Hermitage

   The State Hermitage is a museum of visual art and culture located in St. Petersburg. It is one of the largest and oldest museums in the world (it was founded in 1764 by Catherine the Great) and has been open to the public since 1852. The museum’s collections comprise over 3 million items, including the largest collection of paintings in the world; however, like other museums, only a small collection of items is on permanent display. The Hermitage displays Egyptian and Classical antiquities, prehistoric art, and Western and Oriental art up to the 20th century. The museum does not specialize in Russian art or contemporary art. The museum occupies a number of historic buildings in St. Petersburg, with the Winter Palace at the heart of the museum complex; it also operates a number of exhibition centers abroad. These include Somerset House in London, the Hermitage Center in Amsterdam, and the Guggenheim Hermitage Museum in Las Vegas. Mikhail Piotrovsky has been the director of the museum since 1991; he replaced his father, Boris Piotrovsky, who was the director of the Hermitage from 1964 until 1990. In the 1990s, the museum was at the center of several restitution scandals. It emerged that the museum possessed a number of important works of art that were stolen from German private collections during World War II. In 2006, the museum came under scrutiny after it announced that over 200 items, valued at over 150 million rubles, had been stolen from its store. Though most of these items have been recovered, the reputation of the museum and its administration was severely tarnished.

   The Hermitage was central to the celebrations of the 300th anniversary of St. Petersburg in 2003. The museum featured as a setting and also as a character in Aleksandr Sokurov’s film Russian Ark (2003): the director portrayed the Hermitage as a vessel that carries Russian cultural tradition throughout centuries and changes of the political regime.