Art critic Arkady Ippolitov died

One of the most famous contemporary Russian art critics, Arkady Ippolitov, a long-time employee of the Hermitage, essayist, writer, publicist, influential intellectual, world-famous exhibition curator, has passed away. He died in his apartment in St. Petersburg at the age of 66. Kommersant columnist says goodbye to colleague and “last St. Petersburg dandy” Kira Dolinina.

Starting an obituary with personal memories is not the most decent technique. But in the case of Arkady Ippolitov, a personal meeting (whether with his texts, exhibitions or himself) is almost always a powerful impression. This became clear at least from the first responses to his death on social networks: just as he himself recalled the most acute experience when meeting the books of Proust, Petersburg by Andrei Bely or the films of Greenway, so his acquaintances / readers / fans / friends now recall meeting with him. “He lectured us, he was bored with us, but how wonderfully he was bored…”; “The handsome Ippolitov, who was just over forty, read poorly, was distracted and bewitched. He spoke very slowly, and I couldn’t keep up with him. Sometimes there was nothing, but incomprehensible changes were felt throughout the whole being. Such a phenomenon of rich intonation”; “It was the 1980 Olympics, and I was in a hurry to visit the tourists; over coffee we started talking so seriously about art that the inspired Arkasha, leaving the house and continuing the conversation, remained in his slippers. We noticed this only when we reached the Griboedov Canal, and we were very happy”…

My first impression is of the same kind: I was 17 years old when I saw a tall, thin young man walking up the Theater Staircase of the Hermitage, throwing a fur coat over one shoulder; it was long, red and flowing down the steps like a royal robe.

This memory is not even about his unimaginable beauty, which was completely undeniable then, but about bodily and external freedom, the ability to subjugate space and time. He remained that way until the very end.

Today, when reading his biography, it seems that everything in it had some meaningful meaning. This is what always happens when big figures leave. There are several important points in the biography of Arkady Ippolitov: a Leningrad boy from a communal apartment went to an art history circle in the Hermitage, where he was lucky with the leader, an excellent specialist Elena Vaganova – later he would become her favorite student.

Having failed the entrance exam to the university, he ends up in the army, where “as an orderly at headquarters, he hid on a secret staircase and indulged in the delight” of reading “Under the Canopy of Girls in Bloom.”

The point, of course, is not so much about Proust, but about two years, after which he still finds himself at the history department of Leningrad State University, older and much more well-read than other students. In 1978 (for 45 future years) he came to the Hermitage, the only place of work that then made sense for him. But before becoming a “researcher” and being admitted to “things,” according to the laws of the Hermitage hierarchy, it was necessary to “run around” (he became the keeper of Italian engravings only in 1987). He was lucky – he worked in the museum’s scientific library for ten years. The place, frankly speaking, is not the most prestigious in the same hierarchy, but for Arkady it turned out to be the Klondike: none of the library’s laboratory assistants, who were always replacing each other, read as much in it as he did. Incredible erudition and erudition, which was admired by everyone who worked with him, were the fruit of these years. And one more quality that amazed his teachers, formulated by Vaganova: “the gift of artistic vision,” which included not only a unique memory for visual images, God’s blessing for an art critic, but also a talent for connecting things so non-obvious that this pairing seemed at first pure bravado, if not a provocation.

Life at the Hermitage was not unclouded happiness for him: squabbles, gossip, envy, attempts to sit him down and even fire him, but the main thing was the disproportion of his talent and knowledge to the usual average capabilities of most colleagues.

Already in the 1990s, one of the most prominent St. Petersburg curators who knew how to combine modern and classical art with impossible grace, he received the right to exhibit in “his” museum only in 1998.

His most brilliant period came in the 2000s, when he became the Hermitage coordinator in the Russian-American Hermitage-Guggenheim museum project. His exhibition Robert Mapplethorpe and the Classical Tradition: Mannerist Photographs and Prints (2004–2005) is still cited as an example by students on both sides of the Atlantic.

His collaboration with Zelfira Tregulova began with the Hermitage-Guggenheim, who, unlike Mikhail Piotrovsky, allowed Ippolitov to do the most incredible projects: “Palladio in Russia. From Baroque to Modernism” (Venice, 2014, and Moscow, 2015); “Masterpieces of the Vatican Pinakothek” (Moscow, 2016), response “Russian Way. From Dionysius to Malevich” (Vatican, 2018), etc. Her faith in him was absolute: “You could work with Arkady only according to the principle: either you give everything to him and believe that no one can do it better, or you don’t do it at all.” . Next spring, another joint exhibition of theirs, “Russian Fair,” was supposed to open in Nizhny Novgorod. Unfortunately, Ippolitov only managed to make a selection of works for it (which, however, in his case is in itself an author’s statement).

Ippolitov’s exhibitions have gone down in history, there is no doubt about that. However, this art is too temporary. The legacy he left behind is, first of all, books.

At what point did a museum curator, author of catalogs and essays published by Kommersant, Russian Telegraph, Snob, Russian Pioneer, etc., become a writer – you can’t say for sure. It is much more important that at some point he began to feel and imagine himself as such.

In logocentric Russia, calling yourself a writer is like hanging an order on yourself. But Ippolitov earned this order: about 30 books, not counting catalogues, almost each of which aroused interest, noise, controversy, sometimes scandals, sometimes prizes. At first it seemed that this was primarily art criticism.

However, he himself formulated it harshly: “My book is not archival, but armchair-literary.”

He was inundated with pointing out factual errors and inaccuracies, but he assigned himself a different genre: even in a book about his most beloved artist, Jacopo Pontormo (2016), the text as such, literature, dominated historical commentary and art historical analysis. It was his choice.

Ippolitov’s texts fascinate some and irritate others. Both are great feelings. These texts are verbose, with the most difficult turns and verbal figures, with leaps across eras and countries, the speed of transition in which few people can understand, with suddenly piercing personal passages, with exits into philosophy and almost metaphysics. Today, in retrospect, two main characters of this prose are visible: the author himself and his city. And this city is not Rome, as it seems to lovers of bookish scandals, but St. Petersburg. Arkady Ippolitov lived in the same rhythm with him; he saw his front and courtyard parts every day when he walked from his apartment at the beginning of Nevsky Prospect to work in the Hermitage office overlooking the Neva. With this city he experienced the rise of street and bodily freedom of the late 1980s and 1990s, with it he experienced the dying of his world in recent years. When news of Ippolitov’s death became known, one of his colleagues quoted a passage from his 2013 essay: “Once, looking at the November sky, the engraving grayness was similar to the sky in Melencolia I (referring to Albrecht Durer’s famous engraving “Melancholy.”— “Kommersant”), I realized with eerily clear clarity that I would die in November. It will be an ordinary November day, cold and clear, with a low, slowly but distinctly blue ball rolling through the cold, and everything will be as always. Somewhere they will drink tea, somewhere there will be explosions, somewhere it will be incredibly cold, and somewhere there will be unbearable heat; someone will commit suicide, and someone will be born, somewhere an unprecedented virus will appear, quickly spreading, affecting the guilty and innocent with purulent ulcers, and somewhere they will find a vaccine against it. I won’t be in this, I’ll die, I clearly understood that.” He turned out to be so tragically right, but we didn’t understand then: during these ten years we could have spoken important words to him more often and more honestly.