A wealth of historical artworks permeate Hermitage Revealed
A documentary by Margy Kinmonth. Rated G.
No other museum in the world can boast a back story as rich and full of fatal drama as that of St. Petersburg’s Hermitage. I mean, the city itself has had three different names since Catherine the Great launched the museum in 1764, primarily to prove that Western Europeans had no monopoly on culture. Centring a complex of spectacular waterfront buildings, its Winter Palace was subsequently subject to sieges by Napoleon, Bolsheviks, and Nazis, plus mercenary thieves, bureaucrats, and opportunists of all types. Take that, Peggy Guggenheim!
With this sort of CV, it’s understandable that the art would sometimes play second fiddle to history and architecture. Hermitage Revealed does a good job of showing the massive array of paintings, sculptures, gilded furnishings, and glorified tchotchkes collected by the Prussian-born Catherine and her Romanov descendants. We’re talking Rembrandt, Titian, Rubens, and two Da Vinci Madonnas, plus many midlevel works gleaned from English collections, and impressive antiquities from Siberia and elsewhere.
The Hermitage has also begun showing works—either suppressed by the Soviets or grabbed by them in the postwar period—that remained in contention (and therefore storage) until recently. These include stellar specimens by Renoir, Picasso, Van Gogh, and Gauguin, and some are seen alongside newly commissioned works by modern artists.
The visuals are put into context by a variety of engaging personalities drawn from the museum community, most notably the Hermitage’s current director, chatty Mikhail Piotrovsky. He essentially inherited the job from his father, Boris, who became director in 1964, after logging some gulag time. Presumably to avoid that fate, the younger Piotrovsky (who just turned 80) offhandedly mouths platitudes that grant Vladimir Putin a far more nurturing interest in the arts than one might expect. But dancing with the devil, while shouldering a skimpy purse, has been habitual for every generation keeping the place alive.
Filmmaker Margy Kinmonth, a Brit-TV veteran who also narrates the tour, crams considerable material into 83 minutes. Some scenes aren’t as well-lit as they could be. Her decision to follow a small boy, dressed like Piotrovsky in the 1950s, through the building comes across as naive and superfluous also. But did I mention the Da Vincis?
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