Is it possible to support the National Art Museum, domestic producer, and restaurant business, all at the same time? Even the latter two components do not always produce a positive effect in Ukraine. As for artistic values, the ceiling in some of the rooms of the National Art Museum keeps peeling after the jubilee festivities.
Mr. Theodor Margellos, a Greek entrepreneur, is known in Ukraine primarily as an originator of the Ilta group of companies, particularly after investing over $20 million in the Oleina trademark. Anyway, he considered the pros and cons of the above triple combination and decided to risk it. Not so long ago, he presented a new unique restaurant of his own design, Le Grand Cafe. Located close to the museum’s entrance with the famous lions, the restaurant gave Mr. Margellos another idea. An interior combining French, Viennese, and Ukrainian motifs, and a mutually advantageous cooperation. At present, in return for a considerable interest in the actual value set by the museum, some of its miniature sculptures and canvases of the late nineteenth century embellish the Le Grand Cafe. To provide the required atmosphere (among the items on display are Oleksandr Murashko’s famous Maiden with a Red Hat and St. Barbara, eighteenth century, from Mr. Margellos’s private collection), the restaurant is equipped with the latest heating, conditioning, and even acoustic systems. The interior design is kept classically eclectic. Within several months the French family of Lora Welfling and George Patric de Richmond selected an ensemble composed of articles creating the impression of capricious, somewhat heavy eclectic dating from the turn of the century. Carpets with Ukrainian ornamentation, baroque cartouches and frames, ostrich-egg-shaped chandeliers, a Parisian fireplace, a Viennese grand piano, photos of actors from the Seine fair, whimsical compositions of prints and oils stand out especially impressive against this background. And there is live piano and jazz music in two rooms. The menu includes classic Ukrainian dishes.
The canvases displayed at the restaurants were bought by traders in the late eighteenth century and cost them quite a bit of money. Eventually, they took them from their guest rooms and libraries and brought them to the museum, so the rest of the citizenry could marvel their beauty. At the end of the twentieth century, a businessman rented them to show them to his selected clientele. Blasphemy? Does our art rate exposure at a restaurant, even a classy one? Rhetorical questions. What about the state that does not care about the national heritage? The sad fact is that, if it is impossible to finance if not the development, then at least a certain level of museum operation in Ukraine, it is better to have canvases displayed at a restaurant, rather than in empty and peeling museum halls; this way their being shown will at least give the museum staff their daily bread. Eventually, the start of the new millennium will see them with enough money to repair the museum and maybe even buy new pictures.
