The STaTe hermiTage muSeum annual reporT

temporary exhIbItIons
a glaSS fanTaSy. ancienT glaSS
from The hermiTage collecTion
State Hermitage Museum
12 October 2010 – 16 January 2011
This was the first time the Hermitage staged an exhibition
devoted entirely to glassmaking in the ancient period,
which gives some idea of the richness and variety of the museum’s
collection of this type of art. It included pieces that
had come from the private collections of the Shuvalovs,
the Stroganovs, Alexander Bobrinsky and other collectors,
as well as from the Baron Stieglitz Central Higher School
of Technical Drawing and the former Russian Archaeological
Institute in Constantinople. Substantial additions to
the Hermitage collection were acquired from the Roman
collector of antiquities Giuseppe Pizzati and the Parisian
antique dealer M. Sivadjan. In Russia the most significant
purchases were made in the last quarter of the 19th century
from such collectors as Yu. Lemme and A. Novikov.
An important part of the display consisted of objects found
over a period of decades during excavations of the ancient
Greek city-colonies on the Northern Black Sea coast (Pantikapaion,
Nymphea, Chersonesos and Olbia).
The five sections of the exhibition gave visitors the opportunity
to learn about all the main techniques of glassmaking
used by ancient masters. The first section, which
included the earliest exhibits (5th – 4th centuries B.C.),
featured miniature bottles for fragrances and various
pendant-amulets of multicoloured transparent glass of the
type that had been made in Mesopotamia and Egypt as
early as the 2nd millennium B.C. The so-called “core” technique
in which these pieces were made was borrowed from
the Ancient East.
The second section comprised glass vessels cast in moulds
and transformed into exquisite works of art by polishing,
carving and ornamental painting. Here visitors were able
to see a unique masterpiece – a cup made in Alexandria
(Egypt) at the turn of the 3rd and 2nd centuries B.C., with
a tracery ornament of gold foil contained within two layers
of clear glass. A separate showcase featured rings with glass
insets and phalerae (Roman military decorations).
The mosaic technique, which requires particular virtuosity
and whose heyday was between the 1st century B.C. and
the 1st century A.D., is represented in the Hermitage collection
by some superb exhibits. In terms of the richness of
their colour range the cups, bottles and necklaces are no
inferior to pieces of agate and jasper, even surpassing them
in elegance on account of the use of gold foil.
The two most comprehensive sections of the exhibition reflected
the most important stage in the development of ancient
glassmaking, which began in the mid-1st century B.C.
with the invention of the glassblowing tube. It was then
that glass took on its special qualities – delicateness and
transparency. In addition, masters already had the ability
to give it every imaginable colour, from delicate light
blues and greens to garnet-red, bright blue, cold and warm
shades of green and amber-yellow. The display included
fascinating examples of the work of Syrian masters, who
specialized in blowing glass into a mould, a negative multipiece
mould of clay or stone. This technique made it possible
to create items with relief decoration and inscriptions.
The cups with depictions of gods or wishes for victory were
of particular interest.
The last section of the exhibition included, besides glass
items, ceramic vessels and pieces of bronze and silver that
were similar to glass in the forms and methods used in
their production. This juxtaposition gave the opportunity,
on the one hand, to see common aesthetic trends in Roman
applied art and, on the other hand, to appreciate the
different effects that were achieved with the use of similar
forms in pieces of transparent glass that let in rays of light
and those made of clay or metal.
The exhibition also gave an idea of utilitarian items – from
toilet requisites and tableware to funeral urns, which have
survived for thousands of years despite the fragility of the
material.
The project was dedicated to the memory of Nina Kunina,
a remarkable academic archaeologist, a great specialist on
the history of ancient glassmaking and curator of the State
Hermitage collection of ancient glass.
By Nadejda Jijina and Yelena Khodza
J SociologiSTS on The exhiBiTionS
The puBlic aT The paBlo picaSSo
exhiBiTion Today
The exhibition of the most famous of twentieth-century
artists from the Musée National Picasso, Paris, has been
a great success with the public. It was attended by around
800,000 people, of whom 70% lived in St. Petersburg and
30% came from other cities (nearly a third from Moscow).
It is worth noting that not only regular museum-goers,
but even those residents of St. Petersburg who had rarely
or never been to the Hermitage before, decided to visit
this exhibition. A considerable number of repeat visits
were also recorded.
In the break-up of the public, the prevalent share (89%)
belonged to those with higher education (completed or
not), mostly in the areas of arts (26%), humanities (26%),
and exact sciences and technologies (24%). There were
many young visitors (47%), half of them students, but this
percentage was not as high as that for other exhibitions
of twentieth-century art. A greater part of the public were
older visitors with a long and complex history of appreciating
Picasso’s art, those who remembered previous exhibitions
and unending arguments around the artist.
temporary exhIbItIons
The great majority of visitors had come specially for the
exhibition; only 8% had seen it by chance. The study uncovered
a multi-level structure of reasons behind the visit:
from simple curiosity and attraction of Picasso’s name to
the interest (including professional interest) in the collection
of the Paris museum and the artist’s work.
The main body of the visitors (75%) had a high opinion
of the exhibition as a whole, which, together with the attendance
numbers, provides evidence of its unqualified
success. Among the descriptions used to convey the visitors’
impressions, the most prevalent were: “emotional”,
“expressive”, “absorbing”, “original”, “unexpected”, “intellectual”,
“provoking”, “ironic”, and “playful”.
The vast panorama of Picasso’s art uncovered by the exhibition
opened a wide field for individual artistic preferences:
the answers to the question “Which works did you like best?”
offer a wide range of options. A considerable part of the list
consisted of both well-known and frequently reproduced
pieces and the works which had never been on display in
Russia before. It is interesting that the list of the best-liked
includes such works as Portrait of Olga in an Armchair, La Celestina,
Paul as Harlequin, as well as The Kiss (1925), Cat Catching
a Bird, The Bathers series, Figures on a Beach – those which
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