At Home with the Tsar
June 2004
By All things imperial are back in fashion again. So much so that an exhibit of objects that belonged to Russia’s last tsar and tsarina, which opened at New Mexico’s Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe May 28, lost its centerpiece in February after a Russian billionaire bought the Fabergé wedding icon and returned it home to the Kremlin for Orthodox Easter (see Art & Antiques, March 2004, page 38). Organizers of “Nicholas & Alexandra: At Home with the Last Tsar and His Family” found the object’s replacement—a gilded basket of Fabergé lilies—in the decorative arts trove of the New Orleans Museum of Art.The high-stakes vying surrounding an object planned for inclusion in this exhibit and Russian decorative arts in general is a function both of the new liquidity of Russian investors and also the country’s eagerness to re-examine relics of its lost empire, says Marilyn Swezey, curator of “Nicholas & Alexandra” and an independent Russian art and history scholar based in Washington, D.C. The Romanov empire had once spanned one-sixth of the earth’s ground, and the exhibition, which can be seen through September 5 in Santa Fe, will offer an intimate look at the domestic life of Russia’s last imperial couple. The show spotlights how Nicholas and Alexandra were modern in tastes. They also were martyrs to history: The couple was executed, along with their children, in 1918 at Yekaterinburg.
New Mexico’s Museum of Fine Arts, the exhibition’s first venue, is neighbor to the city’s Palace of the Governors. This oldest-surviving public building in the United States housed New Mexico’s first Spanish Colonial government. Observers have suggested that this pairing is postmodernism in action: Russia’s imperial interiors recalled in a city that by turns commemorates its Spanish founders and the uprisings that ousted them.
Included in the show and representative of the Russian empire is a uniformed Fabergé statuette of Kamerkazak Kudinov, a Cossack palace guard, which sports diamond and sapphire studded piping down his uniform; noblesse oblige reveals itself in a satin embroidered apron that Alexandra, the granddaughter of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, wore when hosting charitable events—and into whose pockets she reportedly tucked token contributions.
An official 1896 portrait of Nicholas II by Ilya Repin places the tsar amid flowering plants on a summer veranda. He wears a similar military uniform, replete with epaulets and medals, in a photographic portrait that pairs him, seated, with a standing Alexandra wearing a cap-sleeved gown decked with flower garlands in a verdant interior.
If Nicholas II and Alexandra were eager to demonstrate the abundance of nature in public portraits, they also were very interested in technology in their private lives, Swezey observes. The progressive couple added electricity to the Alexander Palace and had a foundry design and install an elevator in 1913. Nicholas II was an amateur photographer, and his family portraits abound in this show. Many family letters complementing the photographs help to establish documentary flavor.
Sketches of furniture arrangements, floor plans, as well as period watercolors of palace interiors help visitors imagine what the palace—one of eight the family occupied—looked like before the Bolshevik Revolution. “The family rooms were in the styles of the day,” Swezey explains. “Alexandra’s sitting room was a typical Victorian lady’s sitting room. The study was Edwardian, and the corner reception room was Chippendale-style.”
Closely held details of the couple’s daily life include flatware and an etched amethyst glass tea set. An Art Nouveau– influenced 1904 English-made table lamp and ashtray speak to influences from without. Books from Alexandra’s library include a 1912 edition of Omar Khayyam’s The Rubaiyat inscribed “For my darling Alix, [from] Nicky.”
It is testimony, perhaps, to the clamor for vestiges of lost history that the late cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post, like Malcolm Forbes, was a fan of Russian decorative arts and kept some Romanov family objects at Hillwood, her home-turned-museum in Washington, D.C. Hillwood lent to the show a 1913 Tercentenary brooch made in the Fabergé workshop of Albert Holmstrom, which also created the lily basket. The bauble, crusted with gold, aquamarines, rubies and diamonds, was presented in commemoration of the 300th anniversary of Romanov rule in 1913.
The subplots about the sorts of objects that endure over dictators, wars, occupations and finally, glasnost are striking. For example, children’s toys occupy a large segment of the exhibition, perhaps because they were overlooked by ensuing rulers with bigger prerogatives than the playroom.
If “Nicholas & Alexandra” boasts a share of objects that invite viewers to read closely between the lines, one such example is the textile Alexandra commissioned in France in 1900: a Gobelin tapestry reproduction of Marie Vigée-Lebrun’s portrait of Marie Antoinette and her children. Surely today the rulers’ shared fate imparts a dose of high irony to this roadshow of both domestic and precious objects.