On 22 February 2019, the General Staff building was the venue for the Hermitage’s sixth intellectual marathon, devoted this time to Piero della Francesca. The event focussed on classic art and the phenomenon of its present-day popularity.
The leaders in the discussion “Nostalgia for the classics. The museum boom” that opened the marathon were the museum’s director, Mikhail Piotrovsky, and Alexander Borovsky, the head of the Department of the Latest Tendencies at the Russian Museum. In the course of a lively exchange of opinions about museum problems in modern life, they touched on the topical issues of museum “bans and booms”, the role of design in the concept of an exhibition, tendencies towards the formation of a “society of spectacle”, the “public demand for scandals” and why exhibitions are needed at all.
The participants in the second discussion, “Piero della Francesca – a topically relevant artist”, were the art scholars Ivan Chechot, Alexei Larionov and Olesya Turkina. They asked themselves some important and complex questions: Wherein does Piero della Francesca’s modernity lie? Is he modern and “topically relevant only as a representative of the art of the beautiful, as the relevance of the beautiful is again on the agenda today”, or does he have another topical relevance? Ivan Chechot illustrated Piero della Francesca’s “modernity” with an interesting selection of visual images.
The third discussion proposed viewing the Renaissance painter’s work through the eyes of contemporary artists – Ivan Govorkov, Dmitry Gutov and Leonid Tskhe. The artists’ discussion was moderated by the art scholar Stanislav Savitsky. In the course of a lively and emotional exchange of observations on the role of classic art in present-day life and the significance of Piero della Francesca for contemporary art, the participants gave varying assessments of the great master from the Quattrocento’s. oeuvre. Dmitry Gutov pointed out what he sees as a very important aspect that distinguishes Piero from contemporary artists. Addressing the large audience, he said: “Do you really imagine that he worked with his mind on whether his art would endure? … What we have here is a laid-back artist who has turned his back on the hysteria of constantly pondering whether he will be taken into the future.”
The final discussion, about exhibitions, museum interventions and dialogues in the Hermitage setting, was between Liudmila Davydova, the Keeper of Classical Sculpture, the designer Andrew Shellutto and the critic Kira Dolinina.
Besides the intellectual discussions, in keeping with the established tradition those attending were offered artistic, musical and cinematic programmes: improvisations on a double bass by Vladimir Volkov, a performance by Irina Dubrova and the Retrouvé ensemble of period instruments and the lutenist Konstantin Shchenikov-Arkharov, a lecture by Natalia Efendieva on paintings in the films of Andrei Tarkovsky.
The spaces of the General Staff building admitted for the one evening project-interventions by contemporary artists that included Pavel Ignatiev’s complex and polysemantic installation MACROSTUDIES/Microstories – a sort of homage to Piero della Francesca, Vitaly Pushnitsky’s painting Expectation and Marina Koldobskaya’s performance action News… in the spirit of “art in progress”.
One of the unexpected events of the evening was an appearance by Boris Grebenshchikov, while its elegant conclusion was the already traditional reading from the Iliad by Liudmila Davydova. She stresses the importance of having “an unconditional dialogue” that illustrates “the eternity of the flow from one cultural space to another.” The marathon held in the General Staff on 22 February provided direct proof of that idea.
