From Helsinki, in Haste
May 23, 2008
A hasty early breakfast at our B & B before our car arrived to take us back to Heathrow. We were happy to have made the choice to spend a couple of nights near the airport, in Windsor, partly because we had enjoyed Windsor so much, and partly just for the break in the journey. Heathrow provided us with the usual airport hassles, the check-in line, the security line, but turned out to be relatively tolerable, and the process left us enough time for a cup of coffee and the newspaper in the huge visitors’ lounge, lined—of course—with the usual array of absurdly expensive duty-free boutiques.
A thankfully dull Finnair flight from London to Helsinki. Lunch arrived in the form of meatballs swimming in gravy, with a few vegetables thrown into the pool. We took one look under the aluminum cover and declined. I read a couple of really interesting articles in the currant Atlantic monthly, including one truly fascinating piece about the Obama money machine—especially good reading since the way that money has flowed to his campaign has a lot to say about the wider issues of who he is as a candidate and what his candidacy has to say about his vision for the future. I ended up even more clear in my support.
We arrived in Helsinki with no further incident that the shrieking of several babies gifted with unusually powerful lungs, and made our way easily through immigration and customs and at the baggage claim hooked up with our friends with whom we had planned to share a ride into town. The Hotel Kamp turns out to be capacious, luxurious, and we were delighted to find that tipping “is not a custom” here in Finland. We had only a few minutes left to unpack before congregating with our tour group from the Fellows of Contemporary Art down in the hotel lobby, where we were greeted by out Helsinki tour guide, Iiro (rolled “r”, please), a man of great stature—physical, that is—and booming voice, who led us out to the elegant Senate square at the center of the city.
From Iiro, we learned perhaps more about the history of Finland than tired minds were able to absorb, but the square was quite beautiful in the late afternoon sunlight
and we enjoyed the opportunity to get a flavor of the city. A brief stop at the lovely state library, with its high, vaulted ceilings and quiet reading areas, then on for a brief tour through the increasingly chilly streets.
A brief respite on our return to the hotel, before drinks in the bar and dinner in the hotel restaurant. A convivial event, with the whole tour group seated at four tables. Much pouring of wine and merriment all around. Ellie chose the fish (pike—didn’t appeal to me) and I had a much too generous steak. Ate the whole thing. Certainly a lot better than airplane meatballs.
Helsinki (cont'd)
A poor night’s sleep for Ellie, who suffered what I suffered from the night before, and many of our party last night also: waking at two and finding it impossible to get back to sleep. Time change, I guess. I slept reasonably well—thanks, probably, to the sleeping pill I took before going to bed.
A good buffet breakfast at the hotel, then a moment to catch the breath (and wash the body) before meeting up with our group to start the day’s excitements. First stop, the Gallerie Forsblom, perhaps the preeminent fine art gallery of Finland, with an exhibition of contemporary Finnish painters called “All Colors,”
and a solo show for the Russian artist Irina Zatulovskaja. In the color show, I was drawn to some wild paintings based on mythical beasts (apologies to the artist for not recalling his/her name.)
In the upstairs gallery, Zatulovskaja showed a number of simply executed, folk-art type paintings on found sheets of metal and ends of wood.
From there, on to the adjacent town of Otaniemi to visit the new museum EMMA (Espoo Museum of Modern Art)
in a lovely wooded area surrounded by birch trees, elm, and sycamore. EMMA’s director, Markku Valkonen arrived to greet us and give us a personally escorted tour through the museum’s major collection of contemporary Finnish artists, on quasi-permanent loan from the Saasamoinen Foundation. We were greatly impressed by the quality and diversity of much of the Finnish collection, shown in the context of such prominent international artists as Anthony Gormley and Jannis Kounellis. Of particular appeal to me personally were two adjacent installations, a long, low salt house by Wolfgang Laib and a lovely, dense assemblage of burnt wood boxes by David Nash.
Also on display, an interesting installation by the Finnish artist Maaria Wirkkala composed of multiple auto windshields arranged on the gallery floor, mostly cracked or shattered, with the reflection of the green trees from the exterior landscape and a superimposed video of a journey down the freeway. By the same artist, a finely constructed ladder of glass, one rung near the bottom broken, with a simple shadow cast against the wall behind it.
Lunch at the EMMA cafeteria, followed by a bus tour of the garden city of Otaniemi
and its technical college, with buildings and residences designed by Aalto, Saarinen and other prominent Finnish architect-designers. A stop at Alaar Aalto’s airy studio and, shortly after, at his house, where we admired not only the architecture but the wonderful detail of furniture and accessory design. Mid-century, but with greater warmth, we thought, than the clean interiors and exteriors of Schindler and Neutra. Both tours charmingly led by a young Finnish-bred Irishman whose name I never caught…
A bus ride, next, to the not-yet-opened (to the public at least) Korjaamo Cultural Factory and Gallery (a renovated industrial building dedicated to the arts) and met with the artist Hikki Marila, whose large-scale, highly expressive paintings took off from the tradition of Matthias Gruenewald’s famous altarpiece and Duerer’s praying hands. Fine work, I thought.
The next stop was certainly one of the highlights of the day, the Gallerie Anhava, hung with a superb exhibit of the black and white photographs of Boston-based Finnish artist Arno Rafael Minkkinen, who photographs his own nude body in the natural landscape, creating images where land, sky, water, trees and rocks seem to form a continuity with the human form.
The artist was on hand to talk to us about the work, and gave a fascinating account of the risks and joys involved in making it. “What happens inside your mind,” goes his aesthetic philosophy, “can happen inside the camera.” “No one,” he explains, “is looking through the lens” when he makes his pictures. He trusts the camera to do the looking for him.
Thence to our final art stop of the day, Kalhama and Pippo Contemporary,
where we saw the multimedia work of the artist Heli Rekula and were treated to champagne and strawberries to wrap up the day’s activities. Ellie and I chose to leave a wee bit early, and enjoyed a walk back to the hotel through the busy city streets. This evening, we are promised a more formal dinner at Chez Dominique.
Helsinki (cont'd)
Another very poor night’s sleep. Ellie and I both seem to get to sleep okay, but wake in the wee hours and can’t get back to sleep again. I took a sleeping pill in desperation at about one o’clock and waited for what seemed like an hour for it to kick in. Then woke at about seven fifteen.
I did finally manage to get online (at vast expense) to post an entry covering the past couple of days. Then enjoyed another generous buffet breakfast in the hotel before getting ready for another arduous day in pursuit of the art and architecture treasures of Helsinki. Iiro was again on hand as our guide in chief, along with Timo Valjakka, our resident art expert, as we boarded the bus for a forty-minute drive out into the country to the communal residence of three of the great Finnish architects of the last century, Eliel Saarinen (whose son Eero was born here), Armas Lindgren and Herman Geselius. They seem to have shared wives, among other passions…
Along the way, we sped past the national monument to Sibelius, “Finlandia,” the six-year product of the labors of a woman artist (my apologies to her for not having registered her name), a large, free-standing exterior piece composed of organ pipe-like elements which, we were told, compose their own music in response to the lakeshore breeze. There was no more than a moment to catch a photograph as we drove past, and I recalled that hoary poem about the “fat white lady” seen from the train: “Oh, fat white lady whom nobody loves,/Why do you walk through the fields in gloves/Missing so much and so much?” It often puzzled me as a child that no one loved her. Because she was fat? Because she was all alone in the fields? But I digress. It just seemed to me that, dashing past the Sibelius monument, we could claim to have “seen” it—but to know not the first thing about it or its maker. Sad, really.
We found the Saarinen house
at Hvittrask (literally “White Lake”) a truly lovely location amidst the woods and rocky hillsides by the eponymous lake. Touring the house, we were delighted not only by the fine architectural design of the house,
but by the exquisite care bestowed on the smallest detail of construction and furnishing. The influence of the Arts and Crafts movement was everywhere, of course, though I confess I’m unsure as to which was the chicken and which the egg. I do believe that Arts & Crafts, beginning in England in the early days of the 20th century, came before this great period of Finnish creativity, but I’m no historian of design, so I couldn’t say for sure.After the tour of the house, we walked single-file down a steep, narrow path to the lakeside,
where a sauna house had been installed at a much later date—and were regaled by Iiro with presumably semi-fictional autobiographical accounts of the winter delights of hot saunas followed by naked dips in the lake through holes made in the ice.
Back on the bus, we drove back into town for a visit to Kiasma,
the new museum of post-1960 art designed (to the consternation of many Finns) by the American architect Stephen Holl. It’s one of those buildings whose interiors are more impressive than the exterior, with minimal lines and cathedral-like heights within. Our first stop was in the cafeteria, where we enjoyed a pleasant buffet lunch with grand views out over the city. And after lunch we were escorted upstairs to the project room by the museum’s chief curator, Dr. Marja Sakari and the artist of the current exhibition there, Jiri Geller.
I found Geller’s installation quite delightful, a combination of three pedestal pieces and a fourth, placed high above the viewer near the gallery’s skylight.
Balloons, molded and cast in fiberglass: one perky group of three white ones, happily titled “Happy Together;” a single, shiny black one on its side, “Dunkelheit” (German for “darkness”); and a yellow one, burst and deflated, called “Shattered.” The last, a red one, floated way above us, a reminder of the joy—and loss—experienced in childhood, watching a favorite balloon drift far out of reach into the blue sky.
We were treated next to a guided tour through the current exhibition by the chief curator, and were once again impressed by the quality and variety of art being produced by the middle generation of Finnish artists… Our next stop, at the converted Tennis Palace, introduced us to the next generation, new graduates from the School of Fine Arts Academy, an exhibition that had all the exuberant freshness and much of the derivative quality you’d expect from graduate student work. A further stop at the Finnish National Gallery gave us the historical context, and an education in a hundred years and more of Finnish artists of whom most of us had never heard. Oh, and an interesting, unfinished Van Gogh and a couple of small pictures by Gauguin.
Finally, we made a brief stop at Design Forum Finland, where three current exhibits and a gift shop rich in current examples of the excellence of Finnish design offered another, different understanding of the heritage whose origins we had explored in the first part of the day.
Ellie and I decided, after a short night’s sleep last night, to picnic in our room and have an early night. Tomorrow, we have to be up and about at 5:15 AM, ready for a 6AM departure for the train station and the train across the border into Russia—a six-hour journey, I’ve heard, from here to St. Petersburg.
Aboard the Sibelius Express
Up early, as planned. Earlier, in fact. I was up and about at 4:30, way before the alarm and the wake-up call from the front desk. Breakfast served at 5:45AM in the hotel dining room, and we took advantage of the usual spread to make sandwiches for the train journey. Our bus was on hand to take us all to the train station, but the promised “portage” never arrived, so we ended up toting our own bags to the platform. The train was scheduled to leave the station at 7:23, and left, surprise, at 7:23 precisely.
(This update written on board as we cross the border from Finland into Russia, our passports carted off to parts unknown by a dour Russian immigration official. We hope to see them again before we reach St. Petersburg.)
St. Petersburg
We arrived at the train station in St. Petersburg and were met by Ada, our local guide, and our bus driver Oleg, who took us first on a guided tour through the city and along the Neva River to the Peter and Paul Fort whose outer walls serve, in the summer time, as a nude sunbathing spot for tan-minded inhabitants.
(You need a telescope to spot them here!) It seemed to us Southern Californians a bit nippy for that particular activity, but many were out there, enjoying the cool rays of the Russian sun.
Arriving at the fort, we disembarked and strolled along the thick exterior walls and through the crowded parade ground to the SS. Peter and Paul Cathedral.
Ada elbowed us through the throng into the church and offered a bright, well-informed historical tour of the tombs of the Russian royal families.
This is not the place to recall that whole history—in fact, to be honest, I remember little of it myself—but it was a surprisingly emotional moment to be looking into the modest chapel where the recently rediscovered remains of the brutally murdered Nicholas and Alexandra and their children have been interred in the vicinity of their ancestors.
I hold no brief for royalty or aristocracy, and look back on that period of European history with amazement that so few could hold sway for so long over so many. And yet there is a certain undeniable appeal about it—witness the success of TV shows like The Tudors—casting perhaps the same kind of spell as today’s celebrity culture. The incredible power and wealth of the tsars seems, as I have observed elsewhere in these pages, undeserved, but there it is, on full view in such magnificent places…
Next stop, early evening by now, the Hotel Astoria, where I soon discovered that online access is even more difficult—and more expensive—than in Helsinki. I will have to content myself with doing my writing offline and, hopefully, finding an hour sometime in the next couple of days, to buy enough access to get it posted, along with a few pictures. Our room proved pleasant enough, on the second floor, with a nice view out and, presumably, from the outside, in. A bit disconcerting, with no lacy curtains to hide our nakedness from the passers-by on the other side of the street.
A good dinner in the Davidov, the hotel restaurant, and off after a very brief respite to the Mariiknsy Ballet—the former Kirov—where was attended a performance of “Sleeping Beauty.” Tired as we were, we were not enchanted to find ourselves seated directly behind people with seemingly enormous heads, requiring constant shift of the neck from one side to the other in order to see not only the wings but also the center of the stage, where most of the action, of course, took place.
Still, the sets were spectacular, the music, er, dramatic, romantic, perhaps a little sweet… and the dancing impeccable. It was a four-hour performance, and we might have lasted through the third act—the wedding—had it been just a little bit easier to see what was going on. But fatigue set in, too, and Ellie and I left with the majority of our tour group after Prince Desire’s kiss had awakened the royal court on the stage.
Bed—and I wish I could say sleep—by eleven thirty.
St. Petersburg (cont'd)
A lavish breakfast spread at the Astoria Hotel, hot and cold. I chose the cold, conscious of the extra weight I have begun to carry around with me on this trip. Shortly after breakfast, our bus was waiting outside to navigate us through heavy morning traffic to the Hermitage (seen below in a night-time view), where we arrived an hour before the public opening—along with quite a number of tour groups that shared the privilege with us.
What a spectacle, though. I just used the word lavish for breakfast. It’s not adequate for the interiors of this one-time home of the tsars and their families. My pictures, below, will give a small idea of the outrageous magnificence of the place, the vast halls, the marble and gilt columns, the extravagant furnishings and—can one call them knick-knacks?
The collection of paintings is superb, certainly of a quality to rival the Louvre, the Vatican, the British Museum… Good tourists, we dashed past walls filled with masterpieces—in the Spanish area alone, a huge stash of Velazquez, Goya, Murillo, El Greco. We paused for long enough to gape at a couple of madonnas painted by Leonardo, and were allowed a luxurious ten minutes in a long hall filled with Rembrandts. My personal favorite, a “Descent from the Cross,” with breathtaking chiaroscuro lighting.
Then on at breakneck pace—not our guide’s fault, she has done a wonderful job for us, expertly filling in the many gaps in our collective knowledge—to the top floor, an exhibition of “Hidden Treasures Revealed,” a trove of mostly Impressionist and post-Impressionist works brought back by the Red Army from Berlin after World War II. Originally looted from other countries and, I suspect largely, from the collections of the Jews the Nazis murdered, most of them have apparently remained unclaimed, and are shown as a group now for the first time.
From there to the Hermitage’s huge—and hugely impressive—collection of Impressionist and Modern works, walls richly hung with splendid paintings by Monet, Cezanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin… and, again a personal favorite, Kees van Dongen. And even after those spectacular galleries, my jaw dropped to the floor as I entered the first of two whole galleries devoted to Matisse, the massive, familiar image of “The Dance,” “The Red Room,” and others seen previously only in the history books.
The same with Picasso… Breathtaking… Really beyond description. We spent perhaps three hours in the museum, and could have spent another three days and still not covered everything.
Still, onward… our bus made a brief photo op stop on Vassilyovsky Island in the middle of the Neva, and thence to the Flying Dutchman restaurant in the replica of an old sailing vessel. A good lunch, with crab salad, fish in a “potato shirt,” and petits fours, and a marvelous view out over the river and the fountains which, unusually and happily for us, were working on this weekday because it happens to be “City Day” in St. Petersburg.
The afternoon was devoted to a preliminary exploration of the contemporary art scene hereabouts, and the bus took us to a somewhat less posh part of town where we stopped first at the Anna Nova Gallery. Wouldn’t you know, they were installing—a group show of young painters which we saw mostly propped against the walls. Several good painters, we thought—I regret I did not, for the most part—note down their names, nor do I remember any but for one Yury Alexandrov, whose work I liked a great deal, along with others in our group. Large paintings, with charcoal—or black paint—line drawing featuring somewhat ritualistic, violent, at times erotic scenes.
Next stop was D-137, supposedly the first contemporary art gallery in St. Petersburg, a renovated cellar with low, arched brick ceilings, where we were greeted by the gallery director, Kristina, and introduced to the work being installed (again!) on the walls. Another painter, Marina Fedorova, whose figurative pictures were concerned mostly with themes of loneliness and isolation.
In a second, smaller space, a few other gallery artists were on display, but nothing, to this viewer, of particular note.
Our last stop for the afternoon, though, was certainly worthwhile. Olga Tobreluts is an artist of established reputation, as witness the number of books and catalogues for group exhibitions in which she has been included—including Edward Lucie-Smith’s “Artists of the Twenty-First Century.” She works in an amazing variety of media, from painting and sculpture to digital art, photography, and performance. Clearly much concerned—and well-informed—about art history, her painting styles range from classical-realist
to frankly expressionistic,
and she seems to move comfortably between them. She has not yet shown in the United States and is holding out for the prospect of a museum exhibition. Particularly, she wants to avoid being branded as a “Russian” artist. Why not, she asks rhetorically, international? Why not indeed? I see much evidence of the international quality of contemporary art these days, and this trip is no exception. We enjoyed Olga's friendly hospitality in her studio, and left much impressed by her achievements as well as by her potential for a remarkable future.
Back at the hotel, there was barely time for a shower and change before reporting for dinner at the Adamant Restaurant, across from our hotel on the bank of the smaller Moika River. A private room awaited us, along with a band of somewhat surly waiters and a (to my mind) rather so-so traditional Russian meal. As we were eating, a trio of musicians burst in upon us—accordion, balalaika, mandolin—soon joined by a buxom singer who flirted with each of the men in turn and ended up handing out noise-makers... which we very soon learned were for sale, along with CDs by the band. Their intrusion was unasked for, and the response in terms of sales clearly less than they had hoped for. They left in something of a sulk.
An after dinner cruise was scheduled to start shortly afterwards, and we walked to our embarkation point to discover that our boat was moored on the opposite side of the river. Summoned unceremoniously by bullhorn, we flocked back to the nearest bridge and back to the tour boat, heading out for the Neva and the fountains we had seen earlier in the day. A lovely moment, with the sun setting over the western bank, reflecting on the clouds above and the golden domes and details of the buildings below.
Our boat people warmed to us after some initial general annoyance, and broke out the vodka to warm us against the evening chill. Much merriment on board as we completed our hour’s tour, and walked back from the river bank to the Astoria.
St. Petersburg (cont'd)
Oy, veh! Did I mention—surely I mentioned—that I went to bed last night totally exhausted and not a little inebriated from the generously poured wine at dinner and shots of vodka (I didn’t count) aboard our cruise ship; and therefore all the more secure in the knowledge that I would finally be rewarded with a good night’s sleep.
Nope. Have I mentioned—surely I’ve mentioned—that I sleep with the aid of a CPAP breathing machine to help me with my apnea and protect Ellie from my dreadful snoring? Last night it broke. We got to bed at midnight and I was woken at two with a blast of air in my face and an unusually loud sound coming from the machine. A piece had snapped off the plastic nose mask and fallen to the floor. In the darkness, I couldn’t find it, and settled for trying to use my hand to perform its function—to prevent the air from escaping from the hose. You can imagine that was not very successful. Every time I began to go to sleep, my hand fell from its task and the blast resumed.
At five AM I finally staggered out of bed and felt around the neighboring area of floor until I found the missing piece. Between five and five thirty, bleary eyed and clumsy with fatigue and irritation, I tried to work out how it fit back on. At five-thirty, success! I had two hours of sleep.
Breakfast at seven thirty. Bus at a quarter to nine. This morning we drove out through often heavy traffic to the village—well, these days, the town—of Pushkin, renamed as such, we heard, during the Soviet era in honor of the great Romantic poet. Ada treated us to a potted history of the tsars—tales of drunkenness and incompetence, internal family plots and cruel assassinations—not to mention some distinctly strange sexual appetites. A pretty dissolute and greedy bunch, those Romanovs. We were left with some considerable sympathy for the serfs and the revolutionaries who eventually rose up to dispose of them.
And what extravagant opulence! Opulence, that’s the word I’ve been looking for.
The Catherine Palace, which we had driven out here to visit—along with several thousand other tourists from all parts of the world—is a summer residence in unimaginably grand scale, in construction, in interior design and in detail. In the Great Ballroom alone, Ada told us, eight kilos of solid gold were needed to gilt the decorative columns.
It took us a while to get that far. Many of our company needed a pit stop before the tour, and the lines at the restrooms were so long that the women’s line merged into the men’s, and even so, many returned with their mission unaccomplished. There must, then, have been twenty tour groups ahead of us in line to reach the entry and the foot of the staircase to the half-mile long upper floor where the tours were staggered by the staff to move fairly smoothly, in turn, from room to room.
(Ellie, in the required booties...)
Opulence was the word. The great ballroom, the grand dining rooms, the rooms where the family entertained guests, the others where they entertained, presumably, themselves… and the most extravagantly rich of all, the famous Amber Room (no pictures allowed!), whose walls and decorative mirror surrounds and candelabras are constructed of an intricate mosaic of tens of thousands of amber fragments of different color and hue, a glorious, glittering, way over-the-top display of wealth and questionable taste. The walls of adjacent huge gallery were assemblages of masterpiece paintings, trimmed and sized to fit the requirements of the wall’s design and separated only by thin gilt beading. Those Romanovs!
After a tour of the palace, we strolled back to our bus, already two hours late for our lunch reservations at Podvorie in Pavlovsk, a vast log cabin affair with numerous tour buses and private cars parked in its lot. Entering the restaurant, we were greeted by a (stuffed!) brown bear offering a silver tray with glasses and a bottle of cold vodka.
We imbibed. Happily. This place is known for providing its guests with unlimited supplies of vodka—literally, as much as you can drink. No extra charge. We had been instructed by Ada on the etiquette involved: only as much in the glass as you can drink down at a single gulp, so that the vodka never gets cold. Warm vodka, she assured us, is the inevitable source of painful hangovers. We poured small. We drank. We poured again.
Long tables, laden with food, several starters, including a bowl of delicious assorted pickles, pork slices, creamed beef, bread and butter… followed by a delicious borscht soup with dollops of sour cream, and followed in turn by stuffed cabbage leaves and grape leaves. I have forgotten something along the way. I have forgotten a lot of things, probably. You could begin to understand what was meant by the “groaning board.” And wine of both colors. And, er, vodka, more vodka. Merriment would be the understatement. Toward the end of the meal, we got into a singing, table-banging rivalry with a French tour group across the room, who had been singing and dancing to the sounds of the Russian band who arrived to regale us with their music. They beat us by far--the French, I mean. At our table, none of us could agree on songs we all knew. The Beach Boys? Woody Guthrie? Edith Piaf?
Anyway, the scene ended up with all the merry chaos of a country fair. Breughel, anyone?
After lunch, we piled back on board for the ride back into town, and were delayed once again by traffic jams on all the major highways and city streets. We thought the traffic was bad back at home. It’s a nightmare in St. Petersburg, with a system that is totally inadequate for the new surge in car ownership, and traffic flows that are poorly organized and supervised. We arrived at our next destination, a gallery and studio complex, about three hours later than planned, and by then I was ready to take a little down time. I see enough contemporary art in Los Angeles, and there’s that internationalism at work now that makes for a kind of sameness no matter what continent you happen to be on. With another weary traveler, then, I chose to find transportation back to the Astoria—Ada hailed us a private car, just like the old days in Moscow, when anyone might stop for you—and our driver found a quick back street route back to the hotel.
A blessed hour’s sleep, and then another blessed—albeit expensive—hour online to get some posting done. In fact, I managed to bring everything up to date, with the exception of one single day’s photographs, which will have to wait until later. Who knows what Moscow might or might not bring by way of connectability.
Ellie returned early from the afternoon tour, too, and we spent an hour packing and watching the news—notably, the death of Sydney Pollack and Scott McClellan’s book with its scathing report on the Bush White House. Finally, someone on the inside ready to share a little of the scandalous truth. But why not sooner? After packing for tomorrow, we hit the streets for a pleasant walk in the late sun through what seemed like a predominantly student area close to the hotel. Most of them smoking! We failed to find an inviting café or restaurant and took the easy course, returning to our hotel restaurant for two small salads, a tiny bottle of Perrier and a third of a glass of New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc, all for the modest price of $120. Service not included.
St. Petersburg: Last Day
With a late night departure for Moscow on the schedule, we finished our packing early and enjoyed a last Astoria breakfast before our bus was loaded up with bags and we set out for the embankment, where we embarked on the hydrofoil that was to take us out across the Gulf of Finland to the Peterhof, the summer palace beloved by Peter the Great. A half hour’s smooth and speedy run over choppy seas.
Arriving at our destination, we disembarked...
)Very lovely light, enhanced by the incredible variety of green hues of the trees and lawns.)
... and took a long walk up the tree-lined alley toward the distant palace.
Peter, it seems, was an avid gardener, and the vast gardens are laid out with graceful symmetry in all directions. Rather than repeat the visit to another magnificent palace, our guides had chosen wisely to lead us instead through the bathhouse,
whose rooms were still elegant but far more intimate in scale (again, no pictures allowed here). The baths and showers were ingeniously designed, as were such conveniences as a ceramic device for ladies to take a private pee under their skirts in public places…
An untoward event in the great, intricate bath and shower complex designed, if I remember right, for the tsar himself. The attendant in the room turned on the switch to demonstrate the action of the generously proportioned central tub, with streams of water from above and from the sides. Whilst other members of our party moved to the right around the tub, I chose the other direction, to the left, to a place where I was apparently concealed from the woman operating the system. Before I knew what was happening, the floor and walls opened up in further, furious jets of water, drenching me from head to toe.
(An exception made, here, to the no pictures rule. I had earned it!) Great entertainment for the rest, but a somewhat less than pleasant shock for the recipient of this unexpected shower. I did recover in short order, however, and the embarrassed attendant was profuse in her apologies. Fortunately, I had chosen a t-shirt and very light cotton pants for the day, and I fairly soon dried out in the open air. Jeans would have been a disaster. I was promptly renamed Peter the Wet.
A leisurely walk through the gardens to the giant “dragon” waterfall,
whose painted dragon, at the top, spewed forth the water that spilled down the checkerboard sections of the slope; and past spectacular fountains—designed, our Ada told us, to rival those of Versailles and operated by simple gravitational pressure as the water flowed down from the hills some forty kilometers distant.
The by now familiar gilded statues were everywhere, of course, glinting magnificently in the sun and reminding us how fortunate we have been with our St. Petersburg weather.
Our driver had brought the bus out from the city to meet us, and we drove back in through impossibly crowded streets and interminable traffic jams. Lunch was awaiting us at a restaurant named Sadko—a fine, overly generous meal that started with a ratatouille layered “cake” with beetroot slices and topped off with melted goat’s cheese; in Ellie’s expert opinion, one of the best dishes we have had; then chicken kiev with a creamy mustard sauce and napoleon pastries for dessert. All served with more than the usual smiles from pleasant wait-folk.
Another frequently obstructed drive on to the Russian Museum,
where the curator, Alexey Kurbanosky was on hand with the generous gift of his time to give us the guided tour to the collections—much of the modern part of which, he told us, was out on loan to an exhibition in Moscow. He gave us, instead, a useful and interesting introduction to Russian art history, starting with the icons of the Middle Ages and leading up through the early contact with Western Europe in the times of Peter the Great,
(that's him) through Neo-Classicism and Romanticism to the late blooming of Impressionism and modern concepts. No contemporary art at all, but the curator’s obviously passionate explication of the paintings was an object lesson not only in art history, but in how to look at art and understand the psychological and symbolic function of its detail.
It was a short walk from the Russian Museum to the Church of the Resurrection of Christ, also known as the Church of the Spilled Blood because it was built precisely on the site of the assassination of Tsar Alexander II by a group of revolutionaries who called themselves “The Will of the People.” We stopped to gape briefly at the spot, and admired the interior of the church, which is decorated almost entirely with large-scale, intricate and brightly colored mosaics—and of course much gilt.
The expense and devotion which the royal families and their pre-revolutionary subjects lavished on their religious sites defies belief.
The bus took us to our final art stop for the day, the opening for the artist Peter Belyi at Marina Gisich Gallery. Not knowing what to expect, I was much impressed by the work, an installation entitled “La Bibilioteca di Pinocchio”—Pinocchio’s Library. It comprised a row of “library” shelves patched together out of roughly assembled construction lumber, recycled from demolition sites, each with a line of “books”—sawed off chunks of the same lumber of varied book height, whose split edges and layers did, remarkably, resemble books.
It was as though the paper used to create those things we read and which contain the sum of much of human knowledge had reverted to its original state. I saw the piece as being about silence and denial, knowledge frozen into the lies that officialdom can feed us, the willful state of ignorance in which we all too often choose to bask. As rich as it was conceptually, the installation had a powerful emotional punch, even in the context of a crowded gallery opening.
On, then, to dinner at a restaurant neighboring the Mariinsky Theater, its walls inscribed with messages from grateful ballerinas, opera singers, designers and musicians. There was even one, dated 2003 and signed by a certain Laura Bush. From there, we boarded our St. Petersburg bus for one last time and said our genuinely fond farewells to our guide, Ada, on the way to the station to catch a late train to Moscow. We piled our luggage into small berths and pulled out of the station at 11:30PM, in time to settle down for as much sleep as we could manage.
To Moscow
Our train pulled into Moscow station, as scheduled, at 7:20 AM.
The night was not nearly so bad as we had feared—the berths reasonably comfortable, despite dire warnings to the contrary. Even the bathrooms were serviceable, if not particularly enticing. I slept a few hours, and woke feeling ready for the day.
The downtown Aurora Marriott Hotel was not ready for us to check in so early in the morning, but did afford us the opportunity to drop off our bags and enjoy a pleasant breakfast before leaving for the day. Our bus dropped us off in the shadow of the Kremlin walls,
and we walked into the fortress for our first visit, in the Armory...
(A nice group of kids...)
... where the state treasures of the tsarist times are kept—amazing objects dating from as early as the thirteenth century, including both temporal and sacred ritual artifacts, chalices, icons and bibles encrusted with gold and jewels; eleven fabulous Faberge eggs and other state and royal gifts; textiles and clothes, wedding and coronation garments and patriarchs’ robes. Another jaw-dropping display of wealth and luxury…
From there, a walk through the Kremlin grounds
to the glorious plaza of the seven churches with their golden domes and spires.
We stopped in to visit the magnificent Church of the Assumption,
the traditional site of the coronation of the tsars, and admired what our guide informed us was “the biggest bell in the world”, cracked in a fire and useless now, but awe-inspiring simply for its size; and next “the biggest canon ever made”, across the courtyard from the senate and the office buildings of the administration and the city residence of the president, now the newly inducted Medvedev (we received expert instruction on the pronounciation of his name.)
Leaving the Kremlin, we walked on through the Alexander Gardens and past the World War II memorial, recalling with anger and sadness the twenty-six million Russians, many of them innocent civilians, who died at the hands of the Nazis in that unhappy period of the country’s history. Further on, we reached Red Square,
where Lenin still rests, it seems, in his mausoleum, though rarely now on view to the public. Ellie and I recalled the lines that stood, even in winter, on our last visit to Moscow, waiting to get in and pay respects to the first leader of the Soviet state. No lines, these days. And no honor guard. And Lenin himself, we heard, is rather the worse for wear: most of his body has decomposed, leaving only the hands and face, which need special preservation efforts in a basement laboratory below the tomb. Sic transit gloria mundi, no?
A brief architectural visit to the famous art nouveau GUM Department store with its great interior spaces lit by long skylights above,
with Ellie and I recalling, once again, those bad old days, when GUM was inaccessible except for the privileged few aparatchiks, and where there was virtually nothing to be purchased in the stores even for those few who had the money to indulge. Lunch at the Goudonov Restaurant off Red Square reminded us of the dreadful, virtually inedible food in Moscow, 1989, in the few new “private” restaurants that had only recently opened. Our lunch, preceded by a foretaste of four different chilled vodkas, was a veritable feast by comparison.
On our way back to the hotel, we made a brief descent into the famous Moscow Metro station,
with its deco spaces, its steep elevators, and its rows of social realist bronze sculptures. Then back on the bus for a mid-afternoon return to the hotel. Some were foolhardy enough to venture out again almost immediately for a visit to the Moscow Art Fair. I chose, instead, to spend a couple of quiet hours in the hotel room, and to catch up with this travelog.
Moscow: A Spectacular Art Day
Up early Saturday morning for the usual hotel breakfast, and out at nine-thirty for the day’s activities. A brilliant art day, though with an unpromising start at the Park of the Fallen Heroes Sculpture Park—the back lot of the Tretyatov municipal gallery. Outside the park, on the Moscow River bank, a monumental (I mean here, several stories high) memorial to Peter the Great by the artist Zurab Tsereteli,
his giant figure astride a sailing ship, strictly academic in execution, imposing in stature if not, to this observer, in sculptural interest. Too much artist ego imposed upon the citizen’s eye (my judgment!)
Across the road, we were provided tickets for the park, which started life as the graveyard for statues of the leaders from social-realist days, and was subsequently annexed by artists looking for a public place to put their work—the results of which proved to be uneven at best.
Ellie and I chose to walk around the corner to take a look at the neighboring church and gardens, where she thought to have attended one of the first Orthodox services allowed during perestroika, back in 1989. The church was closed, but the gardens were quite beautiful. Heading back into the sculpture park via a different gate, we were yelled at—no, screamed at!—by one of those fierce, unsmiling woman ticket office officials, who grabbed our stubs and, at first, refused to give them back. We finally managed to rejoin our group.
(The best sculpture in the park... kinetic!)
A longish bus ride through the streets and some of the super-wide boulevards of Moscow,
with commentary by Bella along the way. Here’s my picture of Tolstoy (he’s hiding behind that kiosk: this can be a problem taking photos from the bus!)
There are certainly some very beautiful old streets, lined with mansions once occupied by the wealthy and the privileged, now for the most part converted into offices or apartment buildings. In one of them, we arrived at the Pushkin Museum, where we had a full forty minutes (including wait time at the ticket office) to explore one of the greatest treasuries of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and early Modern paintings in the world. A small museum, but incredibly rich—the result of the eye of a handful of collectors in pre-Soviet Russia, whose passion for French painting was unrivaled anywhere in the world. Cezanne, Gaugin,
Van Gogh,
Degas, Monet, Sisley, all represented by absolutely choice samples of their work. You walk into those galleries and swoon… Oh, and Matisse and Picasso. Galleries full of the stuff.
(My picture of the Tolstoy memorial sculpture. He's hiding there behind the kiosk... The perils of taking pictures from the bus! On the other hand, it does occasionally produce a nice Monet:
... don't you think?)
On to lunch, at a curious restaurant at the outskirts of town,
tucked at the base of a Stalinist highrise building. Outside, a nest of baroque cabins (presumable used as dining areas, in warmer times) constructed out of woven willow branches,
with odd benches and fountains; inside, a rich mish-mash of Victorian era art and knick-knacks, including numerous birdcages complete with parrots and songbirds. A quite charming environment, but I think most of us found the food to be equally rich and heavy.
Back in town, we arrived at the front door of one of those renovated mansions, now converted into a spectacular gallery space,
and were greeted by the gallery director, Ruth Addison. (I was delighted to discover that she was a fellow Geordie—that, for the uninitiated, is a person born on the banks of the River Tyne in north-eastern England. I lived there only for the first year and a half of my life, but I’m still very proud of being a Geordie!)
Not only was the space spectacular. She had some pretty impressive art there, too. The current exhibit, in the first two galleries, was one Sergei Chaika,
a young artist from the Ukraine showing for the first time. Dark paintings, with glittering surfaces from many coats of varnish—mostly of single objects, portraits, nude figures, still life objects made impressive in large scale—in heavy chiaroscuro: a human heart on a plate, slightly surreal and spine-chilling in its sheer, almost palpitating presence, was one of the most powerful for the pictures, in my view. In other areas, we found the fanciful, disturbing white aluminum sculptures of A E S + F, the collaborative group whose studio we were to visit next; and a gallery of their photographs of children
from the “Last Riot” series—a vision of the future in which the bloodless violence of digital games has taken over the world.
Coffee and delicious, tiny pastries in the gallery’s graceful bar, then on to the studio of AES + F in the small eighth floor apartment of a building largely occupied by artists. We greeted with easy charm by two of the collaborators,
who signed the large catalogues of their work that were generously handed out to each of us at the gallery, showed us their newest digital video work, and told us something of their history as a group.
The work is quite extraordinary, a blend of digital imaging and games, sci-fi futurism and fantasy, and provocative, non-narrative stories. I was impressed with the modesty of the space in which this internationally-celebrated group manage to operate, and by their friendly reception of a motley gang of art enthusiasts from distant California.
A final art stop for the day in the apartment/studio of Francisco Infante, where Ellie and I were delighted to recognize work we had seen twenty years ago; and remembered having met Francisco at that time, when we were working on our artists’ exchange program. He modifies natural environments—landscapes, skyscapes—with geometric constructivist fabrications and photographs them in cibachrome, creating superb, crisp images that harminze artifice with nature.
In his crowded living area, every square inch of wall space was hung with his work, and a brief glimpse into his working studio offered insight into the way he makes his constructions with nylon wire stretched in large frames.
All in all, an excellent art day, from beginning to end. Somehow, though, my recollection of dinner has faded in the time that has elapsed between then and now, as I write this, already on board our Finnair flight for Helsinki, en route to London, where we spend another week. Let’s hope I remember what happened yesterday, Sunday, our last day in Moscow…
Art Tour: The Last Day
June 1, 2008
Hardly a day of rest—though we made a late-ish start, at a quarter to ten. I’ll let Ellie take over from here for the first half of the day, since she was on scribe duty and took ample notes. I’ll take dictation as she writes:
Amazing, no traffic! Russians spend their weekends out in the country in their dachas. For us, it was chop, chop, chop, forty-five minutes to see the Tretyakov museum, an encyclopedic repository of Russian art from the 19th and 20th century, and up to the present day. We were privileged to be guided (at a full run!) by a very hip and knowledgeable art consultant who talked too fast as we scurried through the late 19th century to the present, starting with the early, more derivative Impressionists with Russian overtones through the justly celebrated avant-garde movement, including some works of enormous historical importance like Malevich’s “Black Square,”
a three-dimensional Popova construction, a beautiful Tatlin sculpture, an eye-popping wall of Vasily Kandinskys,
and some fine Rodchenko photographs. In these works, the artists were exploring the relationship of shape and non-figurative images to express their view of the new world, creating such well-known –isms as Suprematism and Constructivism (my favorite).
(Forgive the poor composition of these pictures. They were "shot from the hip", to eascape the watchful eye and the wrathful "nyet, nyet" of the Russian guard women. Everyone else was taking pictures, I reckoned, so why not me? A poor ethical argument, I'll admit, but I'll suffer the guilt while you look at the pictures--PaL)
By the early 1930s, with the new Soviet regime under Stalin, these art forms generally gave way to Social Realism, which glorified the state with images of happy peasants tilling the fields, industrial workers wielding hammers, naked women basketball players,
massive history paintings with titles like “Get Heavy Industry Going” and “The Defense of Petrograd,” and portraits of Lenin and Stalin and other communist leaders in grand settings of power.
We were also surprised, however, to see that this was not the whole story, as art history too often teaches. There were many artists working in less party-line modes, creating sophisticated works in relative isolation in defiance of then prevailing academic norms.
(Also a chilling video of Uncle Joe...)
The first of the downstairs galleries were devoted to artists like Francisco Infante, llya Kabakov and Erik Bulatov who, starting as early as the 1960s were quietly defying the approved art of the system and who, after perestroika and the decline of the Soviet regime, began to achieve international recognition.
Influenced by the work of Western artists like Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol,
they were a new avant-grade working with mixed media, ready-mades, word-art and the incorporation of everyday objects. Their work influenced that of contemporaries like Oleg
Kulik, whose performance work (in one instance, living for three days as a dog)
was of particular appeal to our group. Many of these artists have received international attention through inclusion in art fairs and, in some instances, the Venice Bienale.
If this wasn’t already enough for at least a day we hurried off to visit the studio of Valery Kashlyakov, one of the artists in the group of Russian contemporaries described above. His paintings are huge, using at times easily collapsible cardboard on which he often paints antique ruins covered over with drippy paint.
His interests are to show us that past time has left us something.” For him, there is “no distinction between rubbish and the antique.’
PC continues, unaided: I will now confess that after lunch on this last day, I fell down on the job. My mind went numb. My little notebook ran out of space. My pen ran out of ink. Do I need more excuses? I remember that we went to a crowded cultural center, where loud rock music was being played and where we visited some three or four galleries; it seemed to me each of the gallery representatives was eager to lead us through the entire contents of their back room.
I disremember (may the artists forgive me) a very large number of paintings, some of them surely good; but I do remember one interesting show in a large building filled with shops and galleries, with an artist using recycled wood to evoke classical structures and making lovely “drawings” out of printed material laced with patterned perforations.
I also remember hearing—yes, I confess, with a sinking heart—that our bus was next to take us to a “city of art”, and the drive out to another part of the city; I remember being led by an art-loving Russian oligarch (yes, friends, I do shamefully forget his name, if not the reputation of his wealth) to a very small suite of rooms in magnificent disarray, a place where ancient computers and electric typewriters, desks and filing cabinets evidently meet their last reward in tumble-down chaos, and where the full complement of twenty-something of us crammed into a space about the size of a broom closet and listened (well, yes, I confess to having caught barely a word: mea culpa) to the story of the oligarch’s purchase—so I thought—of a whole town in the Ukraine and running a foundation and a multi-year artist residency program there. I remember (yes, I confess it) wishing heartily for escape, release, sleep, oblivion… And I remember finally making it back to the bus, and the bus finally getting us back to the hotel. I remember having a blessed hour or so to pack my bags and watching news of the Democratic party’s latest fiasco on CNN… Ah, yes.
And I do remember the final dinner of our tour, a half-hour’s walk from the hotel. Being greeted by a footman in 18th century livery and a waitress in 18th century dress. I remember a fabulous rococo dining room with a white-wigged chamber orchestra playing Mozart and Handel in 18th century costumes whilst we dined on a fine salad, a delicate pate de foie gras, a shrimp and scallops main course, and a pastry dessert, accompanied by a choice excellent red and white wines. I chose both, which may in part explain what happened to my mental faculties. I remember a distinguished member of our group falling in love with the beautifully designed white dessert plates
and trying to buy a set of twenty of them (plates, not desserts) to take home. I remember an extravagant men’s room with discreet urinals and toilet pedestals done in Delft-like porcelain.
I remember taking a picture… Ah, yes. We did get a wee bit tiddly.
And I remember, close to midnight, a very pleasant walk back to our hotel with Ellie through the darkened Moscow streets, remarking that we had, strangely, not seen darkness for a while, because it stays light so late. And I remember falling into bed, exhausted… and remembering to set the alarm for six o’clock in preparation for an early departure for the Moscow Airport. And falling asleep. Ah, yes.
