The Hermitage - Western European Painting of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries [antikvár]

THE HERMITAGE, one of the world's biggest treasuries of Western European art, already had a wide reputat.ion outside Russia last century. It was renowned mainly for its collection of sixteenth to eighteenth century paintings, baving very few nineteenth century works; these for the most part were amassed in the Museum after the October Revolution. From that time the Hermitage alsó began to acquire paintings by foreign artists of the twentieth century. The over one hundred works reproduced in the album are only a small portion of the Museum's collection. While French art of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (the Barbizon school, Impressionism and Post-Impressionism) is quite well represented in the Hermitage picture gallery, the album includes only two of the eight Corots, two out of five Degas pastels, only half of the works by Monet, Renoir and Cézanne, and only three out of the fifteen Hermitage Gauguins. Picasso and Matisse are each represented by six canvases, though the Museum has 33 Picassos and 37 Matisses. As for Bonnard, Denis, Derain, Vlaminck, Marquet and Van Dongen, a great number of whose works are found in the Hermitage, the selection of their pictures in this edition had to be limited to just two or three for each artist. A place of primary importance in the Hermitage collection of paintings is occupied by the French masters. The majority of their works come from the priváté collections of three art connoisseurs, N. Kushelev-Bezborodko, S. Shchukin and I. Morozov, who were mainly interested in French painting, the leading school in European nineteenth century art. Thanks to the constant contacts between Paris and St. Petersburg the Hermitage collection came to reflect, more or less promptly, the main events in the world of art. During this period painters in other countries alsó produced much that was new and noteworthy. It w^ould be impossible, while considering the development of art in Europe as a whole, to overlook the Germán and English Romanticism of the early nineteenth century, or the Germán Realism of the middle and second half of the century. Though this part of the Hermitage collection is not very rich, it contains somé truly remarkable canvases: for example, not every museum can boast nine first-class paintings by Caspar Dávid Friedrich. Another feature of the collection is that it includes works not only by masters of, in our opinion, unquestionable stature, but alsó others by painters who are now all but forgottén, and who in their own time enjoyed great fame. Side by side with five canvases by Neoclassical and Romantic painters (Dávid, Prud'hon, and Delacroix) it is interesting today to see pictures by representatives of the art of the Salons close to these schools (Meissonnier and Gouture), who have been neglected by art historians for many years, though certain important aspects of nineteenth century aesthetics were reflected in their work. These canvases demonstrate the liigh level of academic art challenged by avant-garde painters whose pictures were in many cases barred from official exhibitions. Unfortunately, the Hermitage collection has only one and a comparatively laté canvas by Dávid, the most important figure in European art at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Sappho and Phaon is an idyllic composition, painted during the period when Francé was at the height of its power, and Dávid, the Emperor's Court Painter, preserved his position