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Arts

The dos and don’ts of the Russian art scene

Mark Hudson travels to St Petersburg to see how the nihilism of Bacon goes down in Russia

28 February 2015

9:00 AM

28 February 2015

9:00 AM

They’re doing fantastic deals on five-star hotels in St Petersburg the weekend the Francis Bacon exhibition opens at the Hermitage. With tensions between Russia and the west at their highest since the Cold War, ‘no one’, I’m told, wants to come here. No one, that is, except large numbers of elderly but well-heeled people from the Norwich area, many of them trustees and friends of the University of East Anglia’s Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts — co-organisers of the exhibition — who have flown out here for the gala opening.

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‘Francis Bacon and the Art of the Past’ is at the State Hermitage Museum until 8 March and at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich, from 18 April–26 July.

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