Books, Arts & Manners: From Russia with Love

The impressive collection of Old Masters that comes to us from the Hermitage in Leningrad, and that has now moved from New York’s Metropolitan Museum to the Art Institute of Chicago, inspires me to meditate briefly upon the soul of the Russian people. It might seem odd to think such thoughts in the present connection, since the paintings in question are the Dutch and Flemish acquisitions of czars hell-bent on making Russia much less Russian and much more European. But the very abundance of treasures in the Hermitage, and the grandiosity of the structure itself, were born of an energy and appetite that, to Westerners, must seem shockingly out of control. Before glasnost, just about the only Russian word known to most foreigners was bolshoi—big. And the Hermitage, with its forty thousand drawings, 500,000 engravings, and eighty thousand paintings, is surely one of the big things on the planet.

Another feature of the Russian character that transpires through the present exhibition is an essential conservatism, verging upon sloth. Western visitors to the Soviet Union are often surprised by the local taste for those big black cars with fins that Americans were driving back in the Fifties. One is forcefully reminded of this stalwartness by the catalogue of the traveling Hermitage collection, written entirely by Soviet curators. To the newest batch of Western art critics and historians, trained to apply to everything the criterion of social and political relevance, this catalogue, in its attentiveness to issues of style, form, and provenance, must seem hopelessly reactionary. It would be hard to conceive of anyone more bored by issues of class conflict, surplus labor, and the dialectics of materialism than the curators of the Hermitage.

JG

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James Gardner

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The impressive collection of Old Masters that comes to us from the Hermitage in Leningrad, and that has now moved from New York’s Metropolitan Museum to the Art Institute of Chicago, inspires me to meditate briefly upon the soul of the Russian people. It might seem odd to think such thoughts in the present connection, since the paintings in question are the Dutch and Flemish acquisitions of czars hell-bent on making Russia much less Russian and much more European. But the very abundance of treasures in the Hermitage, and the grandiosity of the structure itself, were born of an energy and appetite that, to Westerners, must seem shockingly out of control. Before glasnost, just about the only Russian word known to most foreigners was bolshoi—big. And the Hermitage, with its forty thousand drawings, 500,000 engravings, and eighty thousand paintings, is surely one of the big things on the planet.

Another feature of the Russian character that transpires through the present exhibition is an essential conservatism, verging upon sloth. Western visitors to the Soviet Union are often surprised by the local taste for those big black cars with fins that Americans were driving back in the Fifties. One is forcefully reminded of this stalwartness by the catalogue of the traveling Hermitage collection, written entirely by Soviet curators. To the newest batch of Western art critics and historians, trained to apply to everything the criterion of social and political relevance, this catalogue, in its attentiveness to issues of style, form, and provenance, must seem hopelessly reactionary. It would be hard to conceive of anyone more bored by issues of class conflict, surplus labor, and the dialectics of materialism than the curators of the Hermitage.