About Watch Russia
For an interview with our publication, we asked Mikhail Piotrovsky, the director of the State Hermitage Museum, to pose for us not in the traditional Parade Anfilada of the Winter Palace, glittering with gold, but in the monochrome space of the General Staff building, next to Ilya and Emilia Kabakov’s installation The Red Wagon. In doing so, we wanted to visually emphasize another aspect of the Hermitage, one that doesn’t just preserve old masters and masterpieces from the past, but also keeps up with modern times by collecting contemporary art. Because a museum is always about connecting different eras and dialogues between epochs and cultures.
Here are some of the most significant items from the Hermitage’s contemporary art collection.
The greatest artist of our time. He was not merely a painter, but a philosopher as well. Born on 8 March 1945, in Donaueschingen, Germany, during the final bombings of World War II, Kiefer made understanding this terrible war his primary theme. The ruins and debris of post-war Europe, where he grew up, became a crucial visual image for him. Kiefer’s paintings are always filled with lifeless landscapes, dried-up flowers, broken glass, rusty structures, streaks, dust, clay, and straw. His main material is lead. In 1985, he bought worn-out sheets of lead roofing that had been removed from the Cologne Cathedral. Due to his love for lead, the artist was often a victim of thieves hunting for this material. Working on themes related to memory and comprehending the past, Kiefer spoke out loudly about issues of the modern world as well: social inequality, poverty, and discrimination. He also reflected extensively on religion, cosmogony, literature, and philosophy, drawing inspiration from all global culture.
In 2017, the Hermitage hosted his first solo exhibition in Russia: Anselm Kiefer – Velimir Khlebnikov. One of the thirteen large-scale works specifically created for this project was made part of the Hermitage collection. It was Aurora, a work that reflects on the paradoxes of historical development and the futility of human existence. The little boat depicted could be interpreted as the legendary Russian Revolutionary cruiser Aurora itself, which radically changed the course of world history. Military ships appear on every canvas Kiefer created for the Hermitage exhibition, making the theme of naval battles a central one. These formidable military vessels are battered and rusty, hopelessly entangled in branches, water, and paint, and trapped in chaos. Streams of black paint flow around them obscuring the images. This soot and smoke from revolutionary and wartime fires represent death and destruction, as well as the shattered new world relentlessly brought on by revolutions and wars. The eschatological motif is fundamental in Kiefer’s painting; each of his works serves as a warning to humanity.
One of the most influential artists of today. Louise Bourgeois, an American of French origin, lived almost a century, 98 years, and her work reflected all major the “-isms” of the 20th century (Cubism, Futurism, Surrealism, Constructivism, Abstract Expressionism, and Conceptual Art), linking Modernism and Contemporary Art. However, her art has always been very personal. Its dominant theme is childhood fears, trauma, and experiences. Sublimation and reflection define Bourgeois’ artistic language. A key subject is the female body and its vulnerability in today’s still predominantly masculine world.
Bourgeois’ first exhibition in Russia took place at the Hermitage in 2001. Later, out of gratitude and in memory of this event, she donated the sculpture Nature Study made of blue rubber to the museum, marking the start of the creation of the Hermitage’s collection of contemporary art. Today, this sculpture can be seen in the Antique Art Hall of the Great Hermitage. As such, Bourgeois gained the opportunity to engage directly in a dialogue with classical masterpieces. Archaic ancient Greek, African, and pre-Columbian sculptures have always inspired her. She returned repeatedly to the image of a multi-breasted, headless chimera resembling either a sphinx or griffin, experimenting with colours and materials (the artist worked with wood, marble, bronze, plaster, latex, fabrics, etc.). In this graceful yet grotesque sculpture, Bourgeois contemplates identity, motherhood, and mortality. Typical of Bourgeois, the piece combines realism and mythology, predatory nature and deliberate femininity, as well as corporeality and phantasmal presence.
The Hermitage was the first museum to exhibit his works in Russia, a large-scale solo exhibition titled Jan Fabre: Knight of Despair – Warrior of Beauty took place in the halls of the Winter Palace, New Hermitage, and General Staff Building in 2016–2017. Most of the exhibited pieces were specially created for the project and served as Fabre’s personal dedication to the Hermitage collection and palace interiors. Following the exhibition, the sculptural composition Stupidity Standing on Death was gifted to the museum by the artist.
Fabre was inspired to create it by Frans Snyders’ painting Concert of Birds (ca. 1630–1640), which is also housed in the Hermitage. His Stupidity work is an allegory of this kind that functions through rather traditional imagery: the skeleton represents death, while the swan stands for folly and irrationality. But here, the materials matter: the skeleton is made of polymer covered with golden-green beetle elytra, whereas the swan is an actual taxidermy bird. As the grandson of famous entomologist Jean-Henri Fabre, who classified insects, the artist widely employs animal aesthetics, utilizing organic materials and forms (skulls, skeletons, stuffed animals, and beetle elytra) in his works. Stupidity is undoubtedly a reinterpretation of classic art. Carnival elements, which are important both for the Belgian culture and mentality as well as for contemporary art, are clearly present in this work. Since Édouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863), paraphrasing classical works has become one of the ways to create new relevant pieces. Such paraphrases usually contain irony and even mockery—not ridicule, but rather a means of engaging in a dialogue with Old Masters and classical art, while often paying homage to them. And Fabre does exactly this in his remarkably beautiful and distinctively Flemish spirit work. The artwork Stupidity Standing on Death is displayed in the Snyders Room (Main Museum Complex) alongside Concert of Birds, highlighting the ongoing dialogue.
A key figure in Russian conceptual art, Dmitry Alexandrovich Prigov (who insisted on using his patronymic without his family name as a pseudonym) explored nearly all genres of contemporary art, attempting to bridge gaps between them. His range of works is enormous: thousands of poems, several novels, essays, plays, drawings, paintings, and performances. In the mid-1970s, Prigov began creating “stihogramms”, where word formation became a new plastic form.
In 2011, Prigov’s exhibition took place at the Venice Biennale, which is curated by the Hermitage. The exhibition served as the basis for filling up Prigov’s Room, which opened in the General Staff Building in 2012. Room is a black-and-white installation that is reminiscent of a museum hall, featuring chairs and familiar rope barriers. Empty frames hang on the walls accompanied by huge labels reading: “This is Matisse”, “This is Rembrandt”, “This is Malevich”, “This is Leonardo”. Viewers are invited to reflect on freedom and constraints in perceiving art, the role played by the artist’s name, and the impossibility of pure contemplation.
The founder of Moscow conceptualism, Ilya Kabakov is the only Russian artist of the second half of the 20th century to achieve worldwide recognition. Since 1989, he has worked collaboratively with artist Emilia Kabakova. Together, they entered art history as pioneers of a new genre, total installation where they explore both private and collective memory.
In 2004, an exhibition of the Kabakovs’ works was held in the General Staff Building of the Hermitage, laying the foundation for the tradition of gifting their artworks to the museum. The Hermitage received installations such as In the Closet (1997), The Toilet in the Corner (1992), The Red Wagon (2008), and Monument to a Lost Civilization (2014).
Monument to a Lost Civilization is a project for a utopian city-museum. It was envisaged as a monument to the civilization in which they were born and spent most of their lives, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Similar to archaeologists, the Kabakovs gathered, described, and categorized the fragments of this now defunct civilization. Drawing upon personal experience and memories, they designed a museum where visitors who are unfamiliar with this civilization could form their own impression.