The dos and don’ts of the Russian art scene

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.

If 2014’s UK-Russia Year of Culture passed virtually unnoticed for political reasons, the western visitor won’t experience the slightest sense of tension on the placid streets of St Petersburg. Bacon, meanwhile, may not be the easiest of British artists to sell here, for reasons that have nothing to do with the Ukraine situation or even his status as an avowedly homosexual artist in a country where gay people face discrimination at every level of society.