The Hermitage: The Biography of a Great Museum

The controlled and focused style that served Norman in her previous books, such as Biedermeier Paintings, works well in her compact history of the great St. Petersburg museum. From its origin as the fashionable pavilion where Catherine the Great hung her paintings, the Hermitage grew through the 19th century until it was nationalized by the state after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Norman, who is a former art market correspondent for the Independent, does not divorce the institution from the political culture around it. Nor could she, when Stalin, desperate for foreign currency, would sell several thousand items from the Hermitage in the late 1920s. Norman is suitably aghast that this has aroused more complaint than the dictator's execution or imprisonment of at least 50 staff members a few years later. To these situations and others--such as the siege of Leningrad during WWII, when the staff living in the Hermitage ate furniture glue to survive--this book proves itself an effective and articulate guide. Although Norman explains how the Soviet Union used the museum's archeological activities to bolster its Marxist ideology, she is less clear on the museum's future in Russia's current free market. Still, this study is an achievement because it remains so readable, despite the encyclopedic march of facts. Its nearly 60 illustrations reproduce works from the collection as well as photographs of the staff and the museum; an appendix contains brief biographies of the employees who were prosecuted in the Stalinist purges. (Apr.)