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Awards Ceremony for Vladimir Potanin Foundation Grants

Published 06 December 2017

On 5 December 2017, the Hermitage Theatre was the venue for a formal ceremony reviewing the collaboration between the Hermitage and the charitable Vladimir Potanin Foundation in 2017.

“The Potanin Foundation is our long-standing, loyal friend. I want to thank them especially for all the good things that they do with us. Today sees the chief event in our series of joint activities – the formal award of grants. The grant competitions are an initiative that came from the foundation and it is indeed a very important one,” Mikhail Borisovich Piotrovsky, General Director of the State Hermitage, said, opening the ceremony.

“Behind each grant agreement there is a person and it is their contribution that is the important thing,” Oksana Ivanovna Oracheva, General Director of the Foundation, stressed. “I congratulate everyone once again on a successful year and I would like to wish you fresh innovative ideas.”

The State Hermitage collaborates with the Vladimir Potanin Foundation in a programme of individual grants for members of the museum staff. Since 2005 incentive grants have been awarded for projects of particular significance to the museum. Each year 50 members of the Hermitage staff receive them. Applications for grants are reviewed by the Grant Commission (with a representative of the Foundation invariably participating) and then reviewed by the Hermitage’s Academic Council. Grants are awarded for achievements in many spheres of the museum’s activities: for the creation of exhibitions and permanent displays, restoration projects, books and dissertations, for processing storage, multimedia projects, research and educational activities.

In 2010 one more type of award was established: travel grants for scholarly research or to gain work experience in museums, libraries, research institutions and the like. In 2017 these were awarded to 26 members of the Hermitage staff.

This year a further type of collaboration has been added: on the initiative of and with the support of the Vladimir Potanin Foundation, the Hermitage created the exhibition “The Stroganovs as Collectors” at the Perm State Art Gallery in conjunction with the Tambov Regional Picture Gallery.

In keeping with tradition, members of the Hermitage staff reported back on projects that have been completed. Sergei Olegovich Androsov, head of the Department of Western European Fine Art, spoke about the Stroganov exhibition; Tatyana Viktorovan Grunina-Shkvarok, an artist-restorer in the Laboratory for the Scientific Restoration of Fabrics and Water-Based Paintings, about the restoration of felt stockings from the second Pazyryk Kurgan (4th–3rd century BC); Dmitry Vladimirovich Liubin. head of the “Arsenal” Department, about research work in Munich to study the oeuvre of the battle painter Alexander von Kotzebue; Anna Alexeyevna Yeremeyeva of the Department of the Ancient World about a working visit to the British Museum’s Department of Greece and Rome.

The ceremony concluded with the presentation of the Grand Prix of the Iskusny Glagol [Artful Word] competition, a joint project of the State Hermitage, the Vladimir Potanin Foundation and the Yekaterinburg Museum of Fine Arts.