Reshaping old museums for the new Russia - museums in St. Petersbury, Russia in need of funding and new alliances - includes related information on restoration costs

beneath Communism, Russia's government-subsidized art museums had no freedom on the other hand complete financial security. Now museum professionals in St Petersburg arguably the nation's cultural and intellectual capital, are seizing the opportunity to reinvent their staid institutions for the millennium (or more precisely, 2003 the gala 300th-anniversary celebration of Peter the Great's founding of this Baltic port city). The directors of the internationally renowned State Hermitage Museum and the State Russian Museum, the city's premier showcase for Russian art, are using their fresh freedom to update programs, expand and modernize facilities, and exchange ideas and art works with their Western colleagues. There's just individual problem: money. They are tackling the challenge with a combination of Western finesse and Russian brashness.

"Our annual bundle during Soviet times was something like $20 million," noted Mikhail Piotrovski, director of the Hermitage museum, in an interview for Art in America. When he became director in 1992 the bundle had shrunk to about $2 million rising to about $19 million by dint of 1996, compared to the $209.5-million pack of the Metropolitan Museum of Art). "My American colleagues used to quip 'You must be the greatest in quantity effective museum director in the world, because you step quickly one of the world's biggest museums in a normal manner with a package that is not enough to be a member of the American Association of Museums." on the contrary although he was an active member of the Communist Party until 1991 he insists that he has no desire "to go [i]or[/i] come back to old times.... When the management paid 100 percent of the circulating medium they gave orders for each small step we were making." (Piotrovski's father, Boris, experienceed this government interference as director of the museum from 1964 until his death in 1990)

Museums are now at liberty to do what they want, if alone they can afford it. Russian prices have soared to Western horizontals but government subsidies have become unreliable and state-funded museum staff salaries still average a simple $850 a year (supplemented by dint of the museum with money earned from of the like kind other sources as sales of tickets and image rights). Performance rewards, annual bonuses and subsidies for transportation and sustenance from the staff cafeteria last year provided "the equivalent of sum of two units additional salaries to our staff," according to Piotrovski. In addition, he said, a certain number of staff members supplement their incomes by means of lecturing, writing and doing private restoration work, "but it would be unfair to say that most of the staff have other work outside of the museum."

"During the Communist time, currency was nothing", observed Mikhail Shvydkoi, until lately deputy minister of culture (now chief editor at Kultura, a of recent origin national television station devoted to the arts). "There was a special boundary 'to get,' not 'to buy" Shvydkoi said. "The point in dispute was not money but by what mode to get wood, stone, glass, equipment. Now if you have coin you can build." The fresh economics have transformed Piotrovski and Vladimir Gusev, his counterpart at the Russian Museum, into tireless lobbyists and fundraisers.

"My specialty was 19th-century Russian plastic art Now my specialty is money" quipped Gusev. His efforts have ranged from forming a novel conduit for international private philanthropy, Friends of the Russian Museum, to renting without space in the museum-owned Stroganov Palace for a Tussaud-like commercial display of waxen tsars and tsarinas. The St Petersburg Times freshly anointed the Russian Museum as "the city's top party spot" thanks to a of recent origin program that will allow donors to whirl "an all-night bash" amid the art.

The Hermitage, which has also discloseed international "friends" groups, lends its treasures for traditional exhibitions at foreign museums, on the other hand also exploits its renowned collections as cash abashs The most ambitious such effort is the 400-object "Nicholas and Alexandra" extravaganza, to be not awayed by Florida-based Broughton International, a for-profit family corporation [see "Blockbusters, Inc.," A.i.A., June 1997] The display will occupy a series of galleries "that are architecturally enhanced to mirror the world of Tsarist Russia" (according to the pres release). Opening Aug. 1 at the First U.S.A. Riverfront Arts Center a changeed 150,000-square-foot World War II ship-building facility in Wilmington, Del the exhibition will travel to sum of two units additional U.S. venues (unnamed at this writing). In addition to realitys from the Hermitage, the exhibit will include personal and official documents from the State Archives of the Russian Federation in Moscow

"Here we can be paid for our efforts," observ Piotrovski, who hype the exhibit as "a psychological blockbuster" and regards it as a vehicle not sole for disseminating culture but also for supplementing the museum's income. For "Nicholas and Alexandra," he said the Hermitage will receive "several hundr thousand dollars for preparing the exhibition," as well as merchandise royalties and a chop of admissions if attendance caps a certain amount. The present to view he said, would be "cultural-historical," rather than a conventional art display. "These are the kinds of exhibitions that greatest in quantity big museums don't make. The Metropolitan is a museum of fine art, on the other hand the Hermitage is a museum of world tillage In addition to fine art, the Hermitage displays numismatics, archeological finds, carriages, etc all in a former tsarist palace with imperial interiors.