The Hermitage at the VK Fest 2018

 

The museum prepared a unique programme specially for the VK Fest with the title “The Unknown Hermitage”. Festival-goers were informed about various aspects of the life of the Hermitage, including some that are unknown to museum visitors.

 

Master classes given by Hermitage staff, art and a creative atmosphere – all of that awaited visitors to the VK Fest. Each of them was able to convince themselves that the Hermitage is absolutely up-to-date and very young despite already being “a little over 250”.

 

 

 

Ancient Crafts

 

The greater part of the programme was devoted to the art of the Ancient World. Anyone who wanted could take the place of an ancient craftsperson and make their own red-figure or black-figure vase, cameo or theatrical mask.

 

Cameos are rightly regarded as some of the most beautiful and astonishing works of art from the Ancient World. The task of creating them demanded much time and effort as the grinding and carving of stone is a highly laborious process. The creation of a single cameo might take several years of painstaking work. Visitors to the Hermitage tent were able to choose one of the exhibits from the museum collection as a model or use their imagination and invent their own design for a piece of glyptic art.

 

 

The theatre is a wonderful gift passed down to us by Greco-Roman civilization. Its symbol has remained for many centuries the pair of masks – comic and tragic. The majority of masks had to follow precise established patterns so that the audience could readily identify the various characters. Inspired by examples of masks from the Hermitage collection, each participant in the master class was able to make their own copy of one of them.

 

 

Particularly popular was the master class devoted to ceramics from the Ancient World in the Hermitage collection. Pottery played an enormous role in the lives of people in Antiquity. There were several ways to decorate a vessel, but the most elegant was painting. Visitors learnt about the great variety of different vase shapes, about different aspects of how they were painted and about the difference between the red-figure and black-figure styles. In addition, anyone who wished was able to create their own version of a vase – the subjects of the ancient examples were very varied and governed far less by strict rules, or canons, than sculpture, for example.

 

The master classes were conducted by Olga Gorskaya from the Department of the Ancient World.

 

17th-Century Dutch Painting

 

The Hermitage’s collection of Dutch paintings is one of the biggest in the world and the most significant outside of the Netherlands. A master class provided an introduction to the Dutch artists’ distinctive vision of the world and their special sense of beauty. Participants produced three-dimensional pictures based on works in the Hermitage collection.

 

The master class was conducted by Olga Atamanova from the School Centre

 

Stained Glass in the Tiffany Style

 

This year the traditional master class given by Hermitage restorers was devoted to glass. Festival-goers were able to watch the process of producing elaborate shapes from pieces of glass – a stained-glass creation in the Tiffany style.

 

The master class was conducted by Vadim Lebedev of the Laboratory for the Scientific Restoration of Works of Applied Art​ 

 

The Hermitage and Ballet

 

The Year of Russian Ballet was the inspiration for “Landé’s dancing lessons at the Cadet Corps” For one evening festival-goers became pupils of the first ballet school in Russia that was established by the French ballet-master Jean-Baptiste Landé.

 

The master class was conducted by the ballet dancer Yelena Malashevskaya

 

Another master class “Create your own theatre” was devoted to the same theme. Those attending had the chance to create – cut out and glue – their own little paper copy of a theatre with a scene from the ballet The Fairy Doll, which had its premiere with costumes and scenery by Léon Bakst at the Hermitage Theatre in 1901.

 

 

VR in the Hermitage

 

A virtual model of the Jupiter Hall was presented in its own separate tent. The joint project between the Hermitage and the company CROC provided the opportunity to “visit” the Hermitage and view one of its most famous halls without leaving the festival grounds. The virtual model allows you not only to stroll around the empty hall and inspect all its exhibits, but also to fly right up to the ceiling!

 

 

Dancing Hermitage

 

This year the Hermitage told people not only about its exhibits and buildings, but also about its staff members’ unusual interests. 

 

Alexandra Ivanova and Natalia Krestyaninova from the Legal Service gave master classes in dancing entitled “Hermitage Exercises” and “Dancing Hermitage.

 

Exercises with the Hermitage helped put people in the mood for active creativity, to get them to wake up and be cheerful.

 

 

Then along with the Hermitage team festival-goers learnt an easy dance that everyone went on to perform together.

 

 

 

Musical Hermitage

 

Ladomir Zelinsky (GhostNoir) of the Youth Centre entertained the public in the museum tent with his DJ set “Concrete Jungle” – “different music that helps people escape from the concrete jungle and to feel themselves in another world”.

 

 

Hermitage volunteer Mariam Kakushadze gave a demonstration of some virtuoso violin-playing. She performed well-known pieces of music in a variety of genres.

 

 

“The Unknown Hermitage” Art Object

 

This year an art object entitled “The Unknown Hermitage” was constructed before the visitors’ eyes – stage set-like screens decorated with elements of well-known and little-known works from the Hermitage. The central personages of this Hermitage “labyrinth of the intersection of the arts” were Rembrandt and Kandinsky.

 

The design of the screens and the painting on their front sides were made in such a way that they formed an anamorphic composition – an optical illusion in which scattered elements come together to form a single whole. A viewer standing in a particular spot comes under the piercing gaze of Rembrandt’s eyes from a graphic self-portrait surrounded by one of Wassily Kandinsky’s abstract works.

 

The art object that combined the abstract and the realistic, different eras and tendencies in art was to some extent a reminder of the Hermitage’s status as an integral encyclopaedic museum.

 

 

 

Hermitage Cats and Football

 

Russia hosted the FIFA World Cup in 2018, and we could not ignore that theme either. The Hermitage presented its own sports costume at the VK Fest, and invited visitors to the tent to also design their versions.

 

 

 

The Hermitage’s guests were also able to paint and take away as souvenirs blank wooden figures with a Hermitage cats theme.

 

 

Hermitage Quiz

 

Over both days, an “Unknown Hermitage” quiz was held in the Hermitage zone at the festival. The prizes for correct answers to questions about the museum were books on the Hermitage.

 

 

This year over 90,000 people visited the festival, while more than 1,700,000 watched the Internet broadcast.

 

Photographs: Olga Meleshkina, State Hermitage