St PETERSBURG, June 21 (Itar-Tass) - Russian President Vladimir Putin and the visiting German Federal Chancellor, Angela Merkel, on Friday had a tour of an exhibition titled ‘The Bronze Age: A Europe Without Frontiers (the 4th to 1st millennium B.C.)’ that officially opens for the public June 22 at the world-famous State Hermitage Museum.
The current exhibition is a second international project in the ‘Europe Without Frontiers’ series. The first one was dedicated to the Merovingian dynasty of Frankish kings and was held in Moscow and St Petersburg in 2007.
Apart from the State Hermitage Museum, which boasts having the world’s most expansive collection of paintings, sculpture, works of applied arts, handicrafts, and historical finds, participating in the Bronze Age products are the Moscow-based Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts and the National History Museum, as well as two German collections - the Museum of Prehistory and Ancient History and the Altes Museum.
The project has brought together the collectives of researchers from the leading museums of the two countries and, in particular, the ones who specialize in studies of the Bronze Age in Europe. For the first time ever, put up for a single united display are the artifacts showing various cultures of the bronze epoch from the shores of the Atlantic to the Ural Mountains.
The visitors will have a unique opportunity to see manmade products dating back to the so-called first pan-European epoch.
The list of exhibits includes a number of famous collections, like the artifacts found the Maikop Mound and the tombs near Stanitsa Novoslobodskaya, both in southern Russia, the Galich and Borodino hoards, the bronze relics of the Koban culture from northern Caucasus, the hoards of weaponry and household appliances from the territories of today’s Poland and Germany, and numerous artifacts from different parts of Western and Eastern Europe.
Another exhibition Putin and Merkel visited Friday night is called ‘Against the Light’. If features the best works of Germany artists of the 20th century from the collection of George Economou in Athens.
The latter display will be open from May 25, 2013, through to January 19, 2014.
George Economou owns the largest collection of graphic works and paintings of the most important representatives of German expressionism and the ‘New Objectivity’ school of the 1920’s and 1930’s who entered the European arts scene in the period when German society was overwhelmed by decadence.
‘Against the Light’ is a long-term display that is part of a five-year program of demonstrating the milestones of 20th century art at the Hermitage Museum. The goal of the program is to give the public an opportunity to get in touch with the main trends of European arts of the past century.