworld equivalent—yet another serious blow to international communication and mutual understanding, as Russia continues along its misguided path towards becoming a widely shunned pariah.

“The Board was one of the bridges that once connected many cultural institutions and traditions,” Piotrovski stated in his post mortem for the IAB. (I believe that’s him in the left foreground, below.)

The International Advisory Board’s illustrious members (at this writing) include Metropolitan Museum director Max Hollein and Michael Conforti, former director of the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA. As of last September, Kaywin Feldman, director of the National Gallery in Washington was listed as a member, but she is no longer listed. (See UPDATE, above.) The Russian museum had described the group as “a unique example of scholarly collaboration between high-ranking professionals.”

Not any more…

That said, the board’s “suspension” (if not dissolution) isn’t a big change for the U.S. art museums, because Russia was already denying loan requests from our country’s museums, including the Met, which had previously been a prominent collaborator on major shows. As I reported here, the flow of loans from Russia to U.S. museum stopped back in 2011 [the latter link is to a NY Times article], as a consequence of an attempt by an international organization of Orthodox Jews—the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movement—to reclaim books, manuscripts and archival materials held by two Russian public libraries. The Russians believed that because of these claims, any works they loaned to U.S. museums might be seized here, notwithstanding our country’s “immunity from seizure” protection for museum loans.

More than a decade later, this Russian loan stoppage is still in effect, as I learned last week, to my surprise, when I attended a Metropolitan Museum press preview (having nothing to do with Russia). While chatting with Andrea Bayer, the Met’s Deputy Director for Collections and Administration, I asked about the status of Russian loans and of collegial cooperation with Russian museum professionals, in light of the Ukraine crisis.

That’s when she told me this:

We’re still in the embargo with all of the Russian institutions. We haven’t been able to borrow from them since the beginning of that suit, which is still an ongoing situation. There was already a freeze on those things [objects from Russian institutions].

She also mentioned to me that “Max [Hollein] is on the international board of the Hermitage and therefore has for many years has been in close communication through that board.” Yesterday’s news means that situation has now changed.

Andrea further noted that Dasha Zhukova Niarchos (ex-wife of Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich and now married to billionaire shipping heir Stavros Niarchos) is a Met trustee “and she has her own institutions in Moscow, so we hear from her about the situation.” She was co-founder of the Garage Center of Contemporary Art in Moscow, which announced on Feb. 26 that it had “decided to stop work on all exhibitions until the human and political tragedy that is unfolding in Ukraine has ceased. We cannot support the illusion of normality when such events are taking place.”

When I asked if Zhukova Niarchos would remain on the Met’s board, Bayer replied that she would, “as far as I know. She’s an American citizen.”

As detailed here and here, both the Hermitage Amsterdam and the Hermitage Foundation UK have severed ties with the Hermitage, which had been a source of important loans to the related institutions in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. As reported by Martin Bailey in The Art Newspaper, the Hermitage’s Holy Family (1506-1507) was to have been a highlight of the sweeping Raphael retrospective at London’s National Gallery. That exhibition, originally scheduled to open in October 2020, the 500th anniversary year of Raphael’s death, was postponed to next month due to the museum’s pandemic-related lockdown.

While much more can be said about the cultural consequences of the Ukraine-Russia conflict, let’s end (for now) with Hollein‘s take on the situation, as expressed in his introduction last week to the Met’s press preview of its new dossier exhibition organized around a Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux marble bust in its collection.

Here’s Hollein’s statement:

We at the Met condemn the Russian invasion and this act of violence against the country and its people and we are all watching, of course. We see the suffering of many people. Some of us have friends in that country. We all know that there is a war going on in Europe that makes all of us very nervous….It’s a terrible threat to peace and security.

As individuals, we are monitoring the latest developments and thinking about [emphasis added] what can we do to help, to support. As an institution, at the Met we are staying in touch with our partners at the International Council of Museums [which links on its website to publications about protecting cultural heritage and says that it is “monitoring the [Ukraine] situation as it evolves”] and at the Smithsonian Cultural Rescue Initiative [for which a search on its website, reveals nothing on Ukraine]. Both entities…have processes [not projects?] in place to monitor and to respond to these events, and the Met is part of that.

We are ready to offer aid and assistance, as best as we can, to the institutions and individuals in our field in that area. We have also connected in the past days with our neighbors just down the block—the Ukrainian Institute of America on 79^th Street and 5^th Avenue, which is dedicated to supporting the cultural life of the Ukrainian American Community. We reached out to them. We’ve been, on Friday, at an opening…where people came together, talked about the war, about feelings, but also about hope and how art can bring us together [emphases added].

“Talk,” “hope” and “reaching out” to an institution on Manhattan’s 5th Avenue are all well and good. But far better would be a detailed, concrete initiative to provide Ukrainian cultural institutions and personnel with technical and/or financial assistance to preserve their holdings and protect their staffs during these dangerous times. For now, some Ukrainian gallerists, curators and museum directors are mournfully interring their treasures in art cemeteries—“basement bunkers” for storing paintings underground (as described in Monday’s Washington Post).

The estrangement of Hermitage director Mikhail Piotrovski from his colleagues is in sharp contrast to what he had told me during our wide-ranging conversation in his office in 1997, detailed in my five-page piece for the February 1998 issue of Art in America magazine—Reshaping Museums for the New Russia [i.e., post-Soviet Union]. Piotrovski had become director of the Hermitage in 1992, succeeding his late father in that post. (My article was hardcopy only, and was later published online by a third-party—“IndexArticles”—which unaccountably misspelled “St. Petersburg” as “St. Petersbury.”)

Cultural controversies, the Hermitage’s director then told me, are best resolved by art professionals who understand one another, not by politicians. (He was then referring to ownership disputes over previously looted objects.)

Here’s the relevant passage from my AiA article, in which I quoted Piotrovski:

“Good will is what’s most important, and that’s the one thing politicians don’t have.” Noting that Russians regard these works [so-called “trophy art”] as appropriate compensation for “what Germany did to Russia—destroying our cultural heritage deliberately,” he [Piotrovski] declared that “the ideal solution is exchange—fifty-fifty by numbers or by quality of pictures….We can decide with our German colleagues how to go about it, because first it should belong to humanity.”

Engulfed in bloodshed, the combatants in the current Ukrainian/Russian conflict are a long way from such a utopian resolution of cultural differences.

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