Hermitage
▪ museum, Saint Petersburg, Russia
in full State Hermitage, Russian Gosudarstvenny Ermitazh
art museum in St. Petersburg founded in 1764 by Catherine the Great (Catherine II) as a court museum. It adjoined the Winter Palace and served as a private gallery for the art amassed by the empress. Under Nicholas I the Hermitage was reconstructed (1840–52), and it was opened to the public in 1852. Following the October Revolution of 1917, the imperial collections became public property. The museum is housed within five interconnected buildings, including the Winter Palace (1754–62) and the Small, Old, and New Hermitages.
The Hermitage has a rich collection of western European painting since the Middle Ages, including many masterpieces by Renaissance Italian and Baroque Dutch, Flemish, and French painters. Russian art is well represented. The Hermitage also has extensive holdings of Oriental art, especially noteworthy being its collection of the art of Central Asia.
Bakst, Léon
▪ Russian artist
original name Lev Samoylovich Rosenberg
born January 27 [February 8, New Style], 1866, St. Petersburg, Russia
died December 28, 1924, Paris, France
Russian artist who revolutionized theatrical design both in scenery and in costume.
Bakst attended the Imperial Academy of Arts at St. Petersburg but was expelled after painting a too-realistic “Pietà.” He returned to Russia after completing his studies in Paris and became a court painter. He was a cofounder with Sergey Diaghilev (Diaghilev, Sergey Pavlovich) of the journal Mir Iskusstva (“World of Art”) in 1899. Bakst began to design scenery in 1900, first at the Hermitage court theatre and then at the imperial theatres. In 1906 he went to Paris, where he began designing stage sets and costumes for Diaghilev's newly formed ballet company, the Ballets Russes. The first Diaghilev ballet for which he designed decor was Cléopâtre (1909), and he was chief set designer thereafter, working on the ballets Scheherazade and Carnaval (both 1910), Le Spectre de la rose and Narcisse (both 1911), L'Après-midi d'un faune and Daphnis et Chloé (both 1912), and Les Papillons (1914). Bakst achieved international fame with his sets and costumes, in which he combined bold designs and sumptuous colours with minutely refined details to convey an atmosphere of picturesque, exotic Orientalism. In 1919 Bakst settled permanently in Paris. His designs for a London production of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty
Kamerny Theatre
▪ Russian theatre
Russian Kamerny Teatr,
small, intimate theatre founded in Moscow in 1914 by the Russian director Aleksandr Tairov (Tairov, Aleksandr Yakovlevich) (q.v.) to support his experimental synthetic theatre that incorporated all theatrical arts—ballet, opera, music, mime, and drama—as an alternative to the naturalistic presentations of Konstantin Stanislavsky's realism at the Moscow Art Theatre. Instead of staging plays of everyday life, Tairov offered a theatre of heroics, in which the hero was to elevate the audience above the quotidian levels of existence. The Kamerny developed as an experimental theatre specializing in foreign plays. Among the many reforms associated with the Kamerny are the use of music, dance, gesture, and mime and the inclusion of chanted or intoned speech. In many of its choreographed movements, which made use of offbeat rhythms and atonal sound patterns, the Kamerny anticipated certain dance configurations now associated with modern dance. Enlarged to 1,210 seats in 1930 by Tairov, the Kamerny achieved its greatest recognition in 1934 in Moscow with its production of Optimisticheskaya tragediya (“The Optimistic Tragedy”), an acceptance of Soviet Socialist Realism, which he interspersed with his experimentation. Thereafter, the experimental nature of the theatre declined. The theatre closed in 1950 with Tairov's death.
Tatlin, Vladimir Yevgrafovich
▪ Russian sculptor
born Dec. 16 [Dec. 28, New Style], 1885, Kharkov, Russian Empire [now in Ukraine]
died May 31, 1953, Moscow, Russia, U.S.S.R.
Ukrainian painter, sculptor, and architect remembered for his visionary “Monument to the Third International” in Moscow, 1920.
Tatlin was educated at the Moscow Academy of Fine Arts, graduating in 1910. Late in 1913 he went to Paris, where he visited Pablo Picasso, whose reliefs in sheet iron, wood, and cardboard made a deep impression on him. Returning to Moscow, Tatlin created constructions that he called “painting reliefs,” which he exhibited at a Futurist exhibition held in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) in February 1915. He became the leader of a group of Moscow artists who tried to apply engineering techniques to the construction of sculpture. This developed into a movement known as Constructivism (q.v.).
This type of avant-garde art continued for a brief period after the Russian Revolution of 1917, during which time Tatlin created his most famous work—the “Monument to the Third International,” which was one of the first buildings conceived entirely in abstract terms. It was commissioned in 1919 by the department of fine arts and exhibited in the form of a model 22 feet (6.7 m) high at the exhibition of the VIII Congress of the Soviets in December 1920. A striking design, it consisted of a leaning spiral iron framework supporting a glass cylinder, a glass cone, and a glass cube, each of which could be rotated at different speeds. The monument's interior would have contained halls for lectures, conferences, and other activities. The monument was to be the world's tallest structure—more than 1,300 feet (396 m) tall—but it was never built owing to the Soviet government's disapproval of nonfigurative art.
About 1927 Tatlin began experimentation with a glider that resembled a giant insect. The glider, which he called Letatlin, never flew, but it engaged his interest throughout his later life. After 1933 he worked largely as a stage designer.
Tairov, Aleksandr Yakovlevich
▪ Russian director
original name Aleksandr Kornblit
born June 24, 1885, Romny, Russia
died Sept. 25, 1950, Moscow
founder and producer-director (1914–49) of the Kamerny (Kamerny Theatre) (Chamber) Theatre in Moscow, which, during the era of the Revolution, rivaled the Moscow Art Theatre in professional competence.
Tairov took up law briefly before settling on a theatrical career. He worked in several companies, including that of the Mobile Theatre of P.P. Gaydeburov. In 1913–14 he managed the shortlived Free Theatre Moscow prior to founding the Kamerny.
In the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution—at a time when the United States had broken off diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union—Tairov brought to Moscow audiences the work of the American playwright Eugene O'Neill, notably The Hairy Ape, All God's Chillun Got Wings, and Desire Under the Elms. Tairov's style was avant garde, particularly with respect to staging. He helped develop the functional “constructivist” setting, a bare, multilevel scaffolding devoid of traditional decorative scenery. His approach to theatre was stylized and antirealistic and was diametrically opposed to that of the followers of actor-director Konstantin Stanislavsky. He attached great importance to the actor's physical attributes; members of his company were rigorously trained in dancing, singing, acrobatics, and rhythmic precision of move ment. His 1934 production of Vsevolod Vishnevsky's The Optimistic Tragedy was regarded as a high point of Socialist Realist theatre. Under pressure from Stalinist authorities, however, Tairov was eventually compelled to work under the guidance of a state theatre committee. His wife, Alisa Koonen, starred in many of his productions.
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