Счастье, когда любимое увлечение становится профессией.
Интервью с коллекционером Романом Бабичевым
♪ Started the way ♪
When you made your first purchase, what was it: a conscious choice of the first artist for your collection, or a happy chance you couldn’t miss? What outweighed the sense of aesthetic charm or the very possibility of taking such an important step?
I grew up in the country of socialist propaganda and visual campaigning, and therefore, when I went to the first officially authorized exhibition of previously banned modernist artists held at the Beekeeping Pavilion at the PAU in 1975, I was completely shocked. I was, of course, familiar with the creativity of the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist people represented at the Pushkin Museum, but their art was perceived as something that had already been museumized, suspended. And at the exhibition, it was completely real, close, and I felt like a contemporary of what was happening.
1. Opening of the exhibit at the Pavillionon of Beekeeping at the PAU in 1975; 2. Dmitry of the Red Singers. White cubes with bubbles on black background, 1969. The work was shown at an exhibition at the PAU.
Both language and subjects, including religious topics, were shaken until then, impossible in modern art: «Iov» by Ottari Kandahar, «The Street of the Lady of God and the Storm of Jesus Christ» by Oscar Rabin and others. That’s when I had the desire to collect, to surround myself with works, to sink into the world of art. At that time, I was a student and, having no financial means to realize my wish, spent the next 17 years preparing for my dream, attending museums and not going to bed without any art album.
1. Nikolai Vokoma. System Z. 1993; 2. Peter Belenka. No name, 1975. Authors are participants in the painting exhibition at the Pavillionon of Beekeeping at the PAU in 1975.
Many years later, in 1992, I tried to reach out to the non-conformist artists who were dreaming of doing their job by attending exhibitions in the Gorcoma Halls of Graphics on Little Georgian Street. However, their response to my requests to visit the workshops was not very kind. Nonconformists, in their Soviet experience, treated new people with opas, they had strong ties with foreign buyers, so they suggested that I call a year and a half back, but I couldn’t wait, and it saved me from knowing the widow of Rustaslav Nikolaevich Barto, an earlier-generation artist. Rostyslav Nikolajevic was a very subtle, sophisticated master, apprentice, and companion of Alexander Shevchenko; his creativity quickly overtook me.
1. Rostislav Barto. Eastern woman with child, 1931; 2. Rostislav Barto. A picture of a girl on a striped background, 1933.
On my first visit, I bought 36 works from Larissa Petrovna Galanza in the 1930s and 1950s. But if I was familiar with the art of nonconformists, then the works of domestic artists who worked in socialism in modernistic manners, I’ve never seen them. I was very interested in this field of art, and, for my happiness, an exhibition of Moscow artists from the 1920s and 1930s from the Moshu Foundations and the succession meetings opened in the Central House of the artist. After her visit, I felt that the art of artists in the informal (modern) field was more interesting and more interesting than the art of the so-called second avant-garde.
1. Rostislav Barto. Mountains. Crimea, 1941, 2. Rostislav Barto. A landscape with a figure by the Gulf, 1963.
It was at this exhibition that the method of my collection — the heritage of artists — was chosen. So far, I have thought that, after the death of a famous artist, the legacy commission distributes the remaining works to museums and to the local division of the Union of Artists, and it turns out that there are a lot left in the heirs' families. This method gave me the opportunity to feel an artist from the stories of the heirs, a chance to choose and acquire the works I like and some guarantee against forgery. The repeated association with works in the heritage helped to gain expertise. So the answer to your question is this: the first purchase was the happiest accident, which had great consequences; its main motive was aesthetic preference, not its scale.
1. Alexander Rusakov. Etude on Karpovka, 1920s; 2. Alexander Rusakov. Horses on water, 1923–1925.
1. Vladimir Greenberg. Naturmort. Vegetables against the background of the urban landscape, 1916; 2. Vladimir Greenberg. Sister G. A. Greenberg’s portrait, 1916.
COLLECTION STRUCTURE AND DEVELOPMENT SEGMENT
Was your journey a strategic plan, a road map, or a living, organic process, where one interest naturally grew from the previous one? What served as a catalyst for the transition to a new direction: internal reflection, exhaustion of the topic, or the discovery of new artistic horizons?
I didn’t have a strategic plan or any other plan. Initially, I did not expect my congregation to gain such a scale: I was driven by a simple desire to decorate my home and life with the works of artists represented in museums. That’s the first filter I’ve ever had. As the process of gathering, learning and understanding of the subject became more intense, my views changed, my filters changed, and the artists who weren’t in the museums became interesting for some reason. The limits of the congregation were not originally established, but it has already come to feel that the walls of the apartment, as some collectors of the previous generation have done, will not be limited. Generally, they had paintings, watermarks and drawings on all the walls and even doors, and if new work had been received in the collection, it had been placed on the wall instead of being removed, which was subsequently required to leave by sale or exchange; spares and storerooms had been avoided.
1. George Rublyov. First tractor in Ukraine, about 1931; 2. The Lion Brodata. Telegram, about 1930.
Today, my congregation views domestic art from a certain perspective throughout the 20th century. It did not immediately become so, and there were stages in the history of its creation, each coming from the previous one and being a new step. At first, I was attracted to Moscow’s artists more than in the 1920s and 1930s and less to the pre-revolutionary period of the twentieth century. I was active in collecting their works from 1992 to 1996, and then, without leaving the previous course, I concentrated on Leningrad pre-war art (1995-2001). After some stock-taking, the exhibition «On the shores of Neva. Painting and graphics of Leningrad artists from the 1920s to the 1930s» at the A. S. Pushkin GMII in 2001 came up with a desire for a new direction.
Victor Proshkin. Bread Cleaning, 1929.
Soon I looked into an unknown area — the sculpture. It is more difficult to understand and understand than two-dimensional paintings and graphics, and the dominant stories — a portrait and a figure — make it of little interest to an unprepared viewer. The main mass of the Soviet sculpture was for propaganda purposes, such sculptures were enormous in size, so we could only collect their reduced original models or rare camera things created by a sculpture for ourselves. The whole thing wasn’t much, but it was quickly exhausted, although almost all the important sculptors — from Trubecki, Konenkov and Golubkina to Chaikov and Sarah Lebedova — were found.
1. Alexey of Zelensky. October, 1929; 2. Zinaida Bagenova. Scratch, 1947.
After the sculpture stage, I focused on collecting the works of painters from the warm and subsequent periods. I, as a child and a young man of that era, are concerned about the great changes in art by now. True, interest has already shifted from the artists of the Little Georgian, of whom I chose not «resistants,» but metaphysicists who wrote about eternity and for eternity: Redbird and Weisberg, to powerful artists: Andrei Vasnetsov, Pavel Nickonov, Nikolai Andronov, who, after a short period of «sure style,» followed each other’s way. For example, Andrei Vasnetsov, in my opinion, became a metaphysicist, and Paul Niconov, who worked mainly on a village subject with a Bible slope, I define as a soil expressionist. Andrei Goncharov, Tatiana Mavrin and many others are here.
1. Andrei Goncharov. Couple portrait (in red and green), 1974; 2. Tatiana Mavrin. Suzanne, 1940.
Andrei Vasnetsov. A pack of tea, 1969.
ON THIS AND FUTURE COLLECTION
Tell us how your collection lives and develops today: what have you been really interested in lately, what kind of acquisitions you are particularly proud of, and what are its vectors for the near future?
The most recent assembly was the Moscow abstractionist of the second half of the twentieth century: Yuri Zlotnikov, Valery Jurlov, Vladimir Andreenkov, Andrei Krasulin, op-artist Alexander Grigoriev, abstract expressionist Vladislav Zubarev, a remarkable experimenter in various directions, from minimalism to assemblies, Vladimir Triamkin, whose star is still rising. There was an attempt to gather modern art, but when I came in, I realized that I would not collect a significant and systematic collection: it would require considerable resources and huge space, and it was already difficult for me to manage the volume. I feel that to date I have reached the limit of the rule of command, so I only occasionally buy individual works of modern authors that I can’t help buying. I love the work of Nikita Alexeev, Constantin Batinkov, Vladimir Shinkarev and others. Each of these sections of the congregation continues to be replenished to this day, but at a different pace, due to the current deficit and competition.
1. Nikita Alexeyev. Bob Marley «I Shot the sheriff», 2016; 2. Vladimir Andreenkov. Experience with Space, 1965.
1. Valery Jurlov. A couple of forms, 2011. Work option 1958; 2. Yuri Zlotnikov. City rhythm synthesization, 1980.
The answer to the question about the future of the collection is still vague. To my great regret, I do not have the means to establish an open museum and to ensure its existence for many years, which would be the best solution. This requires a financial fund that generates the regular income normally generated by deposits or securities, but it is not and is not foreseen. Therefore, I have only to count on the heirs — children and grandchildren.
Leonid Tishkov. Ethnographer’s Visit, 1985.
My meeting is not made up of masterpieces. One, two, five works can be removed from the masterpiece congregation — and it will remain a masterpiece congregation. The main virtue of my congregation is on a scale, systematic and comprehensive. Not every provincial museum can brag about 5,000 pieces of art, run by a single line, an idea. After all, the museums were built on very different principles. So you don’t want to think about breaking up, sharing, selling the collection. Many of its exhibits will lose some of their strength if they are not part of it. I hope that one of my children and grandchildren will bear this heavy and pleasant burden of managing the collection.
1. Constantin Batinkov. From the 2012 Circus Series; 2. Constantin Batinkov. From the 2011–2012 Circus series.
Anton Chumak. From the Sol Project, 2014.
GENERAL DEBATE OF THE COLLECTION
Do you see in your congregation a kind of supertask, one pattern for all works? How can you express the main idea, the spirit of your collection?
The collection started not with an idea, but with a desire or a dream just to live next to art. And when I came up with this dream, of course, I started reading a lot. There was no literature on collection at all, not what it was at the present time. I’ve been worried about this because I wanted to learn a little bit of experience from someone. I had to settle for my museum albums. And I drew attention to the Russian Museum’s albums on art from the 1920s to the 1930s, and then to the album «Avangard Stopped on the Ride» on the art of the same time, which was collected for the museum in Nukus, Igor Saviczym; it was also an excellent album, «Living the 1920s to 1930s», released in «The Soviet Artist». These albums included paintings about the constructions of socialism, but all the works were in one way or another not academic, but modern. And somehow fate brought me to the legacy of the artists of this circle. At the time of the creation of the works, the State did not buy them because of modernism; the art market did not exist, because, with few exceptions, all lived in communal apartments, such as paintings, and six people in the same room. The museums of all these artists and their heirs were well aware of the fact that each of the works had been purchased but had not yet developed a position on them, whether their works would be museumized. The works of these artists, with few exceptions, are now not in museum exhibitions.
1. Tatiana Cooperwasser. Car in front of the house, late 1920s; 2. Tatiana Cooperwasser. Religion is the opium of the people, the beginning of the 1930s.
Artians have tried to come up with a title for this area that does not fall into the mainstream of official art: «the third way» (which means between avant-garde and socialism), «silent art», «the art of the wick» and others. The point is that these jobs were almost intact until the 1990s, to a large extent. And I wasn’t chasing the rare works of the then popular mysteries, the bluebirds, behind these mobiles, but gave up collecting the little-explored direction. Some colleagues tried to make me understand, but I was smart enough not to listen to them. You wouldn’t have to wait until Alexander Benoit’s next watercourse showed up, and you wouldn’t have to fight rivals for it, but you’d have to pick the best things and build a collection. Then the collection branched in new directions, but it was all about modernistic influences in the Russian art of the 20th century.
1. Alexander Rusakov. Disco cap, 1930; 2. Alexander Monin. Physical education is the key to health! (Woman’s Portrait of an artist, O.N. Monina), 1929.
For the exhibition of the meeting at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, the famous art scientist Valentine Diaconov came up with the title «Modernism without a manifesto», which became a brand: this is the title of both a series of books of the catalogue-reson of the meeting and a very informative website about the congregation. I think everyone understands that name. It is about modernism in Russia during the difficult times of the 1930s, the most dramatic and even tragic, when not only could the associations of artists not issue their manifestos, programmes, declarations, as before, but the associations themselves were dismantled after 1932. Many of the artists of my congregation have had a difficult fate and have been severely criticized in the press, with all the consequences, up to and including repression.
1. Anatoli Mikuli. The scenery with the red houses, the end of the 1900s, was the beginning of the 1910s; 2. Nikolai Emelianov. The tree landscape, the late 1920s, is the beginning of the 1930s.
So if I compare the private art collections, I think that my meeting is original and has its own face, and given the size, the systemicity, the abundance of the monograph collections in the composition can be considered unique. I mean, for example, the many nonconformists who are emerging today cannot be considered unique: they repeat each other like clones, with little difference. It’s good when they go beyond that.
Roman Semashkevich. At sunset, 1933.
ON DIJITAL COLECTIONING
What do you think of digital collection? What future awaits the collection of physical objects in the digital world?
Collections of material objects will remain collections of material objects, and collections of digital objects will remain collections of digital objects. There’s nothing in common between them. These are different types of collection. Digital art cannot and should not possess the qualities that the originals possess: an invoiced surface, volume, size and others. The originals use different materials and tools, which are not required for digital objects. Why doesn’t anyone ask art collectors how they feel about collecting art stamps or reproduction collections from the magazine Ogonök? I used to collect these kinds of reproductions, and the art albums were in a huge deficit. Everything I said about NFT isn’t about the video art: it’s a special kind of art.
1. Vladimir Greenberg. Neva. sunset, 1937; 2. Alexander Vedernikov. Little Nevka, 1930s.
1. Alexander Vedernikov. View of Little Nev from the artist’s room window, 1930s; 2. Victor Proshkin. The Bridge of the Builders. Barge by the Pier of the Storm River, 1934.
ON THE PROMOTATION OF COLLECTION: CATAL AND CITY SERIES
Is it one of your strategic objectives to integrate the collection into the formal educational and scientific field so that these works are quoted, researched and become part of an academic canon, integrated into educational courses, teaching aids, and research?
At one point, feeling that the collection had grown to a large number of exhibits (at that time there were about 4,000 pieces), I realized that I wanted to allow a wide range of professionals and students to get to know my things. And for that to happen, they have to be published. I also wanted to structure the collection by grouping the work on a number of topics, without which any congregation might appear to be a landfill of diverse objects. It took several years to prepare the publication. The catalog reson, originally designed to be single-volume, has grown to six volumes, and two more are being prepared for printing. The productions were described as fully and accurately as possible; apart from the usual features, we listed all the exhibits and playouts that could be found, the provenances, the signs on the turns, the covers and the pasta. The publications were attended by the best young artists, many of whom are candidates for art: Nadia Plungyan, Alexandra Celivanov, Alexander Strukov, Olga Davivova, Maria Silina, Maria Doronina, Anastasia Timofeenko and Valentin Diaconov.
The series «Modernism without Manifesto».
I handed over and sent copies of catalogues to the main museums, libraries, and specialized higher education institutions in Russia. In Russia, these are, of course, the Russian State Library and the Russian State Library of Arts in Moscow, the Russian National Library in St. Petersburg, the libraries of the Russian Academy of Arts, the GTG, GRM, Ermitage, MGU, S. G. Stroganov, and many other institutions. I also found that individual volumes of the catalogue are represented, apparently through the procurement system, in libraries of 21 foreign institutions. These include the Candinian Library at the Georges Pompidou Centre, the Metropolitan Museum Library, the British Library in London, the United States Congress Library, the Geneva Library, the Berlin State Library, the Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard and other universities. A complete list of libraries is available on Modernism without Manifesto.
The series «Modernism without Manifesto» is being prepared for publication.
The creation of a site of its own collection, or online museum, under the same name «Modernism Without Manifestion», was a logical continuation of this work. Here we have included several works by all the authors of the meeting, detailed information about the exhibition of the meeting and participation in other exhibition projects, publications about the meeting, information about the catalogue of the resonant. Today, professionals and amateurs are actively using these materials for educational and scientific purposes. My website statistics show over 1,500 hits a month. It’s about 40-50 people every day. I am, of course, very pleased to know that my work is of practical use. This year, for example, thanks to information on the website, I was found and visited by artists from St. Petersburg and the United States working on articles on the creation of Alexander Vedernikov, Nikolai Emelyanov, and the glass of Vera Muhin.
Photo of the exhibition halls «Modernism without a Manifesto. Roman Babichev’s meeting» in MMIS, 2017–2018.
During the preparation of the first volumes of the catalogue, the director of the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Vasily Cereteli, came to visit me. He carefully examined the best part of the congregation on the walls and immediately offered to hold an exhibition. Which was particularly flattering, he said that I could choose any space on Petrovka, on Gogolev Boulevard, or in the Ermolayev alley. I asked for the floor of the museum on Petrovka. With the help of architect Alexey Podikidishev, we built an anphid from 14 rooms, held the first, general part of the exhibition for two months, followed by a reexposition during the week, and followed the second part of the exhibition on Leningrad pre-war art. Both parts of the exhibition were carefully thought out, each room revealed its theme, and the hall sequence was not random either. A total of 520 exhibits were shown. The exhibition was attended by 50,000 viewers; one day on a weekend, I saw a line at the museum standing on the street almost to the Good Boulevard.
Photo of the interiors of Roman Babichev’s meeting.
And I’m constantly participating in museum and gallery exhibitions; to date, there are over 130 of them. The complete list is available on the website. In addition, I had many art students and museum staff at home, many groups of students from the specialized universities, the Institute of Art and Antiquities, the School of Collectors and Experts, collections of artistic institutions, artists, galleryists, collectors, restorers and amateurs of art. The works of the congregation have been published in dozens of books, albums, and exhibition catalogues. To summarize the answer to your question, I have an open meeting.
Photo of the interiors of Roman Babichev’s meeting.
ON THE IMPACT OF COLLECTION ON LIFE
How did collecting change your life? How have you changed yourself, your perception of the world over these years of total diving into art? Was there a moment when you realized that it was no longer a passion, but a core of your existence, your true profession, a matter of your life?
1. Antonina Sofronova. White Birds, 1936; 2. Fyodor Platov. Naturmort with plaster sculpture and red countess, 1930.
When a favourite business becomes a profession, it’s a great deal of happiness. Before, when I left work at 7:00 p.m., if there was no emergency, I would forget about her until 10:00 a.m. the next day. After I was fired, I went to bed and woke up thinking about plans, tactical and strategic challenges, combinations. An incredibly important part of the search was for legacy, old collections, individual items, storehouses. Collecting is to some extent a treasure hunt. The books of my childhood, R. L. Stevenson, the Bronze Bird and the Cortica A. Rybakov, have planted a great deal of interest and attraction in my generation’s boys for treasure-searching, which, in ordinary life, is scarce and happens in art. Often it depends on who’s looking. What a pleasure it is to find in an artist’s legacy, somewhere on an anthress, a job no one can remember, and it turns out to be one of the best! It happens. A few years ago, I discovered from a famous artist two of her wonderful works from the beginning of the 1960s, folded into a roll and tied to a wall behind a washroom. A painter can really get away with his work so they don’t stop him from coming to the molbert, and they can lie there for decades. The treasure may be in plain sight, either on the flea market or on the site of the world-famous auction house, but only a few people will be able to identify the real author of the work and recognize the true masterpiece. I have witnessed such cases on several occasions, and there are several such findings in my luggage as well. I always admire my close friend, the collector and connoisseur Sergei Podtinitzki, whose expertise helps him regularly to make fantastic discoveries.
Efrosinha Ermilov-Platov. At the station, 1932.
I’ll make the most of it: owning a thing must be someone who knows how to appreciate it, someone who really needs it. As a collector, I became free to make decisions, an independent man who is responsible for his own actions — to himself and to others. This is extremely important. Now I live in the world of art. Even resting is for me to go to a museum. I communicate with whoever I want: I’m surrounded by a refined intellectual society, people who are interested in art. What else can I wish for?
1. Vladimir Greenberg. Children 1937; 2. Vladimir Greenberg. In the Park of Culture and Recreation (in the Kirov Islands), 1932.
FILLING OF LACKUNE AND REACHING OF THE EMERGENCY
A collector’s path is always a dialogue with himself and his previous assessments. Has it happened that, over time, you have radically revised your attitude towards any artistic aspect of the phenomenon? Was your practice «creative disappointment» or, on the contrary, charm?
Of course, in the process of growing up to collect and study art history, tastes and addictions change. There was a crazy love for Beekeepers and Little Trucks, then scattered, stayed with a few of them. As a collector, I tried to stop by in the 19th century, but then I realized I was bored. Attracted modernism with all its currents. Since I don’t have a systematic artistic education, some eras in art I know quite superficially. I get into some of them from time to time, but not as a collector, but as an amateur of art. The sculpture of Egypt, the Roman glass, the ancient Greek and Roman ceramics, the furniture of the age of classicalism, the ampiration, the Ar deco, the designism, the Soviet porcelain — all of which attracted my attention for a while, I bought books on every subject, gave it up, tortured experts — and then moved on to something else. Last shock I experienced this summer: Protorenness and Renaissance at the Siena Pinakoteka and the Uffiffis Gallery. Perhaps by force of influence, this shock was tantamount to what I experienced when I was young at an exhibition in Beekeeping. A visit to these museums destroyed that pyramid of art that was built in my head, and then it slowly began to rebuild.
Vladislav Rutner. Chess, 1980s.
I’m capable of fundamentally reviewing my attitude towards artists I’ve previously underestimated. Most often this happens after attending a retrospective exhibition or an artist ' s workshop. Sometimes it’s the opposite: you liked certain things, and when you saw them in the mass, something went missing. For example, Oleg Celkov’s work hasn’t touched me for a long time. I knew it was a significant artist, even calling him in France on the line of Andrei Grossisky, but the visit was postponed, and then Oleg left. And only a few years ago, when I took the lecture by Andrei Erofev at the huge retrospective exhibition of Celkov in MOMMA, which he was overseeing, my attitude changed completely to the opposite. About the same thing happened to my perception of Vladimir Yankilski’s creativity, and after his retrospective, I visited the artist’s workshop in Paris three times with his widow, Rimma Solod.
Leonid Zusman. Big Pole. Dad, 1961.
COLLECTIONER MISSION AND COLLECTIONAL TYPOLOGY
How do you define the role of a collector in shaping art history? What do you think his main mission is?
Here I’d like to talk about two types of collection: passive and active. The passive collection is characteristic of rich and very rich people. I call it an «iligarchical collection.» Due to their condition, these collectors receive special attention from auction houses, dealers and gallery operators. They are the first to be offered almost all the best and most interesting things in order to obtain the maximum price from the sale and thus the maximum profit. They tend to acquire already-reconciled, customized, thoroughly-explored and refurbished works. These include both investor collectors who acquire diverse items that are not united by an idea, but have investment value, and collectors who create deliberate assemblies, which often become large or small museums. These people don’t have to go to the market, and they don’t have to go around antique shops, gallery, and dealers' offices, and they just have to wait for new things to be offered to them. The maximum place they appear is art fairs and salons. This attitude allows the collector not to gain a deep insight into the subject matter of his gathering, and to display some laziness in his knowledge and study. The negative effect of this collection model is that it can be influenced by a collector, dealer or galleryer whose taste may be, to say the least, biased or adjusted commercial interest, thus affecting the quality of the collection.
Benjamin Galwich. Madonna in the background of the port, 1917. It’s like the work of an unknown artist.
The active type of collection is generally of average wealth. To get good things to their meetings, they are, let’s say, closer to the ground: constantly monitoring the market, auctions, the same antique shops, salons, even flea markets, interacting with dealers, entering the workshops and the heritage of artists. To be guided in this environment and to decide on the authenticity, meaning, rareness and cost of things on their own, they must be at a very different level of training and greatness. Only then will they be lucky. Personally, I only know one collector from the first group who’s gonna give a head start to so many of the second and personally attend heritage and workshops.
1. Eduard Krimmer. Two peasant women, 1929-1932; 2. Boris Ermolayev. The girl with the guitar. 1940s.
I can offer another classification. First of all, first-solve collectors. The most historic example is S. I. Schukin and I. A. Morozov, G. D. Costaki. Today, there are also these sightingers. For example, I am struck by Pierre-Cristian Broche, who in the late 1980's and 1990's was collecting squatters, when the artists who worked there were largely unknown and were about equal. He was able to single out and gather the work of those whose future talent has produced fruit: today more than 90 per cent of the artists in his congregation catalogues have become famous. It shows phenomenal sense and good taste. Secondly, research collectors who try to establish some new interrelationships in the history of art already in existence, introduce new or forgotten names into the scientific world, and place them in a group or hierarchy. In general, such collectors form, describe, publish, and try to show at exhibitions. The same applies to research into individual works.
Nikolai Evographov. Rest night, late 1930s.
And the third type is the creators. They are collectors who share in their congregation: establish museums or give generous gifts to state institutions. Unlike the heirs of collectors who sell their ancestors' collections at auction, they provide the works with everlasting life in public space. Of course, this is not the end of the typology. There are collectors who, in addition to forming congregations, engage in educational activities and contribute intellectually: lectures, guided tours, articles, and sometimes even books. One such educator was the recent departure of a wonderful man, a doctor, and a collector, Michael Alshibaia. The typology of smaller collections, such as interior or dealer (mobile) collections, is not going to be taken up here.
Photo of the exhibition hall «Modernism without a Manifesto. Roman Babichev’s meeting» in MMIS, 2017–2018.
I am convinced that the contribution of collectors to culture is more than significant. It is no secret that the lion ' s share of domestic and western museums consists of gifted, confiscated, expropriated or nationalized private collections. Take at least American universities: their artistic foundations are almost entirely formed thanks to the generosity of large collectors and mecendants. That is the origin of most museums in the world. The collector looks for things, attributes them, restores them, stores them, presents them to exhibitions, and publishes, that is, popularizes, creates an assembly — more or less whole, often subordinated to an idea, or devoted to some kind of art or some era, opens up new artists and promotes their growth, and then often the result of their activities is found in the museum or the foundation of a new museum. What questions might be asked about the role of the collector?
Photos provided by Roman Babichev. Photo of the opening of the exhibition by Igor Palmin was provided by Yuri Palmin.
