The Road to Byzantium offers a striking new perspective on the art of the Greek, Roman and Byzantine worlds. It focuses on the luxury art s, mostly objects made for wealthy patrons from precious materials such as gold, silver and ivory. Such works were commissioned to exalt their owners and to impress and delight others.

The Road to Byzantium: Luxury Arts of Antiquity

Arts & Photography

Alekseyev, Andrei

History & Criticism

Fontanka Publishers

France in Russia: Empress Josephine's Malmaison Collection

First detailed account of how so much of Empress Josephine's collection came to be at the Hermitage Museum.

Reference

The Soviet cartoons, many of them unpublished, are taken from a unique private collection, and are juxtaposed with Western cartoons drawn from various sources. They reveal the extraordinary obsessions and propaganda campaigns that influenced the work of the Soviet cartoonists in particular, but also the remarkable similarities that can be seen in each side's depiction of the other. Superbly designed in the form of a book within a book, Drawing the Curtain is part cultural history, part art monograph. Contributions by Tim Benson, a leading authority on the history of cartoons, and Polly Jones, a cultural historian specializing in representations of Stalin, provide the context to the period, while extended image captions elucidate the individual works. This is a book that offers a very different take on the history of international relations in the second half of the twentieth century: through national humour and propaganga.

Drawing the Curtain: Cold-War Cartoons

History

Benson, Tim

Military

Henry Moore's evocative drawings from the so-called 'Shelter' series - sketches made in London's underground when it was used as a bomb shelter during the London Blitz of 1940-41 - provide the heart of this book, with over 70 drawings and 9 sculptures included. However, based on a first-ever collaboration between the Henry Moore Foundation and the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, the book also reveals some remarkable parallels with Russia's wartime experience by including drawings sketched in the basements of the Hermitage during the Siege of Leningrad - which started in September 1941 and lasted for 900 days, during which time almost a third of the population died from starvation. Timed to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the Siege in 2011, the book also includes documentary photographs of both the Blitz and the Siege of Leningrad.

Blitz and Blockade: Henry Moore at the Hermitage

Calvocoressi, Richard

Feldman, Anita

Piotrovsky, Mikhail

Androsov, Sergei

• Accompanies an exhibition at the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, from September 23, 2011- January 15, 2012This book is made up of nine classical sculptures from the Hermitage Museum, removed from their plinths and repositioned to share a raised floor with the viewer; and seventeen highly abstracted body-forms by Antony Gormley. The idea is to juxtapose ancient, idealized statues with Gormley's more disinterested sculptures and see whether, in Gormley's work, the abstract language of Euclidean geometry can make a shelter for feeling, and whether, in the case of the classical works, demounting and putting the viewer on the same level as their original makers can re-establish them as made things. The interaction of the public, captured in documentary photographs, is key to a project that aims to show how classical marbles, Gormley's own sculptures and the living human visitors inhabit the same space and can converse with each other.

Still Standing: Antony Gormley

Iversen, Margaret

Trofimova, Anna

Ozerkov, Dimitri

Antony Gormley: Still Standing (russian Version)

Antony

Gormley

In the 1880s, the artist, designer and illustrator Elena Polenova (1850-98) began illustrating her native Russian fairy tales. She worked from the recently published tales of Aleksandr Afanasev, as well as local variations that she noted down during her travels around Russian villages. In the mid-1890s, Polenova became acquainted with an English art journalist called Netta Peacock, who agreed to translate several of the tales into English. The original illustrations which Polenova created for the English edition—which was never published—and the accompanying translation are in a private collection that has only recently come to light. This publication, supported by the Polenovo Museum Reserve in Tula, Russia, draws on this hitherto untold chapter in Polenova’s life, combining the creative talents of the Russian artist and English journalist.

Why The Bear Has No Tail: And other Russian Fairy-Tales, Retold and Illustrated by Elena Polenova

Children's Books

Polenova, Elena

Fairy Tales, Folk Tales & Myths

Francis Bacon and the Masters presents more than twenty of the artist’s paintings, the majority coming from the extraordinary collection assembled by Bacon’s patrons, Robert and Lisa Sainsbury, over the course of the artist’s lifetime and now in the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, University of East Anglia, Norwich. Along with other landmark paintings from the Tate Collection and other major public and private collections, these are placed in the context of masterpieces from the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg: Egyptian mummy masks, Roman and Renaissance sculpture, and a number of the museum’s most famous paintings such as Rembrandt’s Portrait of an Old Man, Matisse’s Nymph and Satyr and Picasso’s A Young Lady. These remarkable works, brought together for a ground-breaking exhibition at the Hermitage and the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, are given further context by items and photographs from Bacon’s own studio archive, now in Dublin. The exhibition is guest curated in both venues by Dr Thierry Morel, and co-curated by Amanda Geitner and Calvin Winner from SCVA. The contributing authors are Dr Thierry Morel, Professor Paul Joannides (Cambridge University), Amanda Geitner (SCVA), Calvin Winner (SCVA) and Margarita Cappock (Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane).

Francis Bacon and The Masters

Morel, Thierry

Joannides, Paul

Geitner, Amanda

<ul>
<li>The highly distinctive art and humor of the Russian artist Alexander Voitsekhovsky</li>
<li>Previously unpublished in English</li>
</ul>
Alexander Voitskehovsky's paintings and drawings have long been a feature of St Petersburg's artistic landscape, loved for their idiosyncratic humor and other-worldy quality. Here they are gathered in a single publication for the first time, with accompanying exhibitions in UK and Russia.
Alexander Voitsekhovsky is doctor-turned artist who lives and works in St Petersburg, Russia.

A Whale Off the Coast of Norway and Other Encounters by Alexander Voitsekhovsky

Voitsekhovsky, Alexander

<ul>
<li>A new work taken in St Petersburg, Russia, and exhibited at State Hermitage in summer 2015, followed by an exhibition in London and Hong Kong; hitherto unseen</li>
<li>Mesmerizing photographs of palaces, including Winter Palace, and other public spaces in the city</li>
</ul>
In 2014, during St Petersburg's White Nights, the renowned German photographer Candida Höfer was invited by the State Hermitage Museum to visit the city. She spent ten days photographing several of the city's landmarks: the Yusupov Palace, the National Library, the Mariinsky Theatre, Pavlovsk Palace, the Catherine Palace, and the Hermitage itself. The 25 mesmerizing works that make up this book are the latest in a series of iconic interiors that Höfer has photographed throughout the world over several decades, including the Louvre and Uffizi Gallery, the Royal Portuguese Library in Rio de Janeiro, La Scala in Milan, and the Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza. They are characterised by the photographer's interest in communicating cultural memory, and are all linked by the total absence of people. Entitled Memory, the book develops the theme of a tripartite relationship between the person, the space and the past.
Candida Höfer was born in 1944 in the German town of Eberswalde. She originally studied film and photography at Kunstakademie Dusseldorf where she was one of the first students to use color in her photographs. Under the tutelage of Bernd Becher, Höfer developed the technical perfection for which she has become known. Her work has been exhibited worldwide, especially in Europe and the United States, where her first exhibition tour was titled Architecture of Absense - a fitting description of her compelling photographs of interiors in which people are entirely absent.

Candida Hofer: Memory

Individual Artists

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