State Hermitage Museum

I was already in sort of a bad mood when we got to the Hermitage this morning, due to having a stuffy nose and maybe living in hostel too long. I think a visit to the Hermitage requires a head unmuddled by stormy thoughts and enthusiasm for planning; it has over 1000 rooms, and there’s no clear path through them, as it’s a palace, after all, not built as a museum. But I was too impatient (and possessed of a realistic estimation of my ability to follow maps) to do anything but walk off randomly into the museum and pretend that whatever part I found first was what I had been planning to see there all along. Unfortunately what I found first was the Rubens collection, and I couldn’t pretend for very long to like Rubens. But I couldn’t find my way out of the “Netherlandish” section, and I was lost in a maze of fat cupids and infants and group portraits of shooting societies... and my annoyance spread from Rubens to Dutch painting to large oil paintings... this was not a good track to be on, in the world’s largest art museum. You can’t just decide half an hour into it that you are annoyed by paintings, in general. Every once in a while I would find a room of not-Dutch painting, and it was always a very cheerful moment- this room of English watercolors (with a bunch of illustrations by William Blake, which I liked muchly), some welcomely ascetic Spanish art... but mainly I just looked at sculpture and old pottery and wood cuttings and things. It was fairly ridiculous. And then every once in a while I would have to sneeze, which would require rushing to the center of the room, as far as possible from works of art, and burying my head in my elbow. But the guard babushkas glared at me anyway.

Eventually I gave up and went downstairs to the “antiquities” section and looked at Roman statuary and cuniform tablets and such. After a long break from painting, I finally got over myself and decided to reenter the fray. I found a map and decided that I would go find the third floor. On my way, I discovered that the second floor was far larger than I had ever imagined, and included a lot more than fat Dutch children. But no number of masterpieces of world art could distract me from my quest for the stairway to the third floor (I did stop for a while to look at the Italian section, as I think you’re required to see to da Vinci paintings). How did the Romanovs ever find anything in that place? I would get lost every day on my way downstairs to dinner.

With the help of directions from a guard babushka, I eventually found the stairs. And the third floor was so cool! I may have thought so even if I hadn’t worked so hard to find it! It was French impressionists, if I am correctly employing that term, and junx. I really like Cezanne, and there was a lot of Cezanne. And Renoir. I should mention that my artistic tastes are almost entirely based on who I read an article about one time. Except for disliking Rubens. And I don’t remember ever having read an article about Matisse but he’s my new favorite.

Very few of the people in the Hermitage were speaking Russian. I really liked it when the language being spoken by the tour groups matched up with the country of origin of the art in the room.

Now I want to watch that movie Russian Ark again. I liked it a lot the first time, but now I know the set firsthand.