Following the appearance of various publications in the media relating to the temporary exhibition “Fabergé, Jeweller to the Imperial Court”, we are presenting one published on the Internet site Fontaka.ru entitled “Vulgar Forgeries” and also publishing the complete text of the foreword to the exhibition written by Mikhail Piotrovsky, the General Director of the Hermitage.
“Vulgar Forgeries”. At the Hermitage’s Fabergé exhibition not everyone saw what they wanted.
Published on the public-political Internet news website Fontanka.ru on 13 January 2021. Text by Alina Tsiopa, Fontanka.ru
An art dealer working for Vekselberg has accused the Hermitage of displaying fakes at the temporary exhibition of Carl Fabergé. The Hermitage has responded, but not to the author.
The exhibition “Fabergé, Jeweller to the Imperial Court” that opened at the Hermitage in November has become the occasion for a scandal, and for a discussion about authenticity. Attempting to become acquainted with the protagonists and their positions, Fontanka discovered that behind the strident accusations there is a long-standing conflict, and the game is being played at the very highest level.
On 13 January, a letter arrived in the Fontanka editorial office – judging by colleagues’ reactions, other branches of the media received the same one. It referenced an open letter to Mikhail Piotrovsky, the Director of the Hermitage, signed by Andrei Ruzhnikov. With British telephone numbers and an address in London. The website on which the letter was placed (in English and Russian) offers assistance in the purchase and sale of items of jewellery. Including Fabergé pieces.
The author of the letter makes fairly harshly worded pronouncements about forgeries at the temporary exhibition of Carl Fabergé that opened in the Hermitage in late November.
“Contrary to expectations… the show contains not just controversial or dubious items, but a number of outright fakes,” Ruzhnikov writes. “Side by side with splendid exhibits from the Hermitage, Pavlovsk and Peterhof can be found vulgar replicas. The Soldier lighting a cigarette is a crude copy of Savitsky’s figurine in the Fersman Museum. The Hen Easter Egg is a recent copy of the original, which can be admired just 1,000 steps from the Hermitage, in the Fabergé Museum on Fontanka. Neither the so-called ‘Tenth Wedding Anniversary’ Egg – allegedly a gift from Nicholas II to Empress Alexandra in 1904 – nor the red enamelled ‘Alexander Nevsky’ Easter Egg belong to the 20th century… but to the 21st!”
The reference to the Fabergé Museum is no mere chance: Google quickly informed us that, together with Vladimir Voronchenko, the art dealer Andrei Ruzhnikov, acquired Fabergé pieces at auction for the oligarch [Viktor Vekselberg]. One such newsworthy moment was recorded in an article “Fabergé Hunters” in [the Russian edition of] Forbes magazine, whose author was present at a Christie’s sale. There Ruzhnikov and Voronchenko had snatched, literally from beneath their noses, a Fabergé presentation snuffbox finished with precious stones, enamelling and a portrait of Emperor Nicholas II. That was done by a man with the unremarkable name Alexander Ivanov, who went on to buy up a further substantial portion of the Fabergé objects put up for sale. Remember that name, as they say.
Coming back to the accusations levelled at the Hermitage: in another passage, Ruzhnikov took a swipe at precisely who it was that the Hermitage collaborated with in preparing the exhibition.
“We find instead a plethora of items from the ‘Fabergé Museum’ in Baden-Baden; the ‘Museum of Christian Culture’ in St Petersburg; and a so-called ‘Russian National Museum’ that exists only on paper,” Ruzhnikov thunders. “In your catalogue preface you extol the ‘splendid’ collections of these three institutions and appear to rank them on a par with the Fabergé Museum in St Petersburg. Anyone can enjoy the Fabergé Museum on Fontanka – by strolling through its stately galleries, attending a talk or spending time in its bookshop…. But please tell me where to find the grand-sounding ‘Russian National Museum’!”
The explanation of what these unknown collections are that provided exhibits to the Hermitage is provided by that same old article in Forbes. Two of the museums mentioned (the Russian National Museum and the Fabergé Museum in Baden-Baden) are the creations of Alexander Ivanov mentioned above. The third participant in the exhibition is clearly connected to them: the Museum of Christian Culture opened in Saint Petersburg less than a month ago. The website indicates that the legal entity behind it is the New Era cultural and historical foundation (registered, according to [the SPARK-Interfax resource for verifying legal entities], to a certain Marina Krishtal, who is also the director of the museum). The museum’s webpage also carries the logos of the Fabergé Museum in Baden-Baden and the Russian National Museum. We have come full circle.
The conclusion suggests itself that the conflict is going on between old acquaintances, and they are not in the least concerned about the reputation of the Hermitage. The only question is how high the level of the conflict is. After all, if we recall events that happened not so long ago, it was none other than Alexander Ivanov who bought the very “Rothschild Egg” that President Vladimir Putin would later present to the Hermitage on its 250th anniversary.
“The President acted as the person who presented the egg to the Hermitage, but in essence the Russian Federation made a gift to its own museum,” Ivanov told the newspaper MK at the time. “Yes, I do have some involvement. When it was bought, it was clear to me that it would end up in Russia. If the President has presented the piece to the country’s main museum, everything else is secondary.”
Just where the businessman Alexander Ivanov gets the money to buy Fabergé, and especially his most expensive egg, is not known. Some suspect him of having connections with high-ranking people in defence and law-enforcement, but he himself strongly denies that and says that he earned his wealth buying and selling antiques, although he does admit to having friends “in high circles”.
Incidentally, this is not the first time that the Hermitage has shown items from Alexander Ivanov’s collection – in 2015 Fontanka reported on the opening in the General Staff building of the Carl Fabergé Memorial Rooms and the exhibition “Fabergé in the Great War”. The exhibition’s curator was Marina Lopato, a Doctor of Art Studies. She also began preparing the current exhibition in the Hermitage but passed away before it opened. Now the temporary display is dedicated to her memory. The curator of the present exhibition is Tatiana Baboshina, a researcher at the museum. Andrei Ruzhnikov raised questions about the competence of both the creators of the display in his letter to Piotrovsky in a most unpleasant manner – probably forgetting that the self-same Marina Lopato had been a member of the advisory panel for the Fabergé Museum that he rates so highly, the one opened by Viktor Vekselberg on the River Fontanka. And, in point of fact, the Hermitage Director himself is a member of its board of trustees.
So, what about the Hermitage? Mikhail Piotrovsky with his characteristic wisdom foresaw conflict before the exhibition even opened, so when the media requested comments regarding the scandal, all that he needed to do was to refer them to his own foreword in the exhibition catalogue.
“The large-scale character of the business, the abundance of stylistic devices, the host of participants in the process, including first-rate craftspeople, high prices and the complicated fates of creators, clients, new and former owners – all of those things gave rise to massive activity by followers, imitators and forgers,” Piotrovsky warned, at a time when the letter from London did not even exist. “The authenticity of each fresh item that appears on the market can always be disputed and will be. Documents, receipts, the presence of a maker’s mark are no more than a partial help. The consensus of the expert community is not easy to obtain and is often lacking. That is why any kind of new publication is accompanied by discussion. And it is quite right when every new exhibition brings with it round tables discussing general and specific issues. It should be noted that questions of authorship and imitation have today become heightened even in the realm of classical painting (Rembrandt, Rubens, the Leonardeschi, the Russian avant-garde). This applies all the more to the realm of sculpture and applied art.”
The Hermitage Director does not intend to write a reply directly to Ruzhnikov. “The style and genre of this so-called ‘letter’ renders a ‘reply’ to it ethically impossible,” Piotrovsky explains.
And for Fontanka he added: “One needs to bear in mind the enormous difference between art specialists who are dealers and museum art scholars. The occupation of the former is buying and selling, that of the latter is preserving, studying and presenting. For the former a work of art is a commodity; for the latter it’s part of a complex cultural process. Nowadays there is good interaction, but that does have its limits, set by concern about profits for the one group and the pursuit of knowledge for the other.”
In its search for information about Andrei Ruzhnikov’s business reputation, Fontanka came upon a publication in the blog of Valentin Skurlov, a historian of the jeweller’s art, honorary academician of the Russian Academy of Arts, academic secretary of the Fabergé Memorial Foundation and, by the way, a consultant on Fabergé articles for the Russian art department of Christie’s auction house. In that journalistic article, Ruzhnikov is described in terms that are not the most pleasant, and the story is told of him having once already declared his readiness to argue to the last cent in court that the Fabergé “Egg-Clock” is a forgery. Admittedly, he apparently did so after failing to purchase it for his important client at a far from “phoney” price.
Mikhail Piotrovsky’s foreword to the catalogue of the exhibition “Fabergé, Jeweller to the Imperial Court”
Fabergé is back in the Winter Palace
From 1866, Carl Fabergé, the founder and aesthetic standard-setter of the celebrated firm and its distinctive artistic manner, visited the Imperial Hermitage’s Treasure Gallery over the course of 15 years, studying and restoring rarities of the jeweller’s craft. No-one familiar with the museum’s collections can be in any doubt that this experience had a powerful influence on the evolution of his taste and style. From 1874, Fabergé was supplying his own pieces to the imperial court. In 1885, he was accorded the status of “Supplier to the Court of His Imperial Majesty”, then in 1910 the title of Court Jeweller to the Imperial Court.
The year 1885 saw the start of the famous series of Easter eggs that under the Provisional Government were removed to Moscow, and later a considerable portion of them were sold abroad by the Soviet government. In 1901, Nicholas II bought the copies of the imperial crown jewels that had been produced with the consent of the court and took the Grand Prix at the World’s Fair in Paris. In 1902, with the support of the Hermitage, Fabergé held his first personal exhibition in the Von Derviz mansion. During the First World War, Fabergé provided medical equipment to the Military Hospital named after Tsesarevich Alexei that functioned in the Winter Palace.
In 1993, the Saint George Hall in the Winter Palace was the setting for a huge exhibition “Fabergé, Court Jeweller” that then moved on to Paris and London. In the British capital, it was opened by Margaret Thatcher. Many museums and collectors contributed to that exhibition, including the Forbes Collection. This was followed by a series of exhibitions in the Hermitage devoted to the Fabergé collections, and in 2014 the Carl Fabergé Memorial Halls were opened in the Eastern Wing of the General Staff building. At that same time, to mark the 250th anniversary of the Hermitage, Russian President Vladimir Putin presented the museum with two of the jeweller’s masterpieces – a Mantel Clock and the Rothschild Clock Egg. Today, the Hermitage is continuing the process and completing a cycle of sorts with a new large-scale exhibition in the Armorial Hall of the Winter Palaces, again reminding people of Fabergé’s “ties of kinship” with the Hermitage and the Russian court, of the way that in the work of the celebrated firm’s craftspeople admiration for various artistic periods blended with the taste of the imperial family.
Much has changed since 1993. Fabergé’s fame, boosted by the purchases and sales organized by Armand Hammer, has grown enormously – and with it the prices fetched at auction.
Fabergé has become a sort of symbol of tsarist Russia and in that capacity an object of veneration, making the purchase of his creations a mark of nostalgic devotion to tradition. Viktor Vekselberg’s sensational purchase of the Forbes Collection ended with creation, with the aid of the Link of Times foundation, of the splendid Fabergé Museum in Saint Petersburg, which has returned to this country hundreds of works by Fabergé and his fellows. Demand created supply and a large number of new works by the House of Fabergé, imitators of Fabergé and replicas of Fabergé came onto the market. Then, concurrently, several more wonderful collections and special museums came into being. Exhibits from three of them – the Museum of Christian Culture in Saint Petersburg, the Russian National Museum in Moscow and the Fabergé Museum in Baden-Baden – are combined in the exhibition with the traditional collections of the Hermitage, Pavlovsk and Peterhof. New items and approaches produce a distinctive fresh museum look.
The collective output of members of the Fabergé family and their craftspeople, famous and anonymous, became one of the phenomena of the Silver Age of Russian culture, refined by aesthetic admiration for the styles of different historical eras. Historicism transformed by “decadence”. At the same time, Fabergé’s distinctive style also embodied the aesthetics of the Saint Petersburg court with its somewhat elevated pomp and solemnity, which increased in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Together they became a romantic image of tsarist Russia, one that, it must be said, is fairly eloquent and emotionally true.
The large-scale character of the business, the abundance of stylistic devices, the host of participants in the process, including first-rate craftspeople, high prices and the complicated fates of creators, clients, new and former owners – all of those things gave rise to massive activity by followers, imitators and forgers. The authenticity of each fresh item that appears on the market can always be disputed and will be. Documents, receipts, the presence of a maker’s mark are no more than a partial help. The consensus of the expert community is not easy to obtain and is often lacking. That is why any kind of new publication is accompanied by discussion. And it is quite right when every new exhibition brings with it round tables discussing general and specific issues. It should be noted that questions of authorship and imitation have today become heightened even in the realm of classical painting (Rembrandt, Rubens, the Leonardeschi, the Russian avant-garde). This applies all the more to the realm of sculpture and applied art. The Hermitage already has an established practice of showing for the sake of discussion Degas sculptures of paintings by the school of Leonardo. Today we are presenting for the public’s pleasure a large collection of items that few people have seen previously. They are beautiful, full of historical energy, memory and questions. All this adds to the immediate impression produced by the splendid skills of remarkable craftspeople.
Carl Fabergé and his fellows will never cease to return to the Hermitage, the constant source of their inspiration and the custodian of the memory of their art and talent.
The opportunity for discussion (scholarly, but not commercial) around the “new” Fabergé pieces was incorporated in the project for the exhibition “Fabergé, Jeweller to the Imperial Court”. The planned press conferences and round tables with museum experts have been postponed due to the pandemic, but they will definitely take place. There will be a continuation of the project in the joint exhibition, scheduled for February, of historical Cartier items and the results of the restoration of masterpieces of jewellery from the Hermitage – “Cartier: Passing on Heritage and Savoir-Faire. Masterpieces from the Hermitage Museum and Cartier Collection”. In that case too, a scholarly-educational programme is planned, including an international conference entitled “Cartier: Dialogues about Art”.
