Art Repatriated

The Lobanov-Rostovsky Collection

In the autumn of 2007, as Russian and international media clamored about the spectacular sale of the art collection of opera singer Galina Vishnyevskaya and her recently-deceased husband, cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, the purchase of another prominent Russian art collection in foreign hands was quietly germinating in the Kremlin.

The Prince Nikita and Nina Lobanov-Rostovsky Russian Theatre Art Collection, comprising some 800 works, was the most significant Russian art collection still abroad. And the Kremlin wanted it badly.

Ever since early 2004, when Russian billionaire Viktor Vekselberg purchased the Forbes Faberge Collection (which included eight Imperial Easter eggs), repatriating Russian art from abroad has become more common and quite fashionable.

Many surmise that then Russian President Vladimir Putin prodded Vekselberg to buy the Forbes collection, though the businessman denies it. In any event, by 2007 Putin (now Prime Minister) had certainly charged staff with seeking out and purchasing prominent Russian art collections still in foreign hands.

“The Lobanov-Rostovsky collection is unique in size, scope and composition and, among private collections is unequalled globally,” said John Bowlt, a specialist in the history of Russian art at the University of Southern California.

“The only real ‘competitors’ are the State Bakhrushin Museum of Theatrical Art in Moscow and the Glinka Museum of Theater and Music in St. Petersburg, but these institutions are both in Russia and carry rather different orientations, e.g. they encompass the 18th and 19th centuries as well as contemporary developments, whereas the Lobanov-Rostovsky collection is devoted to the period 1900-1930.”

That period, 1900 to 1930, saw Russian modernism flourish in close tandem with French modernism, and it is now seen by scholars as Russian art’s finest hour. The art market certainly agrees. The most expensive pieces of Russian art sold at Christie’s and Sotheby’s auctions date from this period.

Outside the community of theatre art specialists and Russian art enthusiasts, however, the Lobanov-Rostovsky collection was never widely known. Over the past few decades it has been shown at museums around Europe and the United States, first appearing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1967. In the West, however, Russian theatre art never had a blockbuster status.

In Russia, the situation was different. When the collection was first shown in Moscow, in 1988 at the State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, followed by a show in the Manezh Exhibition Hall in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), hundreds waited in long lines in the cold to get a glimpse of the rare collection.

There are two reasons for this. First, the quality of the works is second-to-none. But even more important for those who lived in the Soviet Union, the collection was like a textbook about a period that had been removed from the history books.

“The Lobanov-Rostovsky Collecton is a unique example of how Russia, a ‘backward’ country on Europe’s periphery, caught up to and surpassed the culture of the West, going further than cubism and futurism, and striving toward even more radical artistic directions, such as constructivism,” said Bowlt.

After Stalin launched his bid to consolidate power at the end of the 1920s, art and culture was turned into a crucial battlefield for control of the Russian intellectual landscape.

The Russian modernists, many of whom had enthusiastically supported and welcomed the Bolshevik regime, by the end of the 1920s found themselves labelled enemies of the regime. Some, such as Pyotr Konchalovsky, were able to change their spots and adapt to the new reality. Others, such as Kazimir Malevich, most famous for Black Square, were hounded to an early death.

Most of the modernists, however, emigrated to Europe and America, where they continued to create for the theatre, for the practical reason that it was the easiest and most steady way to earn a living. Not many of the artists had a strong desire to be stage artists. Most would have preferred to focus on their canvases.

Several decades later, nearly all of these artists were dead, and their theatre art had been utterly forgotten. In fact, it was not until the late 1950s that a son of Russian émigrés begin to rescue them from oblivion.

Nikita Lobanov-Rostovsky is descended from the line of Rurik, the 9th-century Viking whose descendants ruled Russia until the early 1600s. Nikita’s parents fled Russia in 1917 for Bulgaria, and Nikita was born in Sofia in 1935. Since Bulgaria has an Orthodox culture similar to Russia, many Russian émigrés – an estimated 34,000 – settled there after fleeing the Bolsheviks.

The Lobanov-Rostovskys stayed in Bulgaria through the end of WWII, when Soviet tanks rolled through, chasing the Nazis out of Eastern Europe. The NKVD quickly and mercilessly dealt with enemies of the Soviet regime, especially White Russian émigrés. Nikita’s father was arrested, and eventually executed. In 1953, the teenage Nikita and his mother managed to flee the country.

In January 1954, shortly after arriving in London, Nikita visited an exhibition commemorating the great Russian émigré theatre impresario Sergei Diaghilev and his Ballet Russes. Nikita was smitten by the costumes and stage designs, and one year later the struggling young Oxford student purchased his first work of Russian theater art for the princely sum of $10.

“Out of the 42 painters who collaborated with Diaghilev, 22 came from the Russian empire,” Nikita recalled. “I was so overwhelmed by the dynamism and bright, contrasting colors of the Russian designers, that then and there, a penniless refugee from the socialist undemocratic People’s Republic of Bulgaria, I decided one day to have such a collection.”

Many of the works that eventually comprised the Lobanov-Rostovsky collection were made for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, based in Paris, and which toured Europe from 1909 to 1929.

The collection’s top works include several costume designs for Scheherazade and Cleopatre, by Leon Bakst; Natalia Goncharova’s designs for Liturgie; Mikhail Larionov’s sets and costume designs for Chout; Alexandra Exter’s designs for Aelita; and Alexander Benois’s costume designs for Le Pavillon d’Armide, and Giselle.

“The Lobanov-Rostovsky collection serves as a historical registration and record of styles, movements, personalities, companies and aesthetic tastes,” said Bowlt. “The companies and theaters for which the Russian artists often worked (the Ballets Russes, the Chauve Souris, the Teatro alla Scala, the Chamber Theater) were, in turn, linked to other celebrated individuals of the day – impresarios such as Diaghilev and Morris Gest, writers such as Chekhov and D’Annuzio, artists such as Depero and Picasso, composers such as Prokofiev and Debussy, dancers such as Duncan and Pavlova, singers such as Shalyapin and Caruso.”

The collection also contains many theatre posters, including some painted by one of Russia’s greatest portrait painters, Valentin Serov. He did posters for Anna Pavlova, the greatest Russian ballet dancer of the first half of the 20th century.

There are also works by Benois, Dobuzhinsky, Annenkov, Ekster, Sudeikin, Chekonin and Chelishchev. All of these artists left the Soviet Union, and with the exception of Benois, most were forgotten in their Motherland in the post-World War II period.

“Cleopatra by Bakst is Nikita’s favorite and is the one thing he said he would take with him if he ever had to go to prison,” said Nina Lobanov-Rostovsky, Nikita’s former wife, adding that it was among those that were sold to the Kremlin. “It encapsulates free spirit and passion.”

Bowlt also said that the collection shows the versatility of Russian artists. They worked for grand opera and the cabaret, for the circus and the cinema, for vaudeville and music-hall, as well as in many countries – Italy, France, Germany, Great Britain, North and South America, Turkey and Egypt.

Nikita, now a U.S. citizen, went on to a successful career in banking. And he continued purchasing Russian theatre artworks – made simpler and less expensive by the fact that no one else seemed to want them. Prices were often less than a few hundred dollars – remarkable when one considers that today, one work can easily sell for between $20,000 and $100,000.

“The art dealer Vladimir Hessen knew Anna Cherkessova, the daughter of Benois, and he often went to France and bought art from her and other émigrés in the 1960s,” Nina recalled. “Once, my father gave me $100 to buy a new dress, but I bought a stage design from Petrushka – the one with St Isaac’s Cathedral in it.”

Bowlt said that the Lobanov-Rostovsky collection also represents an exciting case study in the annals of private collecting.

“The Lobanov-Rostovskys chose to promote what was, 40 years ago, an underrepresented subject,” said Bowlt. “They researched the history of Russian art, dedicated their material and intellectual resources to this subject, travelled the world in search of artifacts and assembled a monumental collection.”

Besides the artworks in the collection purchased by the Kremlin, a choice few dozen works remain in the possession of the couple in London.

A design by Goncharova for a stage curtain to the final scene of The Firebird is still in Nina’s apartment. The actual stage curtain is in the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, and it is that museum’s largest item.

“Goncharova’s design for the curtain totally and all at once captures the Russian feeling; it has all the main Russian themes,” Nina said. “When I look at it, I actually hear the music of the Firebird.”

There are four different stage designs for Petrushka in her hallway. She has 111 costume designs, collected painstakingly over 20 years, though they are from various productions. On the wall there is also a Benois sketch of a young Stravinsky playing music. All have annotations by the artist.

Back in the Kremlin in late 2007, Putin knew very well what he was after. Flush with revenues from oil and natural gas (then still trading at record prices), the Russian leader wanted to shop for fine art to decorate the Konstantin Palace, the official government residence in Strelno, outside of St. Petersburg.

Putin had been advised that the Lobanov-Rostovsky collection was just as worthy as the better known Vishnyevskaya-Rostropovich collection. And so, after about two months of negotiations, a deal was signed in February 2008. Officially, the buyer was the
St. Petersburg-based International Konstantinovsky Charitable Fund, a non-profit foundation controlled by the office of the Russian president.

During negotiations, the issue of conservation of the designs was a major concern. The fragile works on paper cannot be exposed to light for very long.

“Were you to show these designs all the time, as if they were paintings, they’d last no more than two or three years!” Nina said, adding that she worked closely with the new owners to help them understand the need to observe strict conservation measures.

With that promise, the Fund became the proud owner of the 810 watercolors, drawings, and gouaches. The collection’s legal seller, the Panama-based Europactole Properties Inc., was paid $16 million, according to Vladimir Kozhin, head of the Russian presidential property committee, and chairman of the Konstantinovsky Charitable Fund.

“The collection could easily have been sold for much more, had the owners decided to dissemble it and sell it off piece by piece at auction in the West,” said Elena Grushevitskaya, senior scholar at the Theatre Museum. “But it was important for the Lobanov-Rostovskys that it went to Russia.”

“Over the years, we have had offers to buy the collection, but it has been our objective to have it kept as a whole by one institution, preferably in Russia,” Nina said at the time of the sale. “We are very happy it’s gone to Russia.”

While the deal was signed in February 2008, officials kept the sale under wraps until June, when an official announcement was made. The reason for the delay is unknown, but it may have been connected with the March 2008 presidential elections. Kremlin officials may not have wanted to be seen spending large sums of money on art just as people were going to the polls in a country where most earn under $6,000 a year. Interestingly, in May, just before the Lobanov-Rostovsky sale was announced, Russian billionaire Alisher Usmanov gifted the Vishnyevskaya-Rostropovich collection to the Konstantin Palace.

Meanwhile, the Konstantinovsky Fund plans to build an arts center at the Palace. Since that is several years away, the Fund decided to display about one-third of the collection at the St. Petersburg State Museum of Theatre and Music from September 24 to October 26, 2008.

After that show closed, the collection was placed in the museum’s storage, where it will stay until the new palace repository is built.  RL

The sale of the Lobanov-Rostovsky Theater Art Collection was not the couple’s first contribution to enriching Russian museum collections. In February 2008, the couple donated two 20th-century modernist artworks to the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow, which has one of the world’s finest collections of impressionist paintings, including works by Monet, Van Gogh, Matisse and Picasso. The works, valued at €255,000, were Poet’s Melancholy (1916), an oil painting by the Italian futurist, Giorgio de Chirico, and Black Zigzag, 1924, an aquarelle on paper by Dutch abstract painter Theo van Doesburg. 

ART RECORDS: While doing less well than anticipated, Sotheby’s November 2008 Russian Art Sale still brought in £14.1 million and set new high sales records for seven Russian artists, including Bodarevsky, Polenov, and Makovsky.

READ MORE: For an excellent account of the 1922 mass expulsion of Russian intellectuals, see Lenin’s Private War: The Voyage of the Philosophy Steamer and the Exile of the Intelligentsia, by Lesley Chamberlain (Picador, 2008)

VIEW THIS: Filmmakers Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine unearthed a treasure trove of archival footage and created a truly great documentary on the Ballets Russes. For more information, visit their website: balletsrusses.com

READ MORE: For a masterful history of Russian art during the period these masterpieces were created, see Moscow & St. Petersburg 1900-1920: Art, Life, & Culture of the Russian Silver Age, by John E. Bowlt (Picador, 2008)

EXTREME MAKEOVER: Konstantinovsky Palace became a child’s labor commune and a school after the Revolution, was occupied by the Germans during WWII, and virtually destroyed during the liberation of St. Petersburg. No renovation was done until 2001, when over $200 million was invested to restore it according to its original 1714 plan, in time for the 2003 tercentenary celebrations.