Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
and preserve artistic masterpieces. He employed German architect Leo von Klenze
and local boy Vasily Stasov to carry out such a project in the proximity of the Winter
Palace. The result was the 'neo-Grecian' New Hermitage, adorned by statues and bas-
reliefs depicting great artists, writers and other cultural figures. After 11 years of
work, the museum was opened to the public in 1852.
At this time, the first director of the Hermitage was appointed and the collection as
a museum, rather than the tsar's private gallery, began to take shape. Various further
acquisitions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries meant that the Hermitage had
truly arrived as a world-class museum. Particularly important caches of paintings in-
cluded the two Leonardo da Vinci Madonnas (acquired in 1865 and 1914), Piotr
Semionov-Tien-Shansky's enormous collection of Dutch and Flemish art, purchased
in 1910, and the Stroganov collection of Italian old masters.
While it may not be the most historically objective film ever made, Sergei
Eisenstein's
October
(1928) is a brilliant depiction of the Russian Revolu-
tion. The lighting needs of the production left the entire city without electri-
city during the shoot. The most famous scene, the storming of the Winter
Palace, remains an almost unmatched piece of cinematography.
EXPANDING THE COLLECTION
Since Catherine the Great made her first significant artistic purchase in 1764, the im-
perial art collection had grown consistently as each new ruler procured paintings,
sculptures and artefacts to add to the store of treasures. But it was the postrevolution-
ary period that saw a threefold increase in the collection. In 1917 the Winter Palace
and the Hermitage were declared state museums, and throughout the 1920s and 1930s
the new Soviet state seized and nationalised countless valuable private collections:
those of the Stroganovs, Sheremetyevs, Shuvalovs, Yusupovs and Baron Stieglitz. In
1948 it incorporated the renowned collections of post-Impressionist and Impressionist
paintings from of Moscow industrialists Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov. The cof-
fers of the Hermitage swelled.
During WWII, Soviet troops in Germany and Eastern Europe brought home enorm-
ous numbers of paintings that had belonged to private collectors. In 1995, after years
of keeping the paintings in storage, the Hermitage finally displayed some of this
sweet war booty. The exhibition, called 'Hidden Treasures Revealed', is on the 2nd
