RUSSIA

www.hermitagemuseum.
org.html_En/index.html

The Sinner

Eternal Springtime

www.online.ru/sp/fresh/
museums/hermitag.html

State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg (Leningrad)

For information on scholarly publications:

Tel. 7 812 110 96 06
Fax 7 812 311 91 80
E-mail: delivery_post@hermitage.ru

Situated in the centre of St Petersburg, the State Hermitage Museum is housed in five magnificent buildings, containing altogether over 3,000,000 items of art. The Department of Western European Art is spread over the second floor of the whole complex and the third floor of the famous Winter Palace. Room 315 is dedicated to Rodin´s work.

Today the Museum is creating its digital self-portrait and offers a highly sophisticated Website with a searchable Database and images in various resolutions. Here are the results for Rodin work in the collection:

   The Age of Bronze,1876, one of worldwide 
       four plaster casts

   The Sinner, ca. 1885, bronze

   Eternal Spring, marble

   The Japanese Actress Hanako, 1908, terracotta?

   Romeo and Juliet, 1905

   The Poet and the Muse, early 1900s

   Portrait of Varvara Yeliseyeva, 1906

   The Cleveland Slide Library also mentions Cupid 
      and Psyche, marble, 1905, L. 67 cm, as part of 
      the Hermitage Collection.

www.museum.ru/gmii/

E-mail:
Finearts@gmii.museum.ru

Eve, 1881,marble,
height 76 cm

The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts

12 Volkhonka street
121019, Moscow, Russia

Department of the Pushkin Museum at the Russian State Humanities University: Moscow, 15 Chayanova Street
Telephone reference: 250-61-97

The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts has one of the most representative foreign art collections in Russia, including a vast collection of tinted plaster casts of famous ancient, medieval and Renaissance sculptures.

The Museum has about 600 West-European sculptures. After the closure in 1948 of the Museum of New Western Art over 60 sculptures were handed over to the Fine Arts Museum, among them works by Rodin, Maillol, Bourdelle, Zadkine, Arkhipenko. Many famous works from the former MNWA now in the Pushkin Museum are fromthe collections of Sergey Schukin and Ivan Morosov, who started acquiring Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings before these artists began to enjoy European fame. To these collections also belonged:

  Eve

   The Kiss

   Eternal Springtime

The Museum also owns a full size cast Thinker.

A good overview of the Pushkin Museum´s history and holdings can be found under: www.vgp.com/moscow/arts.html

www.museum-security.org/

00/224.html

Also quoted under:
www.theartnewspaper.com/
news/article.asp?idart=4117

Museum of the Battle of Stalingrad, Volgograd.

As reported by John Varoli, in November 2000 two bronze Rodin statues were stolen from this Museum in the south Russian city of Volgograd. The statues, 'Jealousy' and 'A Kiss' (The Kiss - HdR), Rodin's own replica of the famous marble statue, were given to the people of Stalingrad in 1945 by a French citizen, West Maccot, in recognition of the city’s heroic resistance to the Nazis. According to the Kommersant newspaper, Ms Maccot purchased the statues at auction in Paris in 1901. The museum gained possession of the statues in 1984, and since then they have been in storage and never on public view. The theft appears to have been carried out by two men who remained in the museum after it closed, and then made their way to the storage area where the alarm had already been turned off, which police have taken as evidence that the theft was an inside job.

http://www.museum-security.org/00/195.html

November 16, 2000


From: Alain Beausire beausire@musee-rodin.frTo: Jonathan Sazonoff saz@kwom.com

Subject:
Re: statues de rodin volées en Russie

Monsieur,

Le 10 novembre, j'ai ecrit au Musee de la Bataille de Stalingrad à Volgograd, pour leur demander des precisions sur les deux bronzes voles; en effet, nous n'avons aucune reference sur cette collection, ni sur la donatrice, Mme West Mackott. Rien non plus sur des relations avec Rodin... Nous ne savons pas si la lettre de Rodin (1901 - jointe au don) a vraiment existe et si elle est authentique. Il en est de meme pour les deux bronzes: s'agit-il rellement du Baiser connu de Rodin? Nous ne savons pas quelle oeuvre a ete nommee "Jalousie". Notre ignorance sur ces evenements est plutot mauvais signe, car nous avons la totalite des archives de Rodin (qui conservait tout); et les contrefacons et les faux sont tres nombreux, du vivant de Rodin a nos jours. Je ne pourrai donc vous aider qu'apres avoir recu ces informations de Volgograd.

Dans cette attente, cordialement

"Alain Beausire" beausire@musee-rodin.fr

Chargé des Archives et de la Bibliothèque du Musée Rodin 77 rue de Varenne 75007 Paris http://www.musee-rodin.fr

Source (now deleted):
www.dev.themoscowtimes.com/
stories/2001/02/05/041.html

Another marble copy of Rodin´s Kiss is discussed in the Moscow Times of Monday, Feb. 5, 2001, where Paul Starobin reports on the business tycoon Bryntsalov:

"Over by the bar is a white marble sculpture of a man and a woman locked in an embrace. A gold plate identifies the work as "The Kiss" by Auguste Rodin. Bryntsalov says he purchased it at the knockdown price of $200,000 from a government sanatorium in the Moscow region. It fell into Russian hands as a "trophy" captured from the Germans in World War II, he explains."

As far as the story is accurate and Bryntsalov´s explanation true, the statue was underpriced indeed; the marble Kiss stolen in Volgograd was reported to be worth ca. $ 2,5 Million.

www.museum-security.org/
reports/07498.html

Also quoted under:
www.exhibitionsonline.org/
artbrief/restitut.htm

A bronze cast of The Kiss that was stolen by the Nazis during World War II and had never been reclaimed is on permanent display in the Tuileries Gardens, Paris since the winter of 1998, in the hope the true owner may finally turn up.