The Soviet sale of Hermitage paintings in 1930 and 1931 resulted in the departure of some of the most valuable paintings of the State Hermitage Museum collections in Leningrad to Western museums. Several paintings have been in the Hermitage Collection since the creation by Empress Catherine the Great. About 250 paintings were sold, including works by Jan van Eyck, Titian, Rembrandt, Rubens, Raphael, and other important artists. Andrew Mellon contributed twenty-one paintings he bought from the Hermitage to the United States government in 1937, which became the core of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
Video Soviet sale of Hermitage paintings
Histori
In the late 1920s, the Soviet government desperately needed foreign currency to finance the rapid industrialization of Russia that was ordered in the first Five Year Plan. The government has sold a collection of jewelry, furniture and icons seized from Russian nobility, wealthy classes, and churches.
In February 1928, the State Hermitage Museum in Leningrad, together with the Russian Museum, was ordered to make a list of at least two million rubles of art, for export. A special body called 'Antiquariat' was created under Narkompros (People's Commissariat of Enlightenment) and opened an office in Leningrad to oversee sales. The Hermitage was ordered to sell 250 paintings for at least 5000 rubles each, plus carvings and a number of gold treasures from ancient Scythia.
The sale was secret, but words were secretly disseminated to Western merchants and collectors of art that the paintings were in the market.
The first foreign buyer to buy Hermitage paintings was Calouste Gulbenkian, the founder of the Iraqi Petroleum Company, who began buying paintings in the early 1930s, trading them for oil with Russia. These later became part of the Kalouste Gulbenkian Museum, in Lisbon. However, the sales organizers are not satisfied with the amount they receive from Gulbenkian, so they are looking for other buyers.
Andrew Mellon is an American banker, Minister of Finance to President Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover, art collectors and, at that time, the American Ambassador to Britain. He contains the idea of ​​establishing a National Gallery for the United States that mimics the model of the National Gallery (London). He heard about the secret Hermitage sale from Knoedler and the Company of New York, the dealer he used often for his art purchases.
Franz Zatzenstein-Matthiesen, a young German art dealer, had been asked by the Soviet Government to compile a list of a hundred paintings in the Russian collection, which should not be sold under any circumstances. He was immediately surprised to find several paintings on his list in Paris, purchased by Gulbenkian. Gulbenkian asked him to act as his agent on further purchases, but Matthiesen instead formed a consortium with Colnaghi in London and with the Mellon company, Knoedler. In 1930 and 1931 the consortium bought twenty-one paintings from the Soviet government, which they offered to Mellon, who had the right of first refusal. At the end of 1931, Mellon bought twenty-one paintings for a total price of $ 6,654,000. They include Van Eyck Annunciation and Raphael's The Alba Madonna . The last painting sells for $ 1,166,400, the largest amount ever paid for a painting up to that point. Consortum sells several other paintings to other clients, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Sales remained confidential until November 4, 1933, when it was reported in the New York Times that some Hermitage paintings, including the Crucifixion and the Last Judgment diptych by van Eyck, have been bought by the Metropolitan Museum.
The sale ended in 1934, possibly as a result of a letter to Stalin from the deputy director of the Hermitage, Joseph Orbeli, protesting the sale of Russian property. The Hermitage Director, Boris Legran, who had been taken to the museum for sale, was dismissed in 1934 and replaced by Orbeli.
In 1937, Andrew Mellon donated twenty-one paintings, along with money to build the National Art Gallery to accommodate them, to the United States Government. The paintings, and remains, the heart of the National Gallery collection.
Other sales were made during the same period, notably Codex Siniaticus of the National Library of Russia, sold in 1933 to the British Museum (after 1973 British Library) for  £ 100,000 raised by public subscriptions (worth  £ 6.5 million in 2018), and The Night Cafà ©  ©/i> by Vincent van Gogh.
In the 1990s, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation Parliament passed a new law banning the sale of Russian art property to foreign countries.
For many years the National Gallery reluctantly lent the paintings he bought from the Hermitage to the Museum, for fear that the Russian government would keep the paintings in Russia. The policy changed after 1990, when Mikhail Piotrovsky became director of the Hermitage. A number of National Gallery paintings have been lent to the Hermitage, including Titian's "Venus with a Mirror", which was lent to the Hermitage during President George W. Bush's first visit. to St Petersburg in 2002.
Maps Soviet sale of Hermitage paintings
Timeline
Februari 1928
Hermitage ordered to prepare a list of paintings for sale.
January 1930 Antoine Watteau, Pemain Lute (dijual ke Calouste Gulbenkian.
May 1930
- Nicolas Lancret The Beautiful Bathers , (sold to Calouste Gulbenkian, then resold to George Wildenstein.
June 1930
July 1930
- Anthony van Dyck, Portrait of Isabella Brandt (sold to Mellon syndicate for $ 223,000.)
October 1930
- Rembrandt van Rijn, Portrait of Parents , (sold to Gulbenkian for 30,000 pounds sterling Museu Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisboa, Portugal)
November 1930
- Adriaen Hanneman, Portrait of Henry, Duke of Gloucester (sold to Mellon syndicates)
- Veronese, The Finding of Moses (sold to Mellon syndicates)
January, 1931
- Rembrandt van Rijn, Joseph Accused by Potifar's Wife (sold to Mellon's syndicate)
February 1931 Frans Hals , Potret seorang Pemuda (Mellon syndicate).
April 1931
- Rembrandt van Rijn, A Turk . (Mellon Syndicate.)
- Anthony van Dyck, Portrait of a Flemish lady . (Mellon Syndicate.)
- Pietro Perugino, The Crucifixion with the Virgin Mary, St. John, St. Jerome and St. Mary Magdalene . (Mellon Syndicate).
- Raphael, Alba Madonna . (sold to Mellon Syndicate for $ 1,166,400)
- Titian, Venus with Mirror . (Mellon Syndicate.)
February 1932
- Giovanni Tiepolo, The Banquet of Cleopatra , (sold to Knoedler Gallery and Colnaghi, now at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia)
More
- Crucifixion and Last Decision diptych by van Eyck, purchased by the Metropolitan Art Museum in November 1933
References
Bibliography
- Selling Russian Treasures (lit. Sell Russia's Treasures) by Nicholas Iljine, Natalia Semenova and Amir G. Kabiri (project director). Publishing MTA (The M.T. Abraham Foundation), Paris-Moscow, 2013.
- Prodanniy Sokrovishta Russiiy (lit. Sales of Russian Wealth) by Nicholas Iljine and Natalia Semenova (project director). Publisher Russkiy Avantgard, Moscow, 2000.
- Kopper, Philip. American National Art Gallery - Gift for Nations . Publisher Abrams, New York, 1991.
- Serapina, N. Ermitazh kotoriy miy poteryali (lit. The Hermitage we lost.) Neva , Number 3, 1999.
- Walker, John, National Gallery, Washington , Thames & amp; Hudson, London, 1964.
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