The Hermitage Treasures: I

FOR decades art experts around the world have yearned to get through the Iron Curtain and see for themselves what is on the walls of Leningrad's famed, sprawling, be jeweled Hermitage Museum. Those who have been able to do so in the post-Stalin thaw have come away with confirmation of a long-held belief: the Hermitage is every bit as good as the Communists claim (see color pages for some of its rarely reproduced masterpieces). Sterling Callisen, the Metropolitan Museum's dean of education, who recently spent six goggle-eyed, footsore days roaming the Hermitage's 15-odd acres, says frankly: "It comes close to being tops in the world."

"I Am a Glutton." Praise of this magnitude is precisely what a grimly determined woman set out to achieve two centuries ago. When Catherine the Great (1729-96), born a German princess, came to Russia in 1744 to marry Grand Duke Peter (later Peter III), she found the nucleus of an imperial art collection started by Peter the Great, her husband's grandfather. After Catherine had forced her way to the throne in 1762, she sent fast-spending agents throughout Europe to send back wagonloads of just about anything on canvas that was for sale. "I am,'' she said, "a glutton."

To house her haul. Catherine built a series of apartments adjoining Leningrad's baroque Winter Palace, set up a hanging garden filled with orange trees (that were hustled inside for the winter), and coyly nicknamed the place her "little hermitage." When the revolution came in 1917, the Hermitage was squarely in the middle. For four turbulent months Kerensky's provisional government holed up in the adjoining Winter Palace. After gaining control, the Bolsheviks confiscated the top private art collections in the country, turned the Winter Palace into a massive, 1,000-room art gallery and office building, and opened the Hermitage to the public. (Admission: 3 rubles, or 75-c-.)

"They Hang Everything." During World War II, while Nazi armies besieged Leningrad, Soviet technicians huddled in bomb shelters deep beneath the Hermitage, patiently picked away at the staggering task of cataloguing the museum's 2,000,000 objects. The job is still going on. Today the collection sprawls through 322 halls and galleries that stretch some 15 miles. Strangely, the museum has no Russian paintings, which are housed in other Leningrad museums. But three of its six departments display only Russian objects ranging from Stone-Age relics to 20th century silverware. Under heavy guard in a basement vault is the Hermitage's prize display: a dazzling collection of Scythian and ancient Greek gold objects that may well be the finest in the world.

Massed tier on tier in the galleries are the canvases of dozens of topflight artists from 13th century Italians to 19th century French impressionists. Sample wholesale lots: 27 Rembrandts (including The Re turn of the Prodigal Son, often called his best work), 40 Rubens, at least a dozen each of Cezanne and Picasso.* The walls are magnificently cluttered. "The emphasis in Russia is not on art as we know it," explains Callisen, "but on culture and the history of culture. So where we would put some things in storage, they hang everything."

*For color reproductions of outstanding works from the Hermitage's collection of modern mas ters, see next week's TIME.

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