On 4 March 2021, the final session of the conference "Jewellery Art and Material Culture" was held at the State Hermitage.
That day of the conference was given over to discussion of the legacy of the House of Fabergé and dedicated to the memory of Marina Lopato (1942–2020), one of the foremost researchers into Carl Fabergé’s oeuvre. The session was opened by Mikhail Piotrovsky, General Director of the State Hermitage.
We are publishing the complete text of the Mikhail Piotrovsky’s speech.
The Story Continues
The Hermitage is continuing to fulfill the programme of the ‘Fabergé’ exhibition as outlined in the introduction to the catalogue. The essay by A.N. Ivanov justifies the attribution to Fabergé of items from the "new collections" shown in the exhibition; I.K. Malkiel's essay covers the experience and methods of studying jewellery in the Hermitage and applies them to the same objects. I should emphasize – we are talking of scientific research here, not "verification" or "expertise".
The programme, as stated in the catalogue, was planned to include scientific meetings. A Hermitage commentary has been published several times, prompted by the great public interest. We were expecting a lot of interest (see Introduction) but we hoped for an intelligent discussion with comparisons being drawn between the new pieces and well known items in other collections. However, the exhibition has been used as a pretext for a typical attack on the Hermitage’s status as a stronghold of academic study. A significant number of commentators understood the boorish nature of the attack and the presentation of an argument that had nothing to do with art. Others loudly joined the argument. The Hermitage’s calm continuation of its academic policy has revealed the nuances of interest and advantage, around which news is made.
The goal of the Hermitage was not just to display beautiful pieces but to draw attention to Fabergé as a cultural and historical phenomenon. This is how the late Marina Nikolaevna Lopato, who created this exhibition, formulated her task and the reason we dedicate this seminar to her memory. The story of the House of Fabergé is about brand and style, about fashion and about aggressive marketing, both before and after the Russian revolution. The story involves different workshops joining together, replication, imitation, copies and forgeries. The opinions of participants in trade disputes are not seen by us as attacks but as another subject for research.
Part of the scientific solution of the problems is a careful study of the background of each object which would be difficult without its presence in an exhibition. This study is constructed from different lines of research:
The first is technical, a study which allows the determination of the time at which the different parts and materials were made ‒ from gold to glue ‒ the presence of alterations and additions, the introduction of new elements. This study is not definitive, but provides the only solid basis for talking about an attribution. It is work in progresses.
The second line is documents. There are usually many of them, but the main problem is to be sure that they refer to this particular thing. Here, the presence of a continuous chain of hand-to-hand transmission ‒ provenance ‒ plays a decisive role. We are currently waiting for additional materials.
The third line is art history. For this the context of the exhibition is especially important. In the setting of the imperial palace, comparison between exhibits leads to a consensus of opinions being developed ‒ or not. To stimulate this process, we decided to add a showcase with scientifically proven fakes in "House of Fabergé" style to the exhibition and show a series of objects from the Hermitage collection that raise certain doubts. The Hermitage collects and studies everything. This is the museum’s role.
Final decisions on the history of applied art objects are rare, in part because the objects change hands so often and this can be "exploited". It is the attribution process, which is so important a part of museum studies. There are many difficulties in this process, attributions, even when they concern Rembrandt or Picasso, tend to "float".
A brilliant example of how this happens was presented in I.K. Malkiel's report on the experience of his laboratory. Studies have shown that the lid of a famous masterpiece, a bowl that was a gift of Nadir Shah, ruler of Iran from 1736 to 1747, was made using European technology. It is possible that it was made by the hands of Carl Fabergé himself.
Another good example is the restoration of the Roman bronze statue of Victoria Calvatone. It turned out that the image reproduced in textbooks and widely disseminated as a masterpiece of Roman bronze sculpture, does not correspond to its original appearance. XIXth century restorers had created about two-thirds of the sculpture, including the wings that never existed. This story came up in the context of the removal of museum valuables from Germany after the war. It is no less interesting for the history of culture than for the sculpture itself. Our restorers did not try to restore it to its original state after excavation, but left it in the XIXth century version, slightly lightening the wings.
In today's world, attribution issues have to be discussed very carefully, as they are fraught with judicial consequences. The Hermitage is, nevertheless, always open to the discussion of sensitive issues. We held a special symposium on the controversial posthumous bronzes of Degas, participated in exhibitions and discussions about Leonardo's “Madonna Litta”, and around numerous “new” Rubens works. A readiness for non-standard discussions is our special style, witness such exhibitions as Peter the Great and Charles XII, Mannerheim, Eisenstein and the storming of the Winter Palace, Jan Fabre, the Chapman Brothers, the Hermitage Buddha….. We always welcome discussion, but it must be intelligent. The actual conversations around the Hermitage exhibitions show what is an intelligent conversation about art and what is not. Both have taken place around the present Fabergé exhibition.
The Hermitage has had a long history of studying and exhibiting the House of Fabergé. I have taken the decision to hold the first exhibition in 1993 and followed up with a series of exhibitions of private collections, including the ‘Link of the Times’ collection, and by setting up Fabergé memorial rooms in the Hermitage, then holding this second exhibitions in the imperial palace. I am acquainted with all the serious Fabergé scholars and am on the board of the Fabergé Museum in St. Petersburg with which the Hermitage has a very good working relationship. I think that the items selected for this exhibition were worthy to be shown in it and that it has been a worthwhile step in the study of jewellery as a cultural phenomenon.
We are taking it further, demonstrating among other things, how to discuss attribution issues. We are looking at every aspect of the problem from a scientific point of view and demonstrating how to explore rigorously the history of an object and the context in which it has survived. This is the Hermitage tradition. We intend to publish serious scientific descriptions of objects which have not been treated in sufficient detail in previous exhibitions – of which there were many.
So far, we can say that many examples were made of the figure of the soldier-emperor and the study needs to make direct comparisons with other examples. The egg with its chicken seems to contain elements of different dates. Many repetitions of this piece are known and they need to be compared. Our publication will include papers from the owners of the objects. We will cover the Hermitage technical analysis, the provenance, the current owners and justification for an attribution to Fabergé.
Our work continues and I hope that we will hear a lot of new information on this subject today.
