Hermitage again

I really regret not having brought my old black and white camera with me. There are so many interesting things to take pictures of, but which the little digital camera does not do full justice to. I miss having the control that I have with my old Olympus. I guess it’s good not having to deal with rolls of film all the time and going through security with them, lugging around a heavier camera, worrying about it being stolen or breaking… but still. Maybe if I come back sometime I’ll bring it, although I won’t necessarily be able to go to all the same amazing places I’ve been to thus far. Well enough regrets.

Saturday (of last week, I haven't posted for a while, so this is an insert so you're not horribly confused) I met up with Alisa and we went to the Hermitage. She wanted to see late 19th early 20th century European painting, and I didn’t really care what I saw—the whole place is amazing.

The picture is of the General Staff building that shares Dvortsovaya Square with the Hermitage. The arches are pretty cool.



This is in the center of the square and an easy meeting up place.



We quickly got lost in the halls, despite having a map of the rooms (in French, which neither of us really know, but could make out with the combination of our language forces). The building is pretty confusing, and you can sometimes only get to certain halls by roundabout ways, where you have to change buildings by means of random and inconveniently placed staircases. It was neat to simply walk through the rooms and up the massive main staircase that leads to the second floor. I had watched Russian Ark (a Russian film made a few years ago, shot all in one take—quite a feat), whose footage is all within the Hermitage, tracings its history; so it was neat to “revisit” rooms I had seen in the film and re-imagine them in their historical periods. Having the film in mind and an image of what the place once looked like before it became strictly a museum really enlivened the experience for me, as lame as it sounds.

This is part of the main staircase.



So we randomly saw some Da Vinci’s, lots of sculpture, Norwegian woodworking, Flemish paintings, lots of Italian stuff, the St George room (basically the throne room), the room where the Last Provisional Government met before getting the boot, and there’s too much to say. The place is too big and overwhelming. You can only absorb so much as you walk around lost in the labyrinth of rooms, which are sometimes more beautiful than the art hanging on their walls. I’ve always had the slightly uncultured penchant for architecture and sculpture (when in person), rather than for paintings. Maybe that has something to do with my having been a dancer and being drawn to three-dimensional beauty and physical line and what not. So there are lots of pictures of random rooms and sculptures—sorry.





This was pretty decadent:



So anyway, we eventually made our way up to the impressionists and neoimpressionists and postimpressionists and cubists, etc., etc. We tried not to look at the Rembrandt’s since we’re having the “best Rembrandt scholar in the world” talk about him to us in a few weeks (at least that’s what Golstein said, it’s been great having all these Russian Professors with us, who have tons of connections with people in this city, allowing us to hear and see amazing things we normally wouldn’t).

A Rodin:



Russia has an enormous collection of great European painting (which one maybe wouldn’t expect), mostly because a few collectors in Russia began collecting a lot of the more modernist painters before Europeans did. Russians were really into Matisse, so there were a lot of those. Also lots of Gauguin’s, a few Van Gogh’s, Monet’s, Cezanne’s, lots of Picasso’s, Kandinsky’s, and many more. The rooms these were in were far less beautiful, so it was easier to pay attention to the paintings and not their decadent surroundings. But I won’t bore you with my thoughts on art right now, I’ve already done that enough with icons. Haha.

You can kind of see Tania's reflection in there:



Alisa and I ran into Lydia and Tania there, so we got lunch afterwards. We then got a call from Prof Golstein and met up with him to get tickets to a few ballets we wanted to see. Then was home for a nap, since I was going out in the evening with my host parents to a concert and other adventures. But that will be covered in another post since this one is long enough already.