russian museum expands horizons
By Larisa Doctorow
Special to The St. Petersburg Times
With unparalleled expansion during the past 15 years, the State Russian Museum is alone among St. Petersburg cultural institutions in challenging the scale of the State Hermitage Museum. Since 1988, when Vladimir Gusev became its director, the museum has expanded to take in four palaces around the city: the Mikhailovsky Palace, the Engineers' Castle, the Stroganov Palace and the Marble Palace. As Gusev joked in a recent interview: "The Hermitage is begining to feel uneasy about our expansion." Under his directorship the museum is also changing its image. Extensive renovation work has been performed on all four properties. The museum has also learned to survive in a market economy and it is even learning to make money. "We make money on our publishing activity, fundraising, catering which we plan to widen, different forms of paid service, concerts and festivals," Gusev said. "The Club of Friends of the Russian Museum also helps us." However, Gusev continues, "Mostly our money comes from the federal budget. We need enormous sums for restoration work. If it were not for that, we would be able to cover [only] 40 percent of our costs." Surprisingly, money gleaned from admission charges is not an important element of the museum's funding, according to Gusev. Asked, then, to justify continued "dual pricing," where non-Russian's are charged much higher admission prices than Russians, Gusev said: "This is not a normal situation, I agree. And this will disappear sooner or later. But now it should be accepted as a big reduction for Russians who cannot pay the normal price of about $5 or $6." The concert halls now incorporated in the museum complex enable it to hold concert series and music festivals. The Russian Museum is involved in running the annual Arts Square Winter Festival and also hosts concerts in the Music in St. Petersburg Palaces festival. Opening the White-Gothic hall and the Winter Garden in the Marble Palace has created new possibilities for having regular concert and theater programs in the palace. The museum organized its first open-air concert in front of the Mikhailovsky (Engineers') Castle last June, featuring the Moscow Symphony Orchestra. But Gusev said that, with restoration on the new properties nearing completion, there are no plans to annex any more palaces. "I assure you that the geographic expansion of the Russian Museum is over. In the last 10 years, our space has grown over three times as big. It is very nice to get new palaces, but it is difficult to restore and find uses for them. Before we had three buildings [in the original Mikhailovsky complex on Ploshchad Isskutsv], now there are 12 [altogether]. Before, we had 30,000 square meters. Now we have close to 100,000 square meters. Plus the Mikhailovsky and Summer Gardens and the green territory around the Engineers' Castle. The works will continue. The government has approved a program of restoration that goes up to 2008." The museum's expansion has enabled an overarching artistic mission to emerge in the last few years. The number of exhibitions the Russian Museum stages each year in Russia and abroad has grown enormously. "Before, we used to put on 12 exhibitions a year. Now it is 50 to 60, and if you include exhibitions abroad then 60 to 70 annually," Gusev said. "It is not our desire to stage as many shows as possible without thinking about the quality. We have a unique collection that we try to show. It is four times bigger than the Tretyakov Gallery collection [in Moscow]. We now try to create a program of exhibitions in such a way that a whole generation will see only new things without repetition. In our collection we have all the names and all the trends of Russian art during its 1,000 years of development." Shows of recent years have both been big and prestigious - like "Russian Impressionism" or "Portrait of the Century" - and small and intimate, like the recent "Portrait of an Artist's Wife." Contemporary St. Petersburg artists also get fair treatment from the museum. Exhibitions such as that devoted to Alexandre Agabekov in 2001 are a regular event in the halls of the museum. So are retrospectives of artists in Russia who have recently passed away. The enormous retrospective of Muscovite Mikhail Schwarzman who died in 1997, is a case in point. "We have reinstated the department of contemporary trends which existed in the museum in the 1920s," Gusev said. "The Marble Palace is the place where we exhibit modern things and for this we often get reprimanded. [But] the Russian Museum traditionally worked with contemporary artists." Gusev said the direction in which the museum is headed follows Western practices in museum policy. "When I became the director of the Russian Museum, the Rockfeller Foundation in New York paid for my two study trips to the United States, and I spent time in New York in the Metropolitan Museum and in Washington at the National Gallery gathering information on how they function. What I learned there I am putting into practice here." But Gusev said that, unlike the Hermitage, which set up a branch in Somerset House in London in 2001 - a first for a Russian museum - the Russian Museum has no plans to expand beyond the borders of its homeland. "We regularly mount exhibitions abroad, but we do not plan to open outlets of the Russian Museum. Russian art is not well known abroad, because it was isolated from the rest of the world for so long. To attract money and attention for Aivazovsky or Maliavin is more difficult there than here. We try to find Russian sponsors," said Gusev. "Our motto is 'Russian business for the Russian Museum.'"
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