Loan from Leningrad

By A. T. Baker

In Xanadu, once upon a memory, Kubla Khan did a stately pleasure-dome decree. Some centuries later, Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia set out to fill a comparable palace in St. Petersburg (now Leningrad) with Europe's finest paintings and artifacts. The result is now called the State Hermitage Museum, and it has one of the world's best and most encyclopedic collections, though it is also cluttered with much second-rate stuff. The Soviets have been reluctant to lend their treasures. Two years ago, Art Collector Armand Hammer, who is also chairman of Occidental Petroleum Corp. and a tireless promoter of business deals with the U.S.S.R. (TIME, Jan. 29, 1973), arranged for the first showing in the U.S. of a group of Hermitage paintings, all French impressionist and post-impressionist works. This spring Hammer persuaded the Soviets to send over 30 paintings more widely representative of European art.

The exhibition, which opens this week in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., is provocative but tantalizingly incomplete. The Hermitage has, for instance, 23 Rembrandts, and Hammer & Co. managed to extract just two, painted some 20 years apart. One is a tender portrait of Rembrandt's young bride Saskia, resting her hand on her presumptively pregnant belly; the other is a magnificent, hauntingly evocative biblical work painted when intimations of mortality obsessed the artist. There is a marvelous Chardin that Catherine herself commissioned to depict the "Attributes of the Arts." There is an exquisite early Gainsborough that looks ahead to his immense popularity as "face-painter" of the most beautiful women. The most spectacular picture is The Lute Player, painted by Caravaggio circa 1596 when he was only 23. No artist who saw its hard-lined reality, its dramatic lighting, its thrusting composition (the lute's throat almost reaches across the table to the viewer's eye), ever painted quite the same again.

Magical Boats. Perhaps because of the knowing eye of J. Carter Brown, the National Gallery director who helped select the paintings, the show has interesting examples of artists who are almost too catalogued in the common memory. Take Guardi. The mind leaps to Venice's canals, but the show's Guardi is a fantastical landscape of writhing trees and magical boats. Boucher? Rather than playful nymphs and naked amoureuses, there are a phantasmagoric cottage and tower that the brothers Grimm might have imagined. And Ruisdael, that painter of flickering Dutch light, is represented by a picture of a dark swamp--a savage place that could well be haunted by some woman wailing for her demon lover.

With the Russians, nothing comes without its price. In this case, the price was the inclusion of 13 Russian paintings from Leningrad's State Russian Museum. They are something of a revelation. Alexander Ivanov's Water and Rocks Near Palazzuola, painted in the early 1850s, is a strongly constructed landscape that Courbet could have admired.

As a portraitist, Ilya Repin painted Tolstoy and Conductor Anton Rubinstein with great panache.

After it closes in Washington Sept. 9, the show will travel to New York's Knoedler gallery, which, as it happens, is partly owned by Hammer, then to Detroit, Los Angeles and Houston. If it is not comprehensive, it is a superb sampling--a cabinet des arts that Catherine herself might have delighted in.

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