The director of the St. Petersburg Hermitage, Mikhail Piotrovsky, who manages almost exclusively European art collections, told the official “Russian newspaper” (Rossiyskaja gaseta) that he so explicitly backed his country’s war of aggression that it seemed as if he wanted his wide-ranging and long-standing Demonstratively tearing off connections to western museums.
His country is undergoing major global transformations, it is changing world history, and he stands by him in that, said Piotrovsky, who compared Russia's confrontation with the West to a "Scythian war," in which Russia, which had been withdrawing up to that point, had been annexed by Crimea in 2014 attack passed.
War means bloodshed and murder on the one hand, but also self-assertion by people and nations, according to the 77-year-old museum director, who, throwing Christian moral inhibitions overboard, laughingly described himself as a militarist.
With the interview, which provoked horror in art circles and comments of disgust on social media, Piotrovsky bid farewell to his long-cultivated image of a free-spirited, cosmopolitan functionary.
It came out at a time when the Hermitage, from which its Amsterdam branch has renounced because of the Ukraine war, had announced a one-year moratorium on exhibitions in the West.
In an adventurous turn, Piotrowskij now accuses Europe of canceling culture against Russian classics such as Tchaikovsky, but does not justify this with the Ukraine war, but with the ideology of postcolonialism, which invaded the West and turned it into a kind of new Soviet Union that toppled monuments.
Exhibitions as a quasi-military "special operation"
Piotrowskij doesn't say a word about the countless exhibitions, concerts, and theater performances that the authorities in Russia canceled because the artists involved had criticized the war, or about bans on publicly quoting statements by classics like Tolstoy against the war.
In the spirit of system confrontation, he describes the recent exhibition successes of his house in Europe as a quasi-military "special operation" - the official word for the Ukraine war - in the field of culture.
He emphasizes that the presentation of Rembrandt or Matisse from the Hermitage in the West is about exporting one's own culture - regardless of whether the paintings were once bought in Europe or, as in the case of the Moscow private collectors Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov, by the Bolsheviks had been expropriated.
Piotrovsky explains that Russia belongs to Europe, the criterion being the ancient monuments found on Russian soil on the Black Sea coast.
A European country like Norway cannot show that.
Piotrovsky's hurray-patriotic appearance is likely to be related to the forthcoming appointment to the post of director of the Hermitage and his desire to be entrusted with the office of honorary president.
Apparently that's the price.