On Art

...The appeal, I thought, vividly demonstrated how the significance of art can depend on its ownership: Only 13 of the featured works were by Russians...

...As I moved from one bulletproof box frame to another, trying to savor the imprisoned Caravaggios and Matisses, I felt the grotesque-ness of the outside world encroaching rather than receding...

...As for comparisons, it would be far more illuminating to see a show that contrasted U.S...

...Yet I find it difficult to urge people to take in this show on any basis other than that of a-chance-to-see-what-the Russians-own...

...the Virgin is elegant, her infant wholesome and perky...

...A small canvas, it features a child enveloped in an almost Victorian ecstasy of piousness, and is notable solely for revealing, as the catalogue observes, the master succumbing at the end of his life to 17th-century Spain's taste for sentimentality...

...the remaining 30 were by such painters as Fragonard, Rubens and Picasso...

...Thoughts about the fencing off of everything worthwhile-be it paintings or the landscape itself-came racing to mind, and I wondered idly if new concepts in protective framing are unveiled at the same conventions that introduce the latest weaponry for the police...

...Even from the tiny Russian sample, one is inclined to the proposition that, except for their surviving pockets of regional and ethnic purity, big countries settle for an all-purpose bombast that defies critical assessment...

...Considering that the idea of East-West reconciliation is no more bizarre than it ever was, one must conclude the uneasiness has something to do with the recent highly publicized warnings against detente by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn...

...Yet if the catalogue didn't tell us, we would never know from its drab, derivative technique that its creator, through his decors for the Ballets Russes, started "a craze for exotic colors and patterns that affected most of the applied arts [in Europe...

...Like its predecessor, the current show, from the Hermitage and State Russian Museums, was masterminded by Armand Hammer, Chairman of Occidental Petroleum and one of Knoedler's principals...

...The Madonna of the Apple Tree," by Cranach, is equally contemporary...

...It is, in any case, more accurately a reflection on Russian lending policies than an assessment of the art...

...art over the last 50 years with that of the USSR...

...Similarly, the Guardi is an agitated landscape, not one of the painter's more characteristic scenes of Venice...

...I preferred the more modest contribution of Konstantin Somov, a younger contemporary of Repin's who, like him, spent time in Paris, seemingly to greater effect...

...But doubtless the sponsors are happy, and presumably Armand Hammer has reaffirmed his position as a star...

...It could more succinctly have been labeled a "media event"-rather like a television "special," something that promises more than it delivers and tries not to offend anyone...

...But at least the exhibit's organizers were wise enough to eschew pictures of heroic laborers, singling out instead one or two landscapes and some portraits of famous men and women...

...But this selection does give the impression of being rather arbitrary, the kind of thing that comes, as it were, from a team picking two from Column A and one from Column B. I cannot, for instance, see why Zurbaran's "The Young Virgin Praying" was included, even if no other examples of his work were to be had...

...Done sometime between 1775-85, it consists of a theatrically lit group of trees, yet is naturalistic enough to evoke the plein-air movements already stirring in Northern Europe...

...Admittedly, there are several absorbing works here...

...It is possible that there is no longer any way of responding directly to the old masters, drained of spontaneity as they have been by excessive reproduction, and by being torn from their contexts to hang in the grim eternities of museums...

...A press release describes the Knoedler exhibit as "an officially designated American Revolution Bicentennial Administration event involving a foreign government"-just in case anyone suspected it of being a spontaneous outburst, I suppose...

...In the light of what can happen these days, the incidents were of negligible importance...

...Like the recent show at the Met on French painting in the Age of Revolution (See, "Academic Overreaching at the Met," NL, August 4), these visitors from the Hermitage seem capable merely of arousing academic excitement or confirming whatever is new in contemporary taste...

...Apparently these, combined perhaps with the forces of domestic pessimism and dismay eating away at our culture, have succeeded in bringing art and life together in a manner that one might have thought would require nothing less than a major confrontation...

...The popularity of the latest imports would seem to indicate that most people, in the pursuit of art for its own sake, check their politics at the gallery door...

...The first was, of course, the group of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works lent by the Hermitage and Pushkin Museums in 1973...

...There is something indefinably wrong about the spirit of this enterprise, so that even the Rembrandts on view-"Saskia as Flora" and "The Condemnation of Haman"-ppear to shrink back...

...Possibly one would learn that countries too large to have existed as genuine political entities before the invention of electronic communications have difficulty producing art that can be related to the creations of the more human-scaled past...

...Hals' "Portrait of a Man," on the other hand, attracts one's eye for the modernist bravura of its brush-work, as well as for its relationship to the work of Manet that we have so often been taught to look for...

...Thus, Veronese's "Dead Christ with Virgin Mary and an Angel," a sober composition in muted colors, is interesting for conflicting with the familiar image of this artist as a celebrator of secular pomp in glorious Venetian palaces...

...Still, I must admit my perception of the exhibition, upon finally gaming access, was clouded by the atmosphere...

...marketing techniques...

...Meanwhile, the sidewalks were being patrolled by members of the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry, who were distributing leaflets urging us not to forget "the 'masterpieces' of another Soviet 'art,'" namely the harassment of Jews...

...The remark in the catalogue Introduction by Academician B. Piotrovsky, Director of the Hermitage, that "never before has such a representative exhibition left the walls of the Hermitage to be shown abroad," suggests he has been studying U.S...

...Altogether the picture is most unreligious...

...The full-length study of Tolstoy is little better-a shallow, photographically painted canvas that illustrates the author's populist beliefs by showing him barefoot in a forest clearing, wearing a peasant's smock...

...On the day of my visit, admission was delayed because the building was being searched in response to a bomb threat...

...through October 29 (and then to Detroit, Los Angeles and Houston) is actually the second such triumph for this gallery...

...Strapping pieces of 19th-century Russian art to the side of the package does not help, either...

...His portrait of seated women is well placed on the canvas and shows a sensitivity to character and gesture that can be compared to Eakins' Bakst's three-quarter-length picture of Diaghilev standing, with his old nurse in the background, is also a noteworthy character study...

...The overlife-size portrait of Anton Rubinstein in evening dress with baton raised, painted in 1887, is both corny and poorly drawn...

...Not having seen the museum's vast holdings, I can only guess at what would, in fact, have been representative...

...To put it mildly, the Russians suffer by having their oeuvre juxtaposed with that from an older and more sophisticated tradition, and their work is remarkable simply for demonstrating just how far the message of the School of Paris went...

...Well-displayed as they are, the pictures have no more impact than reproductions...

...Exhibitions of this type, I think, would be a lot more satisfying if they were conceived straightforwardly as the political and sociological pronouncements they are...

...The sense of anticlimax cannot be blamed entirely on the accouter-ments of security, though: Public relations and its elisions must take some responsibility...

...Nevertheless, there is an air of strain around this display that was not present two years ago...

...Whether or not the show symbolizes a crucial stage in the endless arm-wrestling between the two powers, one feels, as a spectator, a bit short-changed...

...Art, clearly, cannot always transcend reality, or even ameliorate it...

...Ilya Repin is one of the few natives included who is known outside of his own country, although from the specimens presented, it's hard to know why...

...These were taken from the State Russian Museum and they oblige one to switch to a different set of values to appreciate them...

...The paint is bright and enamellike...

...the trees, mountains and figures interlock into a virtually flat pattern...