Private collection

The inheritance of artworks has been, historically, a problematic issue. There are disputes between heirs, concealment of artworks by those who are not heirs but have access to the premises in which the artworks are stored, taxation questions and intellectual rights issues. All of these matters should be considered when succession planning for any art collection. Otherwise, there is a great risk that such collections could go to third parties.

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.

From June 8 until July 2 2006, works from the collection of Monsignor Otto Mauer were exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art on Petrovka Street in Moscow. The exhibition was organized by the Culture Committee of the Moscow Government under the auspices of the Austrian Embassy, within the programme of “Vienna Days in Moscow”. The exhibition’s concept, idea and organization by Art and Business Culture Management Curators Milena Wildenauer and Dr. Eva Stangl-Teimer.

In 2006, the year of its 150th jubilee, the Tretyakov Gallery acquired a significant number of works by the artist Nikolai Meshcherin (1864-1916). Presented as a gift by Nikolai Gagman, art restorer and long-standing member of the Igor Grabar All-Union Centre for Art Research and Restoration, the donation included 17 oil and tempera paintings and six pastels by Meshcherin, as well as archive documents and photographs shedding light on the artist’s life and work. Many years ago, these were purchased from Meshcherin’s widow Lydia Goriacheva-Meshcherina by Gagman’s father Alexander Nikolaevich, a Doctor of Medicine and one of the founders of surgical urology. For many decades, this small treasure remained in the Gagman family. Nikolai Gagman took the best possible care of his father’s collection, doing everything within his means to make Meshcherin better known as an artist. In 1987, Nikolai Gagman organised an exhibition of Meshcherin’s work and published a catalogue to accompany the event, writing the introduction and selecting some fascinating archive material for the catalogue himself. The catalogue included all of Meshcherin’s works from museums and private collections in Russia which Gagman had succeeded in locating.

“A Certain State of the World?” - a selection of works from the Frangois Pinault Foundation collection - was the second project put together by the Garage Centre for Contemporary Culture. Moscow’s new exhibition venue owes its name to the fact that initially the building housed a garage, for buses, built in 1926-27 to the design of the famed Constructivist architect Konstantin Melnikov.