On 9 October 2020, the Hermitage Days formally opened in Kaluga. In keeping with tradition, they are based at the Kaluga Museum of Fine Arts.
“Today there is a big cause for celebration in our museum – the fifth exhibition from the State Hermitage. This genre, the exhibition of a single painting, provides great opportunities. Although it presents just one work, that one is a masterpiece. This allows us to carry out extensive educational work around the picture and we will be doing so throughout the duration of the exhibition. But, of course, there will be lectures, programmes for children and concerts most of all during the Hermitage Days,” Natalia Marchenko, Director of the Kaluga Museum of Fine Arts, said at the opening ceremony.
Mikhail Piotrovsky, General Director of the State Hermitage, sent video greetings to the participants in the ceremony: “I am very pleased to be opening these Hermitage Days in Kaluga and greatly regret not being able to do so in person, but at the moment these are the formats we have. This time in Kaluga we are trying both old and new methods of interacting with each other and with the visitors. This is not the first time that we have held Hermitage Days in Kaluga and on each occasion we bring masterpieces, some very diverse ones, be it The Tolstoy Family in Venice or The Battle of Maloyaroslavl. All of this is very much in tune with Kaluga because it is a city with a host of different faces and stories. Here military history, religious history and the history of noble families all intersect. There is everything in Kaluga, and so it is interesting for us, as a universal museum, to come here.”
The central event of the Hermitage Days was the opening of the exhibition of the painting by Pierre Auguste Renoir Young Girls at the Piano from the State Hermitage. After the formal ceremony, Olga Leontyeva, a researcher in the Hermitage’s Department of Western European Fine Art, gave a lecture on the painting that was broadcast on the Kaluga museum’s social media.
“Today we are opening an exhibition of a single masterpiece. Not every picture can cope with such a task, when the public’s entire attention is concentrated on it alone. In my opinion, Young Girls at the Piano is excellently suited to that important role. In the State Hermitage, this painting is displayed in one of the halls of Renoir and is somewhat lost among the artist’s more striking pictures. In the Kaluga museum, it has acquired a worthy place, and this exhibition will allow us members of the Hermitage staff to take a fresh look at it as well,” Olga Leontyeva observed.
The opening ceremony included performances by students and teachers of the Kaluga Region Music College named after Sergei Taneyev. They played works by Edvard Grieg, Johannes Brahms and Claude Debussy that the young subjects of Renoir’s painting may have performed on the piano.
The Hermitage Days in Kaluga will run from 9 to 11 October and will be devoted to the theme of French and Russian Impressionism. A new development this year will be online broadcasts and virtual tours in the social networks. The Hermitage cinema will be operating in the Kaluga museum: viewers will be able to acquaint themselves with films and guided tours created by members of the Hermitage staff during the pandemic and also to watch a five-hour cinematic journey around the museum shot in conjunction with the Apple corporation.
