The STaTe hermiTage muSeum annual reporT

Guests of the hermItaGe Guests of the hermItaGe
fifTh inTernaTional chariTaBle gala recepTion aT The winTer palace.
“old maSTerS – picaSSo – TwenTy-firST-cenTury arT.
The garden of conTemporary arT – feaST of The flowerS”
On 25 June 2010, the State Hermitage held the Fifth International
Charitable Gala Reception. The funds raised by
the reception will be used for the restoration of the eastern
wing of the General Staff building and the creation of the
Museum of Nineteenth, Twentieth-, and Twenty-First-Century
Art. The project will be completed to mark the 250th
anniversary of the Hermitage in 2014.
The co-chairs of the Honorary Committee of the International
Charitable Gala Reception are: Valentina Matviyenko,
Governor of St. Petersburg, Alexander Avdeyev,
Russian Federation Minister for Culture, Alexei Kudrin,
Russian Federation Finance Minister, Prince Dmitry Romanov,
Vladimir Potanin, head of Interros Company, and
Mikhail Piotrovsky, Director of the State Hermitage.
During the reception, the guests of the museum visited
the Garden of Contemporary Art in the Courtyard of the
Old Hermitage and saw the works of modern artists: Silence
by Petr Bely, winner of the 2009 Sergei Kurekhin Award,
Valkyrie by Darya Fursei, Return by the prominent St. Petersburg
sculptor Dmitry Kaminker, Head of Sobchak by Zurab
Tsereteli, President of the Russian Academy of Arts, and
works from the Birth Certificate series by Filipp Dontsov.
The guests of the Hermitage then visited the specially
opened exhibitions Picasso. From the Collection of the Picasso
Museum – Paris, and “The Wind in the Pines…” 5,000 Years
of Korean Art. Twenty-four works by Ilya and Emilia Kabakov
were displayed in the Hermitage Theatre foyer. These
serigraphy masterpieces form part of the collection gifted
by the artists to the State Hermitage.
CLASP by the widely acclaimed British monumental sculptor
Antony Gormley, made just a month before the reception,
was on display in the rooms of ancient art. The exhibition
was sponsored by JT International together with the
British Council and became an advance advert for a major
exhibition of Gormley’s works due to open in 2011.
The exhibition of one of the most prominent contemporary
artists Anish Kapoor was planned to coincide with
the gala reception. His work Stainless Steel can be seen
in the Great Courtyard of the Winter Palace until the end
of the summer. JT International and the British Council
were instrumental in organizing the exhibition.
The musical programme for the evening was highly original.
It included the staging of the play Accents; a performance
by Russia’s best break dance band Top-9, winner of many
international awards; a specially prepared choreographic
routine to the music of Mikhail Ivanov staged by Daniel Salimbayev,
winner of international competitions; jazz recitals
by Anton Rumiantsev (sax) and the brothers Andrei (double
bass) and Mikhail (piano) Ivanov, Distinguished Artists
of Russia, winners of European competitions and festivals.
The pavilion chosen for the formal dinner “Feast of the
Flowers” was decorated with watercolours by Alla Beliakova,
one of Arthur Fonvisin and Robert Falk’s favourite
students, and with floral compositions.
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