![]() ![]() The Calvert Journal looks at six of the collectors who saved Russian art’s greatest treasures. “I created my own world that protected me from a reality I didn’t really like,” professor Igor Sanovich said about his own collection. “Their passion for art stems from scientific interest: scientists seek harmony, beauty, and the internal supremacy reflected in outward things.” Collectors nurtured their love of beauty, sought the original and extraordinary in order to dilute the ubiquitous pragmatism and homogeneity around them. Agrophysicist Abram Chudnovsky deemed scientists to be the most sensitive and astute collectors: “It is crucial for people with a hunger for spiritual life to nourish themselves constantly with emotional impulses,” he said. For cardiologist Alexander Myasnikov and urologist Aram Abramyan, collecting was a means of escape from nerve-wracking weekdays. Solomon Shuster referred to his hobby as “a manifestation of independence” and “freedom”. “I’ve always wanted to show that even after the Russian Revolution in 1917, when major private collections were nationalised, the volume and scope of art collecting continued,” Anastasia Vinokurova, the exhibition’s curator, told The Calvert Journal. This gulf between two worlds is a recurring motif throughout the show. Ogaryov’s pictures, meanwhile, focus on the collectors’ households, reflecting warmth, liveliness, and spiritual wealth. Pilman’s black and white images capture laconic views of Soviet cities from Moscow to Tashkent, with their identical propaganda posters. They also document the striking contrast between this world and the socialist realist tradition. Photos by Igor Pilman and Leonid Ogarev, modernist paintings, and art-nouveau collectors’ portraits recreate the isolated universe formed by artists, their works, and collectors. The exhibition embraces the 1950-1980s, the period between Khrushchev’s thaw and Gorbachev’s perestoika. The lives of Soviet art collectors - who were usually among the intellectual elite of scientists, doctors, and artists - resembled detective stories, with forays into the black market, midnight bargaining, threats, arrests, police raids, robberies. The installation features more than 70 artworks from Russian and Soviet artists of the first third of the 20th century, from Konstantin Korovin and Alexandre Benois to Vladimir Tatlin and Kazimir Malevich. Until 19 August, visitors will be invited into the artistic alternative worlds built up by 14 Soviet collectors. The latest exhibition at Moscow’s Museum of Russian Impressionism, Seekers of Art, honours these collectors, who are usuallyovershadowed by the artists they championed. Yet throughout the Soviet Union, a select band jeopardised their positions to snap up modernist paintings, preserving what would later become a generation’s artistic legacy. Collectors who sought and obtained art by persecuted masters risked not only their wealth and property, but also their freedom. The Soviet authorities considered avant-gardists, nonconformists, and all other modernists to be inimical to the newly-established communist ideology, which preached cultural unification and disapproved of private ownership. But buying such pieces was fraught with risk. He and his fellow collectors sought true art, untouched by the lethargic, stiff socialist realism, to fill their collections. “But on the inside, as in Hauff’s fairytales, was the glow of beauty.” Shuster was just one of many Soviet citizens who tried to escape mundane socialist routine by travelling to the wonderland embodied in Russia’s unconventional, modernist paintings from the early 20th century. “The fate of all outstanding Soviet art collectors is comprised of squalid entrances, broken banisters, and cartridge clips of doorbells,” the pre-eminent Leningrad art-lover, collector, and film director Solomon Shuster wrote about his fellow connoisseurs.
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