Topic: Museums
The State Hermitage (former Winter Palace) is fully engaged in fitting out 800 rooms of the General Staff Building to welcome be the new home for art from the turn of the 19th century onwards, with a full opening scheduled for 2014. Mark Hudson of The Telegraph reported from St. Petersburg on this major new development for the museum/
“As an extension to the Hermitage Museum, the General Staff Building is far more than a mere annex. Viewed across the majestic sweep of Palace Square, the curving Neo-classical facade of this vast early-19th-century office complex already feels like a challenge to the Baroque opulence of the parent institution opposite,” Hudson writes. “And that’s before you’re aware that its 800 rooms are about to be filled with art, much of which has been deemed revolutionary.”
“Devoted to art from 1800 onwards, the new wing will bring the story told in the old Hermitage — which houses the largest collection of paintings in the world — bracingly up to date. On paper at least it has the capacity to be a truly epoch-defining museum, the way the Musée d’Orsay was in the Eighties and Tate Modern in the 2000s,” Hudson says. “And it will, it is hoped, make Russia appear central to the story of modern art in a way it never quite has before — despite the importance of much that has taken place here.”
© Russkiy Mir. 20 November, 2012
Updated: Tuesday, 20 November 2012 6:53 AM EST
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