By Maureen Hurley
When arts consultant Tony Wolff of Santa Rosa, went to St. Petersburg, Russia, in early 1990, “on a personal roots trip,” he met avant garde artists who called themselves “The Hermitage Group.”
Wolff found their work exciting and innovative—different than the usual avant-garde art—a convergent evolution paralleling the Western European artistic tradition.
Wolff some took slides, and upon returning home, he showed them to curators at art galleries and museums in Sonoma County. Many saw commercial potential in the Russian work. With that, the idea for an art exchange was born.
In the 1960s, an informal group of St. Petersburg artists, under the tutelage of painter/educator, Grigory Dlugach, managed to escape from the Ilimitations of official pseudo-art favored by the Soviet government, and its counterpart—underground art.
Soviet artists were forced to work within the dogmatic confines of “social realism” depicting the glory of communism and the happy prolotariat worker. Some chose to work “underground,” and from that counter-revolutionary movement, Russian avant-garde art was born.
The late Dlugach, who was affiliated with the Russian avant-garde movement of Malevich, Kandinsky, and who studied with Petrovodkin and Filimov, taught his students to look for the kamin (which literally means "stone"), the sculptural bedrock structure of Renaissance compositions.
Seeking the true roots of art, they developed a painting school, and literally found refuge in the tradition of the Masters in the Hermitage Museum: Rembrandt, Van Dyke, Delacroix, Cezanne. Hence the name: “The Hermitage Group.”
Curator and organizer for the traveling exhibit, Tony Wolff said, "As a result of their study of the Renaissance masters, the work is very painterly, not abstract, or minimalist; they're incredible crafts/draftsmen."
“When I saw the slides from ‘The Hermitage Group,’” said John Lofgren, director of the Sonoma County Museum, “I saw the work was extraordinarily exciting, and current.
In spite of all the changes going on in Russia, this work was based on Western European classical traditions—there was a basis of communication between us and them.”
Lofgren selected over 60 pieces for the SCM exhibition (May 22 – Aug. 30).
The opening reception is on May 22 at 6 P.M. According to Wolff, the April Hermitage Group debut at the J. Noblett Gallery in Sonoma was very successful. The 40 paintings and graphics on display were well received, and several pieces sold.
More of the Russian work is also on display at the Sonoma Arts Guild through May 31. Wolff hopes to secure a national tour for the collection of the Russian art after its Sonoma County debut.
The story of how Wolff brought back from St. Petersburg 120 paintings and graphics to America is typically Soviet: (Murphski's Law.)
After one and a-half years of intense negotiation with customs officials, and paying over $10,000 rubles to “buy back” their own paintings from the state, the Hermitage Group finally obtained appropriate customs declarations and documentation.
In Feb. 1992, Wolff flew to St. Petersburg to ship the paintings home in crates, but there was no lumber to be had in the city! So they industriously sewed the 120 paintings and graphics into burlap bags.
But at Customs, all was not well; agents began ripping apart the bags, saying the documentation was all wrong, but one agent just happened to be a student of the Hermitage Group, and so, with a flourish, they were sent Ithrough customs.
A lucky break—Dutch KLM airlines allowed Wolff to check the 250 lbs. of paintings as baggage for free—otherwise it would have been over $3000 to ship the art to America. “It was an insane comedy of errors,” said Wolff, “it was really a godsend the works were packed in burlap sacks, otherwise I couldn't have checked it as luggage."
How apropos—this art literally came to America like a stowaway wrapped in burlap.”
Money raised from the sale of the Russian art will help to fund a St. Petersburg/Sonoma cultural artist's exchange program.
Though Wolff has received small local grants from the Sonoma County Community Foundation and the Exchange Bank, he hasn't yet raised all the necessary funding to bring the Hermitage Group here. Wolff estimates he's sold over $6500 worth of the Russian paintings.
He's negotiating with Aeroflot to fly the ten Russian artists to Sonoma County to live and work with local artists—hopefully by the end of summer.
Ten Sonoma County artists will reciprocate the exchange by returning with the Russian artists to work at the Hermitage studios, and exhibit their own work in St. Petersburg.
The West Sonoma County Paper, May 18, 1992
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