FROM RUSSIA! WITH LOVE

The Guggenheim Museum is hosting Russia!, a huge exhibition covering that country's art from the 13th Century to the present. I spent two full hours there Friday, learning a lot about Russia's art history, a subject with which I was rather unfamiliar.

Before that, though, we stopped for lunch with another couple at a different museum, the Neue Gallerie's Café Sabarsky. The museum shows German and Austrian art, and the restaurant features Viennese food. My sausage salad was quite good, and the Black Forest cake was excellent. The only thing that marred the meal was a busboy who seemed to have skipped taking a shower.

Then we had to go just a couple of quick blocks up Fifth Ave. to the Guggenheim. The exterior is being repaired, so the distinctive Frank Lloyd Wright-designed architecture is obscured by scaffolding. But they've done their best to make even the scaffolding is distinctive.

The lines for tickets were long, even the one for members--mostly because that was also the line for people with CityPasses. As the guests of members our friends were able to get in for $10 each, an $8 savings over the increased admission the Guggenheim is charging during the Russia! Exhibition. We then went and got Audioguides--a must for this tour. The captions by the artworks give only identification information, unlike the ones at the Metropolitan Museum. There are explanations on the walls for the various sections of the exhibition, but you'll get a lot more out of it with the Audioguide. At the membership desk we were told they were sold out, but we could check to see if any had been returned. Fortunately, a few had been.

After checking our coats we went up the ramp to the first level. We decided not to try to stay together--my wife and I frequently split up in exhibitions like this. She was an art history major, and often likes to look at some things much longer than I. This was actually our second visit to Russia!, so we were already at different points, but it was our friends' first time.

It turned out that the crowd (many speaking Russian themselves) was manageable, though. While I occasionally could not get a clear view of a painting, I would just go on to the next one, and within a few minutes I was able to go back and see what I missed.

During my first visit I was able to get a little past Peter the Great (the exhibition is pretty much chronological), but there was a lot more to see--there are over 250 works in it. I was not that interested in the very early ones. The iconostatis, a wall of painted images, was impressive for its size and grandeur and age, but for little else.

When Peter the Great (reign 1682-1725) opened up Russia to Western culture, things got more interesting. He started collecting Western paintings on his travels. But it was his granddaughter-in-law, Catherine the Great (reign 1762-1796), who really assembled a first-rate collection. It became the basis of her Hermitage (which Nicholas I made into a public museum in 1852).

The paintings they collected were interesting, but what was more important to me was the development of Russian artists during the period. In the mid-1700's Catherine the Great founded the Academy of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, following the French model. By 1782 Russian artists were turning out masterful portraits such as the one of Alexander Lanskoi--with the bust of Catherine the Great smiling down on him. It was really a joke, though. Lanskoi was one of her lovers, and the bust, which was exhibited by the Guggenheim right in front of the painting, actually has a much more serious expression.

It was Karl Briullov's portrait of Countess Samilova that really caught me eye. Briullov broke away from the St. Petersburg Academy, and finished his education in Rome. It was there he painted Samilova, another Russian emigrée, in about 1833. His ability to reproduce the fabrics of the clothing, curtains and rug was stunning. Even up close the dresses appeared almost to be photographs.

Other artists also found the rigidity of the Academy too confining, and by the second half of the nineteenth century a group of them had broken away. Known as the "Wanderers," they used art for social commentary. Moreover, they mounted traveling exhibitions, so the people of Russia outside of St. Petersburg and Moscow could see their art. Ilya Repin's Barge Haulers on the Volga may have been the most famous of the works they showed. It depicted the travails of a group of men, freed from serfdom, toiling as beasts of burden with strength and dignity--men whose labor was cheaper than the use of horses.

And then there was Ivan Kramskoy's 1883 Unknown Woman--who immediately reminded me of a dark Bernadette Peters. The photograph-like detail was stunning. But the painting was more controversial at the time because, though her name may have been unknown, her profession was not--she was a high-class prostitute of some sort, and therefore scandalous as the subject for fine art.

There were many other works that had me lingering for extended views. I remember two full-length statues less than a foot high. Not only were the statues great, but they were exhibited superbly--a spotlight put their shadows dramatically on the wall behind. Without seeing the statues you would think they were much larger.

I had anticipating seeing some of the great Impressionist and post-Impressionist paintings from the Hermitage, which has an excellent collection. I was rather disappointed--what they lent for this exhibition was far from the cream of the crop. One good Picasso, the rest very secondary works, and not many in total. The collection, and the one in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, were created from the personal collections of Moscow merchants Sergei Shchulkin and Ivan Morozov. Confiscated by the Soviets, the collections stayed hidden away in storage for decades, as they did not conform to the Soviets' view of art: Social Realism.

There was a whole annex roomful of the early Soviet art--some very propagandistic, a few moderately interesting, nothing terribly compelling.

It was there I ran out of time--I was still on level 5, with two more levels to go. I think I got a bit out of order chronologically. I'm pretty sure there are more pre-Soviet works in the main gallery which I didn't get to. Perhaps I'll go back to finish. It runs to the 11th.

We stopped in the little café on the ground floor for something to drink and some more conversation with our friends.

On the way out we saw a line of people stretching around the corner, waiting in the cold to get in--at 6:00pm on Fridays the Guggenheim starts its "Pay What You Wish" session. But it was way before 6. My wife said that when she went out to do some errands a bit later, she saw the line stretched all the way to Madison Ave.! Clearly this is a very popular show.