Metadata: The Gessen (Hessen) Card Catalogue
Collection
- Country:
- Russia
- Holding institution:
- State Russian Museum
- Holding institution (official language):
- ГОСУДАРСТВЕННЫЙ РУССКИЙ МУЗЕЙ
- Postal address:
- 191186, Россия, Санкт-Петербург, Инженерная ул., 4
- Phone number:
- (812) 595-42-40
- Web address:
- http://rusmuseum.ru/museum/
- Email:
- fzr@rusmuseum.ru
- Reference number:
- F. 191
- Title:
- The Gessen (Hessen) Card Catalogue
- Title (official language):
- Картотека Гессена
- Creator/accumulator:
- Gessen (Hessen)
- Date(s):
- no earlier than 1963
- Language:
- Russian
- Extent:
- 42 storage units
- Type of material:
- Textual material
- Photographic images
- Scope and content:
- The cards in the Gessen catalogue are half-A4-size, and filled in by Gessen by hand. They contain all the data known to him about the person in question, even including the artist’s home address. The backs of the cards are typically pasted with clippings from print publications containing photographs of the artist, reproductions of their works, press reports on them, and bibliographic information on sources of information. Some parts of the card catalogue include information on art events, exhibitions, museums, studios, art organisations, and newspapers and magazines that published articles on fine art and on techniques and materials used by artists. There is information on the Jewish artists N. Al’tman, B. Anisfel’d, L. Bakst, M. Dobuzhinskii, D. Shterenberg, S. Iudovin, and others.
- Archival history:
- The State Russian Museum (GRM) in St. Petersburg is the world's largest collection of Russian art. The museum’s history began in 1895, when on April 13 Emperor Nicholas II issued an imperial decree establishing the Emperor Alexander III Russian Museum, and granting, for its accommodation, the Mikhailovsky Palace, which had just been acquired by the state. In May of the same year, a restructuring of the palace premises was undertaken for the future museum’s exhibition space, as planned and overseen by the architect V. F. Svin’in. The museum statute, approved by decree of Emperor Nicholas II on 14 February 1897, indicated that the new museum would have three departments: the section in memory of Emperor Alexander III, the ethnography department, and the art and artistic-industrial department. (For more detail, see the description of f. 1, “The Ethnography Department of the Russian Museum (REM).”) The museum was opened to the general public on 7 March 1898, becoming the country’s first state museum of Russian fine arts. Forming the basis of the State Museum’s collection were items and artworks transferred from the Winter, Gatchina, and Alexander palaces, and from the Hermitage and the Academy of Arts, as well as items donated to the museum by private collectors. Currently the State Russian Museum constitutes a major museum complex, whose collections number some 400,000 exhibit items and encompass all historical periods and trends in the development of Russian art from the tenth to the twenty-first centuries.
- Administrative/biographical history:
- The fonds consists of forty-two boxes of handwritten cards containing information about art in the USSR collected from various sources – journals, newspapers, official reference works, publications of art-oriented higher educational institutions, etc. Regarding the catalogue’s compiler Gessen, all that is known is that he was an amateur who devoted all his free time to collecting information on Russian artists. The card catalogue was purchased from the private individual V. E. Lorents in 1963.
- Access points: locations:
- Russia
- Access points: persons/families:
- Al’tman, N.
- Anisfel’d, B.
- Bakst, L.
- Dobuzhinskii, M.
- Gessen
- Iudovin, S.
- Shterenberg, D.
- Subject terms:
- Art
- Art--Artists
- Exhibitions
- Museums
- Personal records
- Photographs
- System of arrangement:
- The fonds contains a single typewritten inventory; cards are mainly systematised alphabetically by artist name.
- Finding aids:
- An inventory is available.
- Yerusha Network member:
- Jewish Theological Seminary