Pushkin House is pleased to present the screening of a film documenting the setting up and display of a great exhibition in the State Hermitage Museum - "The Winter Palace and the Hermitage in 1917: History was made here". It opened on 25 October 2017, in the Nicholas Hall of the Winter Palace.
The exhibition included over 350 items drawn from the Hermitage’s own collection, the State Archive of Russian Federation and other St Petersburg museums. A special curiosity was the Portrait of Nicholas II with a portrait of Lenin on the back of it, borrowed from school № 206 of the Central district of St. Petersburg.
The documentary is presented by Prof Mikhail Piotrovsky, Director of the Hermitage Museum, and shows the ambitious design and setting up of the show. In the film we hear from Viyacheslav Fedorov, head of the Russian Department and curator of the exhibition, and his co-curator, Elena Solomakha, head of Archives.
The aim of this film was to enable art lovers around the world to share in the experience and see the great baroque Palace where it all happened, now home to the museum. There is a sequence showing the delivery of Lenin's car to an internal courtyard. The film concludes with Prof Piotrovsky winding up the clock in the White Dining Room; the mantle clock hands had been stopped at 02.10 on 26 October 1917, the date and time when the Provisional Government were arrested.'Time must be allowed to run on. The Revolution is now history', Piotrovsky said, as he wound it up.
In English.
Followed by Q&A with Geraldine Norman, director of the Hermitage Foundation UK and the film’s Associate Producer.
Geraldine worked for 25 years at the Times, then for 8 years at The Independent reporting on the art market.
In 1993 she visited the Hermitage for the first time and in 1995 she began work on her book, ‘The Hermitage: The Biography of a Great Museum’, recently re-issued. In 2000 she was appointed by a consortium of investors, led by Lord Rothschild, to set up the 'Hermitage Rooms at Somerset House'. She helped launch the 'Hermitage Magazine' in 2003 and was its first editor. In the same year she founded the 'UK Friends of the Hermitage' whose name was changed in 2011 to the 'Hermitage Foundation UK' and continues as its Director.