November 19, 2002
True Fabergé Glitter
Comes to a City of Faux Luxe
By Steve Friess
LAS VEGAS — Peter Carl Fabergé's greatest public
triumph came at the 1900 World's Fair in Paris, where visitors
marveled at his handicrafts and made him one of the most famous
and popular artists of his era. It is strangely fitting, then,
that a rare American exhibition devoted solely to Fabergé items
would take place here in the capital of hype, where the masses
can once again see his delicate artistry firsthand. About 1,000
people a day have been visiting the exhibition at the Bellagio
Hotel and Casino.
What surprised the show's organizers was that the curators
of the Kremlin Armory Museum in Moscow so enthusiastically embraced
the idea of an all-Fabergé show here that they lent Fabergé's
three most revered imperial Easter eggs — as well as several
pieces of his jewelry never before exhibited — to the Bellagio
Gallery of Fine Art.
"Perhaps they realized there was then in 1900,
as there is today here in Vegas, an exposure to the mass public
that was very similar and which Fabergé would have fully approved,"
said Géza von Habsburg, who has written seven books on Fabergé.
The show, which runs through Jan. 26, is for
the connoisseur as well as the uninitiated, said Marc Glimcher,
chairman of the Bellagio Gallery. Besides the three crowd-pleasing
imperial Easter eggs, the exhibition includes almost 200 lesser-known
works in a 2,600-square-foot gallery. Each of the eggs, which
were annual Easter gifts from Czar Nicholas II to his wife,
Aleksandra, or his mother around the beginning of the 20th century,
has its own intrigue. The 1900 Trans-Siberian Railway Egg has
a map carved in silver of the 4,000-mile Moscow-to-Vladivostok
route, new at the time, as well as a tiny detachable gold model
of the train that can lurch a few feet if wound by a key.
Fabergé's 1906 Uspensky Cathedral Egg is not
only a likeness of that Kremlin landmark but also a music box
that plays two of the czar's favorite Easter hymns. The 1908
Aleksandrovsky Palace Egg is displayed in a glass case that
stands in front of a mammoth black-and-white photograph of the
cathedral to show how accurately Fabergé recreated it in gold
for a four-inch tableau that fits inside the egg.
Still, if the Easter eggs are the draw, the
highlight of "Fabergé: Treasures From the Kremlin" may be seven
pieces of Fabergé jewelry that were discovered in 1990 beneath
a floor in the home of the Fabergé workshop manager, Vladimir
Stepanovich Averkiev, and have not been exhibited together until
now. Communist troops raided Averkiev's home after the 1917
revolution in an effort to confiscate and destroy signs of wealth,
but Averkiev refused to reveal the location of the jewelry and
was killed for his obstinance. The items on display include
a brooch with a wreath of tiny diamonds and a diamond-and-pearl
ring.
The Bellagio Gallery, which charges $15 for
admission to the show, declined to reveal the cost of the exhibition
except to call it "spectacularly expensive." About 70 of the
almost 200 pieces on display come from the Kremlin, with the
rest loaned by John Traina, a collector from San Francisco,
and the art dealers Andre Ruzhnikov of Palo Alto, Calif., and
A La Vieille Russie of New York.
Mr. Traina's vast collection of Fabergé cigarette
cases has a prominent spot near the front of the gallery because
the curators say those items, coated with colored enamel, are
the least familiar to the public. Fabergé produced more than
140 colors by engraving gold sheets with a design — often a
sunburst — and then adding as many as six microscopic layers
of tinted enamel one by one through a heat process that has
never been duplicated. "These recipes died with Fabergé in 1920,
so nobody knows how to do this anymore," Mr. Glimcher said.
"No one can get six layers of enamel to stick. Three is almost
impossible. They don't know how he did it. By the fourth layer,
the whole thing cracks and falls apart. To get it like this
so you can't see the gold at all except its pattern is incredible."
Some art critics disapprove of displaying priceless
objects down the hall from blackjack tables and slot machines,
but that's Las Vegas, where a branch of the Guggenheim Museum
is an attraction at another hotel and casino. Joan Altabe, an
art critic who contributes to the Robb Report, said: "My problem
with mounting a show of any kind in a casino — especially in
the Bellagio — is that we are living in the age of reproduction,
so people who go to these places are surrounded by all these
fake sculptures, fake gold, fake everything made to look so
real. Then when you go into a space of original art, how can
they appreciate that this is original, one of a kind, never
been done before? There's no way for people to know the difference."
Mr. von Habsburg said that Fabergé would have
loved this sort of mass exposure, and Mr. Glimcher cited the
prominence of those who consulted and loaned objects to his
gallery.
"We put it in a casino because we know there
are going to be thousands and thousands of people coming here,
and when you're doing something new, you want to give it the
best chances for success," Mr. Glimcher said. "The fact that
it's in a casino is for other cultural analysts to figure out.
It doesn't mean anything to me."
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