On 17 September 2019, the formal opening of the exhibition “Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Tapestries in the Hermitage Collection” took place in the Halls of the Art Nouveau in the General Staff building.
At the ceremony Svetlana Adaksina, Deputy General Director and Chief Curator of the State Hermitage, said: “Today we are opening a unique exhibition –a display of 19th- and 20th-century tapestries that have never been put on show and for many long years remained in the museum’s stockrooms. The collection of tapestries in the Hermitage is very large and renowned. They create a certain aura and cosiness in the halls of the museum. They are very interesting to look at.”
Tatyana Lekhovich, the curator of the exhibition, told those attending: “The collection of 19th- and 20th-century tapestries is something that our visitors have never seen as an ensemble. We have presented some of them in temporary exhibitions, but now, thanks to the General Staff building having such spacious halls, we are able to display such large items. These are a part of 19th- and 20th-century art. They are the work of the same artists whose paintings we see in the neighbouring halls. This is a variety of painting, only made from thread, and when you view them, you see 19th- and 20th-century art from a different viewpoint.”
The museum is displaying for the first time a collection of tapestries from this period, in which the works of French artists predominate. The exhibition contains twenty pieces that represent European tapestry weaving belonging to such artistic tendencies as Historicism, the Art Nouveau and Modernism. Visitors will be seeing many of them for the first time or else after a long interval. Some came into the museum from the collection of the imperial family and once adorned the Winter Palace, others came from private collections in Russia. In recent decades, some tapestries of interest to the museum have also been acquired, including the first tapestry by Jean Lurçat in the Hermitage’s stocks – Blaze of Fire and a carpet designed by Fernand Léger.
The display of tapestries is located on Floor 2 of the General Staff building, where the adjoining halls present paintings and sculptures of the same period, the 19th and 20th centuries.
The exhibition curator is Tatyana Nikolayevna Lekhovich, Candidate of Art Studies, senior researcher in the State Hermitage’s Department of Western European Applied Art.
