MEANT TO BE AN ANGEL

"A PREPARATORY STUDY FOR THE PICTURE "HEALING OF THE BLIND" BY V.I. SURIKOV. CONFIRMED BY O.V. SURIKOVA-KONCHALOVSKAYA 1917". THIS INSCRIPTION CAN BE SEEN ON THE BOTTOM EDGE OF THE PORTRAIT OF A STUNNINGLY BEAUTIFUL AND CHARMING YOUNG WOMAN. THERE ARE TWO MORE INSCRIPTIONS ON THE REVERSE SIDE. THE FIRST SAYS: "FROM THE COLLECTION OF TROIANOVSKY MOVED TO THE MOSCOW BROKER KRAISKOY AND THEN FURTHER ON TO A BERLIN BANKER RAPPORT." THE SECOND READS: "PRIVATE PROPERTY OF E. KLIMOV. RIGA. RIGA, TAUBENST, 23-3. MARCH 1944". THE FATE OF THIS PICTURE, ONE OF THE MOST CHERISHED TREASURES OF THE RUSSIAN FOUNDATION OF CULTURE, HAS IN MANY WAYS MIRRORED THE TWISTS AND TURNS OF THE COMPLICATED, TUMULTUOUS HISTORY OF RUSSIA AND THE TRAGIC FATE OF ITS BEST CITIZENS IN THE 20TH CENTURY.

Surikov painted the study during the darkest period of his life when he was mourning the loss of his dear wife, Elisabeth Avgustovna Scharret. She died at the age of thirty, and one third of her short life had been devoted to the man whose outstanding talent became a symbol of Russian art.

They met in St. Petersburg where Surikov was then studying at the Academy of Arts. On Sundays he used to go to the Catholic cathedral on Nevsky Prospekt to listen to the organ music, which he loved. There Vasily Ivanovich met the Scharret sisters for the first time.

Their father, a Frenchman, had embraced the Orthodox faith and opened a small company in Petersburg selling writing paper. Their mother, Maria Alexandrovna, was the daughter of the legendary Decembrist Svistunov. The beauty of Elisabeth Scharret captivated Surikov. On January 25 1878 they married in a church wedding. This marriage was a blessing for the artist. Elisabeth Avgustovna was a good housewife and a perfect mother; she gave birth to two daughters and a son. However, the doctors were unable to save the boy's life, and he died soon after birth. Elisabeth meant the world to the artist, who used to work days and nights. He loved her as "forty thousand brothers would not love", and her death hit him very hard indeed.

Since childhood Elisabeth had suffered from a valvular disease of the heart. She died on April 8 1888. "I am turning mad, brother. My life is broken to pieces and I haven't got the faintest idea of what is going to happen next," the artist wrote in a letter to his brother.

"At that time Surikov seemed to be a sick man. He spoke in a dull voice in a somewhat abrupt and jerky manner. And while talking to you he could quite often suddenly turn silent. He was deep in his own thoughts and emotions. His eyes were red from tears," Michael Rutchenko, an artist from Krasnoyarsk, recalled later.

It was at that time that Surikov started working on the "Healing of the Blind from Birth". Thinking over its biblical theme, he was searching for the appropriate image of an angel, and his mind's eye turned again and again to the precious features of the one he had loved and lost forever.

But as so often happens, the final variant of the picture, kept at the Church-Archaeological study of the Moscow Spiritual Academy, turned out to be very different from its first version. The study remained just a study, and later changed hands, moving from Surikov's family to the collection of the famous Moscow patron of the arts, doctor Ivan Ivanovich Troianovsky.

Serov and Levitan, Chekhov and Benois, Somov and Vrubel considered Troianovsky their friend. A dedicated art collector, one of the organisers of the society "Free Aesthetics" which he had established together with Brusov, Ivan Ivanovich had always been at the centre of the city's artistic life. In addition, the foundation of the "Blue Rose" was also his idea; long before World War I his collection contained more than two hundred works, sixteen by Levitan alone, both pictures and studies.

It should be mentioned that unlike some other collectors Ivan Ivanovich was a generous and sympathetic person. In the Yauza clinic where he started his medical career as an intern and later at the horse railway company and tram depots of Moscow, his patients were workers. And, of course, as a doctor, he was always at the disposal of his artistic friends. It would be difficult to name everyone whom this wonderful man helped during his life.

The study ended up in his collection. Even when the revolution brought requisitions of private art collections, when privately-owned houses were turned into blocks of communal flats, Troianovsky continued to work; he was a true enthusiast of medicine, and believed that his duty came above all other considerations. Time, though, did not spare him: in 1928 this great doctor, who was also the source of innovative artistic ideas, died.

The study was exchanged for something more tangible or sold to the Moscow broker Krainovsky probably even before Troianovsky's death. Then a mysterious Berlin banker, Rapport, owned it for some time until finally the picture came to the collection of Evgeny Evgenievich Klimov.

Klimov's diverse talent knew no boundaries: he was not only an icon and landscape painter, and the author of articles on art history, but his portraits were also much acclaimed. It would be difficult to overestimate his efforts in the saving and restoration of icons; he was one of the leading specialists of the Kondakov Institute in Prague, the best-known centre for collecting and studying icons (or as later Solouch- in called them, the "black boards with the faces of the Russian saints.")

His mosaics "Trinity" never fail to astonish those who visit the Trinity Cathedral in Pskov. Besides being a source of inspiration, the Pskov, Izborsk, and Pechorsky regions had exerted great influence over Klimov's development as an artist, so it was only natural that at the end of his life, when the wind of freedom brought great changes in Russia, he left about 60 of his own works to the museum of his favourite city.

Riga, Prague, Montreal, Mitava, Warsaw... This enormously talented man was very widely travelled.

On his mother's side he traced his family history back to a certain Johann, a coach maker, who had arrived in the Russian Empire in the 18th century from Silesia. On his father's side, his great grandfather was Ivan Klimov, a famous architect and a colleague of Rossi. Evgeny Evgenievich spent his childhood in St. Petersburg; later he enjoyed recollecting how he would run to the Russian museum to copy the works of art he admired every day. At the beginning of the World War I he and his mother moved to Riga, where he graduated from the Academy of Arts and was appointed the head of the Russian department at the Museum of Fine Arts. He also taught drawing and art history at the Riga University and at the Lomonosov Grammar School. He painted murals for the St. John cathedral and for the chapel at the Pokrovsky cemetery. Two albums of his lithographs "City Landscapes" and "Along the Pechorsky Region" were published in Riga. Benois spoke highly of those albums.

"The Lithographic Views of Latvia by Evgeny Klimov" are a poetic blend of mood and artistic excellence. "I can find no better compliment to an artist than by comparing those charming urban and suburban landscapes to similar works by Doboujinsky", the great artist and theatre designer wrote to Klimov.

Doboujinsky and Klimov had become friends while still in the Baltic states and continued their friendship in America. "Though his drawings taught me to see and to feel the world around me, I have never worked under his direct guidance. The more so I was flattered by his letter in which he wrote: 'You were not a disciple of mine, but I can consider you as such'," the painter recollected later.

Klimov spent the last years of his life overseas in Canada, where he lived from 1949. By that time he had worked in Nazi-occupied Prague, where he created a mosaic in the Assumption of the Holy Virgin Church and cleaned the famous icon of Our Saviour from the Soldatenkov collection.

While in Canada, he worked as vigorously as ever. He published articles in Russian- language newspapers and magazines, organised about a dozen solo shows, gave lectures and painted a series of portraits of famous Russian emigrants. And as usual, no matter where he was, he defended the dignity of his native country, even though he had lost it once and for all. Russia and its art gave the ultimate meaning to his life.

"Hopefully, one can be sure that in the due course of time, Russian painting will be acclaimed in the right way according to its worth, because humanity cannot be satisfied for a long time with rational art alone. The Russians have first to explore and feel for themselves the meaning and value of the heritage of their own painters, before they are able to introduce people from the West to Russian painting," Klimov proclaimed in the foreword of his book "Russian Painters" published in New York in 1974. Back in 1938, Alexander Nikolaevich Benois had written to Klimov: "Thank you for sending me your album of lithographs dedicated to the Pechorsky region. This edition is of great artistic and historic interest. The motifs have been collected with much sensitivity, and the technique you chose, when only a few most characteristic features remain, gives a convincing idea of this sorrowful poetic and miraculously preserved corner of old Russia."

Benois very accurately defined the essence of what Evgeny Klimov dedicated his life to - a lifelong effort to communicate a true-to-life idea of the sad poetic legacy of old Russia, already in the past, to the world. Among other pieces Klimov's collection included many works by Benois. For many years his sketches for the La Scala productions of "Khovanschchina" and "Boris Godounov" as well as the sketches for the New York enter prise by Solo Jureck of "Raimonda", along with a portrait of Andrei Bakst and views of Versailles and Fontainebleau, decorated Klimov's house in Montreal. Among other gems were sketches for Michael Chekhov's American productions by Doboujinsky and, of course, the portrait of Elisabeth Scharret which is the study for the "Healing of the Blind from Birth".

Then perestroika started in Russia: Evgeny Evgenievich, who had been waiting for such changes all his life, was excited by the news of the creation of the Foundation of Culture. The appearance of a nongovernmental institution headed by such notables as Raisa Gorbacheva and academician Dmitry Likhachev, inspired many others as well as Klimov.

Hundreds of emigrants and their descendants enthusiastically started to pass over to the Foundation works which they had been saving - pictures, sculptures, priceless books and archive documents. Their dream came true: for many decades they had kept those treasures only to return them to the place where they belonged, both spiritually and culturally.

Thus, pictures by Makovsky, Aivazovsky, Nesterov and Doboujinsky formed the core of the Foundation's famous collection, which is still growing. Thousands of works of art were handed over to museums and archives in Russia in accordance with the will of the contributors. The same destiny awaited the masterpieces from Klimov's collection.

Klimov had specified in his letter to Likhachev that it was of great importance to him that the gems he had saved should be made available to the general public, and that they should be provided with the appropriate long-term care and conditions. According to his will more than 70 of his own works were offered as a gift to the Pskov National Reserve Museum, while masterpieces by Alexander Benois provided the basis for the museum of the Benois family set up in Peter- hof. But the study by Surikov was to go to the collection of the Foundation.

Klimov seemed to be in a hurry to finish his plans, as if he could foresee his future: he was killed in a car accident in Montreal on 29 December 1990. Following his wishes the artist's son, Aleksei Klimov, presented seven sketches by Mstislav Doboujinsky to the Foundation as a gift.

A year ago, to celebrate the jubilee of the Foundation of Culture, the Academy of Art on Prechistenka Street in Moscow hosted a major exhibition displaying treasures of Russian culture that had been returned to their homeland thanks to the Foundation. Thirty museums provided the show with its exhibits: once again sketches by Benois from Peterhof, drawings and lithographs by Evgeny Klimov from the Pskov museum, and the sketches by Doboujinsky were exhibited under the same roof - as they had been for many years in Klimov's collection. At the centre of viewers' attention was the would-be angel from the "Healing of the Blind from Birth" - the portrait of the wife of the great Russian artist.