Barcelona will have its own Hermitage: plans for the Catalan branch of the St. Petersburg museum unveiled

It was planned for this year, but the opening of theHermitage in Barcelona, the “branch” of the great St. Petersburg museum designed for the capital of Catalonia, is actually postponed until 2022. The museum will be housed in a building designed by Japanese architect Toyo Ito, one of the most important internationally, who was awarded the Prizker Prize in 2013: details of the project were released yesterday and it will therefore see fruition, contrary to what was looming due to political obstacles and bureaucratic difficulties. All that remains to be done is to wait for the Barcelona Port Authority’s okay (the area on which the museum will be built belongs to it), which will have to approve the project, with the approval of the municipality. 52 million euros will be needed to build the Spanish Hermitage (split between construction costs, materials costs, and museum project costs). Funding will come 80 percent from a Swiss-Luxembourg investment fund, Varia, which also controls 80 percent of the shares in the Museo Hermitage Barcelona company, while the remaining 20 percent will come from the Cultural Development Barcelona fund, another private individual.

The Hermitage in St. Petersburg, exactly like a commercial franchise, has licensed the use of the name and will lend several of its works (but the Barcelona institution will also have works of its own): the agreement has a duration of fifty years. The works will be housed in seven large rooms: in the largest, about 800 square meters, there will be works arriving from St. Petersburg, gathered in two permanent exhibitions (there will be works by Matisse and Giacometti, among others). Numerous facilities are also planned: a multi-purpose hall, an auditorium, a café-restaurant with a terrace, the museum store, an art library, a VIP lounge, and two panoramic terraces, all on a total area of more than 16,000 square meters, of which about 4,000 is exhibition space. For the initiative’s promoters, the Hermitage in Barcelona is expected to welcome 850,000 visitors in the first year (70 percent of whom will be tourists), rising to 1.5 million in the 13th year of its opening. The museum, they assure, will become a calling card for the city and impose new museographic standards: the project will be entrusted to the firm Total Museology, which will create a museum based on interdisciplinarity. Not just “works hanging on the walls,” then, but paths that will contextualize everything for a better understanding of the world around us. The entrance fee is expected to cost 13 euros.

Pictured: the design of the Hermitage in Barcelona prepared by Toyo Ito.

Barcelona will have its own Hermitage: plans for the Catalan branch of the St. Petersburg museum unveiled

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