One man's multimillion-dollar legal battle threatens chaos

One man's multimillion-dollar legal battle threatens chaos in art world

Hermitage museum may be forced to halt loans of treasures

Mark Honigsbaum
Tuesday November 29, 2005
The Guardian


The State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg - Russia's most important museum and one of the world's leading lending institutions - is threatening a moratorium on overseas loans, throwing into doubt the future of the Hermitage Rooms in London's Somerset House, as well as an exhibition at Tate Modern, due to open in June.

In an interview with the Art Newspaper published this week, Mikhail Piotrovsky, director of the Hermitage, warns there is a real possibility that no Russian museum will lend works to UK or other European venues unless it receives "concrete guarantees" from host governments that its collections will not be impounded, as a result of a long-running dispute between a Swiss businessman and the Russian government. He said there were grave doubts over the Road to Byzantium exhibition scheduled for Somerset House in March. "We must get immunity from seizure before this exhibition," he said. "There are only a few months to get the situation resolved."

The Hermitage Rooms at Somerset House were set up in 2000 to be an exhibition space for the St Petersburg museum. The Tate's Kandinsky show may also be affected. Both the Hermitage and the Pushkin Memorial Museum, also in St Petersburg, hold works by the abstract expressionist artist.
The threat was prompted by an incident two weeks ago in which trucks containing dozens of masterpieces belonging to the Pushkin museum were stopped on the Swiss-German border on the orders of a local Swiss canton. Instructing bailiffs to remove the paintings from the air-conditioned trucks, the Canton Valais said it was seizing the Pushkin's property, insured for more than $1bn (£585m), in restitution of monies owed to a Swiss company, Noga, by the Russian government.

For many years Nessim Gaon has been waging a legal campaign to get Moscow to repay a $70m loan for a grain-for-oil deal negotiated with his company in 1992. With interest, that loan has mushroomed to $900m. If the Russians did not pay up, Mr Gaon said, he would have no choice but to auction the paintings. In other words, the Pushkin's collection was being held hostage. Although the Swiss federal authorities quickly overruled the canton, the incident has had immediate and potentially damaging ramifications.

This is not the first time British galleries have faced the threat of Russian-owned works being impounded. In 2003 the Hermitage withdrew the loan of a Titian to the National Gallery after learning that Swiss lawyers were threatening to seize it and that the British government could not guarantee immunity. In a recent interview Charles Saumarez Smith, director of the National Gallery, said he was "troubled" the issue had not been resolved. "It is more than mildly shocking that great works of art should be treated by commercial companies as collateral against debts incurred by a national government," he told the New York Times after the Valais incident.

At a conference organised by the Art Loss Register in London before the Swiss incident, curators raised concerns about artworks being held hostage with David Lammy, the culture minister. The issue was also aired in September at a meeting of the Club of Three, a private group set up to foster good relations between America, Europe and Russia. But although the British government operates an indemnity scheme for public galleries, it has said it is unable to offer similar guarantees to private institutions.

The National Gallery is calling on the UK to adopt anti-seizure legislation. In the meantime, however, Prof Piotrovsky says the Hermitage has no choice but to reconsider all its agreements for exhibitions with countries "which cannot give proper guarantees to art and where governments do not understand that art is not a commercial commodity". He added that he was particularly perturbed that in the recent Swiss case, the air conditioning in the trucks appeared to have been switched off, placing the Pushkin museum's paintings in "severe danger". The works seized on the Swiss border near Basel included paintings by Manet, Van Gogh, Boucher, Corot, Millet, Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, Gauguin, Cézanne, Matisse and Picasso. A fourth truck was impounded outside Geneva, on the border with France.

Mr Gaon, an 83-year-old born in Sudan, who served in the British army during the second world war, has made a series of attempts to recover his money, including sequestering a Russian sailing ship in the French port of Brest and filing a suit seeking to impound President Vladimir Putin's personal jet. In this case, a national security clause was invoked by Switzerland's federal council to overrule the cantonal authorities. In a statement ordering the release of the paintings the council said: "In international law, national cultural goods are regarded as public property, which may not be confiscated."

Backstory

The State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg is one of the powerhouses of world art. Founded in 1764 by Catherine the Great, its collection, housed in six buildings including the Winter Palace, comprises more than 3m items encompassing priceless works from antiquity to the present day.

At the heart of the collection, occupying 120 rooms in four buildings, are works by Renaissance masters. The Hermitage owns two of the 12 known original paintings by Leonardo da Vinci, two Raphaels, and Titian's St Sebastian.

It also has an extensive collection of Rembrandts, Rubens and French impressionists (Renoir, Cézanne, Manet, Monet, Pissarro), plus Matisse's The Dance, Picasso's Three Women, and Gauguin's Woman Holding a Fruit.