3 JUNE 1995, Page 50

Exhibitions

Twice Saved (Pushkin State Museum, Moscow) Hidden Treasures Revealed (State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg)

Secret treasures

John Spurling

Russia The Russian Parliament debated last week — without reaching any conclusion — the thorny question of 'Displaced Art', or, in round Anglo-Saxon, works of art looted 50 years ago from Germany by the victorious Red army. Two exhibitions in Russia are currently displaying some of the masterpieces that changed hands with the fall of the Third Reich, and have been stored out of sight and public knowledge ever since.

At the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow, for instance, a handsome woman in a loose, short-sleeved red robe stares at you steadily out of large brown eyes: she is actually drawing a head on the paper in front of her and is probably a por- trait of the artist Lola Jimenez painted at about the time of Napoleon's invasion of Rupsia, but she looks as if she was teasingly aware of being posted in the complete cat- alogue of Goya's works as 'whereabouts unknown'. Yet what might have seemed a brazen act of bravado on the part of the Russians — `yes, we've got it and we have the right and the military might to keep it' — becomes in the titles of the two exhibi- tions a more nuanced appeal for interna- tional sympathy. The Pushkin 'presents the Exhibition Twice Saved — European Paint- ing of the XIV-XIX Centuries Displaced to the Soviet Union from Germany as a Result of the Second World War'; while in St Petersburg Hidden Treasures Revealed is subtitled Impressionist Masterpieces and Other Important French Paintings Preserved by the State Hermitage Museum.

After visiting for the first time the sump- tuously but still incompletely restored palace at Tsarskoye Selo on the outskirts of Petersburg, which, like the other two great royal palaces nearby — Pavlovsk and Peterhof — was occupied, stripped and finally blown up by the Germans during the siege of Leningrad, my own sympathies are mainly with the Russians. The contents of the two exhibitions are extraordinary, beau- tiful and valuable, but leaving out of account all the other human and artistic destruction wreaked on Russia by the Ger- man aggressors, those three palaces were among the wonders of the world. The Germans may be offering to buy back their lost works of art, but they are lucky to find them at all, let alone in such pristine condi- tion. Where now, to take one small exam- ple, are the stolen contents and interior decoration of the famous Amber Room at Tsarskoye Selo?

The question is further complicated, of course, by the fact that most of the paint- ings in these exhibitions belonged not to the German state but to private individuals. Fifty-six of the 74 paintings in the Her- mitage exhibition were the property of the German industrialist Otto Krebs, who died in 1941, leaving his money (though not nec- essarily his works of art) to a medical institution involved in cancer research. He had no other heirs it seems, though, in the tradition of Anastasia, supposed surviving daughter of the murdered Tsar Nicholas II, a woman has now come forward claiming to be a relative. Krebs was very secretive about his collection and few people knew what his house in the village of Holtzdorf contained. During the Red Army's final assault on Berlin, however, General Chuikov, hero of Stalingrad, set up his headquarters in this very house; and Albert Kostenevich, the curator of this exhibition and author of its fully illustrated catalogue (Hidden Treasures Revealed, published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson at £30), told me he thought it most likely that it was Chuikov who sent Krebs's collection, virtually complete and in first-rate condi- tion, to the Soviet Union, making use of the railway carriage customarily assigned to all combatant Soviet generals for their spoils (Marshals got a whole train). There are recognised heirs laying claim to other works being exhibited, but given the quality of the three paintings by Daumier (two at the Pushkin and one at the Hermitage) they belonged to Otto Gerstenberg and were lifted by the Russians from safe-keep- ing in the Nationalgalerie, Berlin — and the fact that Bernhard Koehler's dazzling beachscape (`View of Fort Samson') is the only Seurat in all Russia, they are not likely to be surrendered merely at the rustle of Deutschmarks.

Indeed their putative market value is a ludicrously upside-down way of assessing what exactly it is that the Russians have been sitting on in silence all these years. Krebs's collection was formed not just by a man with a very good eye, but one who wished to represent, so far as he could, the range of his favourite artists. Thus his four Van Goghs include three from Provence (a portrait, a landscape and a version of Millet's `Going out to Work') and one from his last period at Anvers, 'The White House at Night' (listed `location unknown'). Krebs's four Gauguins are an early, Chardinesque still-life, an Impres- sionist flower painting and two ravishing figure-paintings from Tahiti. His five Pis- sarros juxtapose early and late town- or park-scapes with the rare and exquisite `Still-Life with a Coffee-pot', set against a densely patterned blue fabric, a kind of proto-Matisse. Krebs also owned five of the seven Cezannes on view — including a par- ticularly intense self-portrait in middle-age — a wailful of prime Renoirs, a clutch of Monets, five marvellously contrasted flow- er-pieces by Fantin-Latour, some Degas dancers and one by Matisse, three little Vuillard interiors and the odd Rouault, Toulouse-Lautrec and early Lautrec-like Picasso.

So, by this strange quirk of history, Krebs emerges half a century after his death in a country he may never have seen and which must have seemed then the ultimate threat to the survival of his treasures, as another Samuel Courtauld or Alfred Barnes, a man whose vision and judgment turned his com- mon-or-garden money into something of incalculable historical and emotional value. Gerstenburg and Koehler, who both died before the war, were well known as collec- tors in their own day; apart from Koehler's Seurat, their most striking memorials in the Hermitage are Degas's large portrait of Vicomte Lepic with two daughters and dog crossing the Place de la Concorde; an idyl- lic Renoir of a suburban courting couple at a table in a lush garden; and two outstand- ing Cezannes from Koehler's collection: a deceptively plain dish of fruit on a mud- coloured plank and a bare pink, green and blue close-up of Mont Sainte-Victoire.

Compared with the Hermitage's meticu- lously selected and catalogued exhibition, albeit somewhat starkly displayed and lit on temporary screens in the grand former ball- room of the Winter Palace, the Pushkin's — labelled only in Russian and without a catalogue — looks like a hasty attempt to keep up with the Petersburg Joneses. Here are early Renaissance Italians (mostly School of . . . ), an El Greco from Koehler's collection, post-Renaissance Dutch, Flemish and Germans, two Goyas and even three 18th-century English School paintings — two little landscapes by Mor- land and a portrait by Romney. But the gems of this heterogeneous loot, spilling out from the pillared exhibition hall on the Pushkin Museum's first floor to the corri- dors either side of the stairs, are again French: portraits by Manet, Corot and Renoir and two more of Gerstenberg's powerful Daumiers. All but one of the paintings in the Hermitage came from pri- vate collections, whereas many of those in Moscow were once in public museums in Berlin, Dresden, Bremen or Potsdam.

To whom should they all now belong? Or will they be divided between victors and vanquished (now again on history's fair- ground-dipper become the impoverished and the new rich)? These paintings at least are refugees to whom everyone would eagerly offer lebensraum.