Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
floor of the Winter Palace and consists entirely of art captured from private collec-
tions by the Red Army in 1945, including works by Monet, Degas, Renoir, Cézanne,
Picasso and Matisse.
During WWII a mass exodus of over a million priceless paintings, sculp-
tures and archaeological treasures were evacuated from St Petersburg to
Yekaterinburg in the Urals. Meanwhile, the Winter Palace became a tem-
porary shelter for people who had lost their homes in bombings - in 1942
some 12,000 were housed in the museum.
THE HERMITAGE TODAY
The Hermitage ranks today alongside the Louvre Museum, Museo del Prado and the
Metropolitan Museum of Art as one of the great art collections of the world. It main-
tains outposts in London, Amsterdam and Ferrara, Italy, and frequently shows its
paintings in travelling exhibitions around the world. Under the directorship of Mikhail
Piotrovsky since 1992, the post-Soviet Hermitage has grown enormously in interna-
tional stature and expanded its collection on display in St Petersburg.
As well as the Hermitage itself, the State Hermitage Museum includes several other
huge number of items for which there simply isn't room elsewhere. The complex,
already long open, will finally be completed in 2012, and will then be the largest
centre of its kind anywhere in the world, with eight different buildings used for dis-
playing, storing and exhibiting parts of the collection that are seen nowhere else.
Plans for the Hermitage include the current conversion of a historic waterfront
building on Vasilevsky Island to house yet another branch of the museum in the centre
of the city. Muse then, when you pay your 400% mark up on the Russian price for
entry to the Hermitage, that your money could be going to far worse places.
