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The Red Room. Sirpa Pääkkönen For me one reason to return to Hermitage in Saint Petersburg again and again is Henri Matisse . When I was very young, I watched his paintings in art books and admired his bright and joyful colours and strong shapes. Emotions spread. Matisse gave me happiness and joy. When I very many years later stand in front of Matisse’s paintings in the Hermitage I can feel the same emotions which I felt as a young girl. That’s why art is so powerful. Portrait of Lydia Deletorskaya. St. Petersburg's Hermitage has one of the world's finest collections of   French artist Matisse's (1869-1954) art. A couple of years ago, the collection was moved from the main building to the General Staff Building   at the Palace Square, where the magnificent spaces for the museum's impressionist art, the 1850s, and the changing exhibitions, were renovated. Matisse's stunning paintings are enough for more than one room. The Hermitage’s ...

A painting by Anselm Kiefer. Photos: The State Hermitage Museum Here you have a good reason to travel to Saint Petersburg: In the State Hermitage Museum you can just now see a very powerful  solo exhibition by the German artist Anselm Kiefer . The exhibition is a contemporary artist’s dedication to the Russian poet Velimir Khlebnikov . The exhibition will be seen in the colossal Nikolaevsky hall of the Winter Palace where Kiefer has created about 30 new big paintings. For Kiefer, poetical production often turns into a starting point: “I think in pictures. Poems help me with this. They are like buoys in the sea. I swim to them, from one to the other. In between, without them, I am lost. They are the handholds where something masses together in the infinite expanse”, he describes. Great paintings are mainly brown and grayish by their colors. They have references to nature or to ships. The name is often Aurora or Untitled . The paint layers are thick and the oil paintings a...

The Hermitage in The Palace Square in Saint Petersburg. Photo: Sirpa Pääkkönen In recent years , the world's most visited museum has been the Forbidden City Palace Museum in Beijing, China. The annual number of visits has risen there up to more than 15 million. At the forefront of the world has long remained the Louvre in Paris (8.6 million visits in 2015). Northern European museums overwhelming number one is the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg (3.7 million visits in 2015). The Forbidden City. Photo: Wikipedia. These data derive from Statistics Finland'scultural statistical table package. The Palace Museum in Beijing is located in the imperial palace of the consecutive Ming (1363-1644) and Qing (1644­-1911) dynasties. The architectural complex is also known as the Forbidden City in the middle of Beijing. The museum has vast holdings of paintings, calligraphy, ceramics and antiquities of the imperial collections. In 1987the museum was listed as a UNESCO Wor...

Ilya Repin:What a Freedom In Saint Petersburg you’ll find about 400 museums. It’s a great adventure to search them. You’ll get to know many small museums like Bread museum, Vodka museum and many artists' home museums. And then there are big historical museums with thousands of pieces of art like The Hermitage and The Russian Museum . I've seen many of the museums in Saint Petersburg and I like them very much. If you have plenty of time you can spend a day in The Hermitage or in The Russian Museum The State Russian Museum is the largest depository of Russian  fine art in Saint Petersburg . It is also one of the largest museums in Russia. Kazimir Malevitsh: Peasants. When you watch the historical paintings you watch at the same time history through the eyes of artists. Many paintings are full of details and they give a shape for historical events, how artists imagine they have happened. You can also see how the styles change and the artist make great crea...

The Hermitage cat in the main staircase, photo by the Hermitage. In Saint Petersburg you can quite easily meet wild cats who live in courtyards of big buildings. Some friendly grannies feed them or they get their meals from wastebaskets or they hunt mice. Those cats I’ve seen very many when I’ve visited Saint Petersburg. What I would like to see are the Hermitage cats with their special reputation. But it’s not easy. You hear about them but you don’t see them if you don’t take into account books published from the Hermitage cats. Those you can buy in the museum. Now I don’t tell the whole truth, because I really have seen the Hermitage cats, but not in the museum. I have seen them in the Cat’s Republic in Saint Petersburg. It’s a special cat coffee shop where nearly 20 Hermitage cats have moved after they have retired from their work at the Hermitage art museum. So they wor k at the museum. They live in the basement of the museum and catch mice and rats and s...

The river Fontanka. Photos: Sirpa Pääkkönen The Hermitage Art Museum. The Hermitage Art Museum. The Hermitage Art Museum. The Hermitage Art Museum. The Hermitage Art Museum.

Henri Matisse: Punainen huone. Poljen kuntopyörää, kun katse osuu kookkaaseen, paksuselkäiseen kirjaan, Henri Matisse , jonka olin ostanut Eremitaasin taidemuseosta Pietarista joskus 1980-luvulla. Ranskalainen Henri Matisse (1869­-1954) oli tehnyt silloin vaikutuksen ja on hauska huomata, että sama taiteilija vaikuttaa edelleen yhtä voimakkaasti. Ihmisen temperamentista   ja persoonallisuudesta sanotaan, että tietyt piirteet säilyvät läpi elämän. Tiettyä pysyvyyttä näkyy olevan myös taidemaussa, ainakin omalla kohdallani. 1900-luvun alkuvuosikymmenet olivat kuvataiteessa tavattoman luovia, kekseliäitä ja visuaalista ajattelua uudistavia vuosikymmeniä. Taiteen rajat paukkuivat sekä Euroopassa että Venäjällä, kun uusia tyylisuuntauksia ja ismejä tuotiin näyttelyihin taidekansan iloksi ja ihmettelyn aiheeksi. Toki myös tuomittavaksi, kaikki eivät nielleet muutoksen aaltoja. Matissen ja hänen taiteilijatovereidensa mukana tuli fauvismi: voimakkaat värit, roh...