Dr. Mikhail Piotrovski is visiting Canada for the opening of Voyage into Myth: Gaugin to Matisse, French Painting from The Hermitage Museum at the Art Gallery of Ontario.
The relationship between The State Hermitage Museum and Canada began in 1992 with the meeting of Mikhail Piotrovski and Robert Kaszanits, then an Assistant-Director of the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. The first collaboration was a $700,000 project to cover the museum’s 2213 windows with a protective plastic film. This collaboration led to the creation of The State Hermitage Museum Foundation of Canada, under the leadership of the Right Honourable Ramon John Hnatyshyn. The Foundation has now embarked on a $3.5 million project to catalogue the 2.8 million museum objects onto a state-of-the-art automated registry system wholly donated by Canadians.
Dr. Piotrovski will discuss some of the challenges of running a cultural institution in post-Soviet Russia.