collectors

"Sexy” perfectly defines the current state of the Russian art market - appealing, interesting, stimulating and inviting. Since the late 1990s Russian art has steadily emerged as one of the most dramatic, dynamic and exciting collecting areas. The meteoric rise in prices achieved each season at auction captivates every business and art-related paper and journal. Conjecture abounds in media headlines that address successful auction buyers in a most reductionist manner, the "mysterious Russian,” or the "anonymous Ukrainian;” these are the new heroes who buttress auction sales across different collecting categories. Individuals from different industries scramble to uncover identities and dissect collecting patterns. Who are these masked individuals? How can we characterize their collecting behavior?

Ilya Semenovich Ostroukhov was a leading collector in the Moscow art world of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His collection, which later became the Icons and Paintings Museum, located in Ostroukhov's home on Trubnikovsky Pereulok near the Arbat, was referred to in a 1914 city-guide as one of Moscow's foremost attractions[1], and was frequented by art lovers, which gave considerable trouble, as well as pleasure, to its owner. Ostroukhov was by that time a well-known landscape artist, first actively involved in the Peredvizhniki (Wanderers) movement, who later rebelled against and broke with that group, creating in 1903 together with fellow malcontents who had split from the movement the Union of Russian Artists, concentrated primarily on the Moscow tradition of painting.

The publication of this article is a tribute to its author, Irina Alexandrovna Kuznetsova, who for more than 50 years curated French and English painting at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts. The Pushkin Museum, where she took her first job at 17, became for her not just a workplace but a home requiring unremitting care. She was born in 1913, a year after the opening of the Museum, to the construction of which her father Alexander Kuznetsov, a founder of the Russian school of industrial design, contributed. She graduated with a degree in art history from the famous Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature and History (MIFLI) before World War II, and in November 1943 she defended a doctoral thesis on the history of English portraiture. Kuznetsova authored many books and articles, and put together and wrote essays for many albums and catalogues devoted to French and English art of the 17th-19th centuries. Her greatest academic achievement was a catalogue raisonne of French paintings of the 16th-19th centuries from the Pushkin Museum collection, prepared together with Yelena Sharnova and published in 2001. She placed especially great emphasis on the pictures’ origin and their histories as they made their way through European and Russian collections. Her research was summarized in several major articles - most remain in manuscripts only today - about the history of art collecting in Russia from Nikolai Yusupov to Sergei Tretyakov. We are very grateful to the “Tretyakov Gallery” magazine for this publication of Irina Kuznetsova*, who died in September 2002.