A star was hatched
Stephen Smith tells us how Peter Carl Fabergé dazzled the world with his exquisite eggs — and why they’re back in fashion
THE art world was agog when Damien Hirst sprinkled diamonds over a human skull to create For the Love of God in 2007. But Russian jeweller Carl Fabergé was doing the same thing a hundred years earlier, only bigger and blingier. He scattered sparklers over the humble Easter egg, for goodness sake, not to mention gold and platinum, too.
A canny purveyor of high-end conceptual art to the carriage trade, Fabergé was the Hirst of his day. That comparison would never have occurred to me before I went to Russia to film a BBC documentary about the master goldsmith of St Petersburg, who made some of the most eye-catching if ultimately useless objects the world has ever seen. Nor did I guess that you could see the whole of the past turbulent Russian century reflected in the shiny surfaces of Fabergé’s brilliant creations, if you looked closely enough.
At around the same time as the Victorians were reinventing Christmas in the West, Fabergé was doing a similar thing for the Eastern Easter. He took the Russian Orthodox custom of exchanging painted wooden eggs and gave it a no-expense-spared makeover. The acme of his art were the eggs that his workshop produced for his best client, the Tsar, who presented them to his wife and mother on Easter Sunday.
This was terrific for business. After the jeweller’s handiwork was given pride of place at the palace, Fabergé became one of the earliest brand names. His luxury goods were impossibly desirable to Russia’s emerging industrialists and businessmen. The great egg-man opened an emporium in London, where the British royal family were keen collectors of his gewgaws, and he was one of the first entrepreneurs to exploit the opportunities of mail order. In all, 50 so-called imperial eggs were made for the ruling Romanov family before they were toppled and assassinated during the upheaval of the Russian revolution.
The egg is a symbol of renewal and continuity, and it is striking how history has repeated itself in the life cycle of Fabergé’s baubles. Beginning as the playthings of a privileged and remote elite, they spent a long time in the wilderness in the Communist era, only to re-emerge in recent years as eye candy for Russia’s new ruling class, President Vladimir Putin and the oligarchs.
Malcolm Forbes, the American collector of Forbes Magazine fame, once owned nine imperial eggs. After his death, they were reclaimed for the motherland by oil and gas tycoon Viktor Vekselberg, who was named as the richest man in Russia last year.
Vekselberg, who is said to be worth some $18-billion, told me he paid $100-million for Forbes’s egg collections. To put that into perspective, Hirst’s diamond-barnacled bonce sold for rather less: £50-million.
I asked Vekselberg if the eggs gave him a warm glow inside.
“Absolutely,” he laughed. “But it’s very difficult to say what the real value of these artefacts is.”
In other words, they were cheap at the price, no longer the whimsical conversation pieces of the Tsar’s court, but part of the storied heritage of a Russian nation state rediscovering its pre-Soviet history.
It was in the same spirit that curators at the great Hermitage Museum rolled out the red carpet for us — or rather, an extraordinary and rarely seen
Fabergé became one of the earliest brand names
diorama of Russian scenes from the turn of the 20th century. Painted on what seemed to be a continuous roll of canvas, it stretched from one end of a stately corridor to the other.
This was literally the backdrop to one of Russia’s glorious cultural triumphs. At the famous Paris Exposition of 1900, scene-shifters were hired to pull the diorama past the windows of a pair of static railway carriages, so giving delighted visitors the illusion that they were clattering across the steppes on the new TransSiberian line, the world’s longest railway.
Fabergé, whose twinkling urns were the toast of the Exposition, was also inspired by the railroad. He commemorated it with — what else? — an Easter egg which cracked in half to reveal a surprise inside: a scale model of the rolling stock, fashioned from precious metals.
Putin’s passion for fancy knick-knacks is unexpected, I think it’s fair to say. In all the many photo opportunities depicting him as the vigorous father of his nation, I’ve yet to see him applying Brasso to the Kremlin’s own clutch of imperial eggs. Nevertheless, they are proudly on show a short walk from his office. They are tangible collateral of Russia’s wealth and prestige. I had a strange and slightly melancholy thought as I looked at them. Several imperial eggs feature cameo portraits of the Romanovs, and they seem to wear a minatory expression. Fabergé’s trinkets, which once elicited whoops of joy and astonishment around the breakfast table of the Tsars, have turned into memento mori, nagging reminders of mortality, just like Hirst’s bejewelled skull.
They caution all who gaze on them to remember a chastening truth. On history’s smoking hotplate, you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. — © The Daily Telegraph