The director of the Hermitage is outraged by the Basner business

The director of the State Hermitage Mikhail Piotrovsky spoke about the detention of art critic Elena Basner. He called him an insult to the entire Russian intelligentsia.

“I believe that this is an insult to the whole intelligentsia. Such measures, when a woman of a humanitarian profession is put in prison is a spit of the entire intelligentsia of Russia, ”Piotrovsky said on the air of St. Petersburg .

On January 31, Elena Basner was detained by law enforcement agencies after she arrived in St. Petersburg from Helsinki for two days. On February 2, the Oktyabrsky District Court of St. Petersburg extended the deadline for three days.

A candidate of art history, who previously worked in the Russian Museum, who oversaw the large international exhibitions of the Russian avant -garde, is suspected that in 2009 it gave a false expert opinion on the authenticity of the picture of Boris Grigoryev, which was later sold for $ 250 thousand.

Today, February 4, the press service of the Russian Museum stated that Elena Basner "had never had the status of an expert <...> since 2003 has not been connected with the museum since 2003, and the museum has not been responsible for its actions."

The lawyer of Elena Basner Larisa Malkova will raise the question of the release of her client on bail, the Russian newspaper reports. “Such a measure of punishment as a detention is permissible only in exceptional cases,” Malkova believes.

Elena Basner’s colleagues do not allow her communion to fraud and fight for her release. Even collector Andrei Vasiliev, who bought a fake picture, opposes the content of Elena Basner in custody. The petition demanding a change in the preventive measure for Elena Basner, sent to the judge of the Oktyabrsky District Court of St. Petersburg, collected more than a thousand signatures on the Internet.

PS on Tuesday evening, February 4, Elena Basner was officially charged under Part 4 of Art. 159 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (“Fraud on an especially large scale”), RIA Novosti reports. The maximum punishment under this article is imprisonment for up to ten years. The decision to arrest Basner will be made on February 5 by the Oktyabrsky District Court of St. Petersburg.