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| COLLECTING IS ALWAYS DELIGHT Alevtina Ryabinina I met Nikita Dmitriyevich Lobanov-Rostovsky, a direct descendant of the first Russian royal dynasty, the Ryurikovichi, at his house on Kildare Terrace in Notting Hill, one of London's currently most fashionable districts. The house lies a leisurely ten-minute walk from Kensington Palace, still home to members of the British royal family. Also adjacent is the famous embassy district that concentrates virtually the cream of the world's diplomats, as is Hyde Park and the Albert Hall. Nikita Lobanov is known to the world not only because he belongs to the nobility and occupies prestigious posts at two of America's biggest banks and the diamond company De Beers, but mainly because he has a unique collection of Russian theatrical art, and he himself is regarded as the foremost specialist in this field. For a long time, the prince served as advisor to the Christie's and Sotheby's auction houses and was on the board of the Association of Theatre Museums in London. But for two years now he has been, as he himself puts it, an ordinary English pensioner. However, such an assertion is not entirely true. Lobanov is a "life member" of the Metropolitan Museum's benevolent organisation, the San Francisco Fine Arts Council and the Los Angeles Institute of Modern Russian Culture. With the support of the Moscow municipal authority, he has recently established the Princes Lobanov-Rostovsky Museum in Filevsky Park, with a permanent exhibition reflecting the history of the Russian state through the life stories of the prince's famous ancestors and documentary material. His name is connected not only with Moscow. Still standing in the centre of St Petersburg is the Lobanov-Rostovsky Palace, built, like St Isaac's Cathedral, by the renowned Montferrand. Both this exhibition and the prince's London house have portraits of his grandfathers, by Argunov, brought over from Russia by Nikita Lobanov's grandfather. | |
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It is known that your ancestors were avid collectors of a great variety of items. Is your passion a tribute to family tradition or was it fostered by some special circumstances?
Possibly, this passion is in part inherited genetically. However, the main reason is "love at first sight" for Russian theatrical art of the last century. In 1954, when I was living with my godmother in Oxford, she took me to a great exhibition in London, about the Sergey Dyagilev seasons of Russian ballet. I was enthralled by the colour, the unbounded imagination and the peculiarly Russian lightness seen in these works. This in particular seemed so magically absorbing for my non-Western eyes. Exhilarated, I vowed to create an equally wonderful collection, which at the time was a completely insane idea - my mother and I had only just gotten out of newly-established communist Bulgaria, where my relatives had lived after emigrating from Russia, and where I too was born. Except for my scholarship, which I had received by participating in an Oxford competition, I didn't have a penny to my name. I didn't even have a couple of dollars to buy a costume design by Natalya Goncharova. That was a time when interest in Russian art had not yet awoken - designs by Goncharova and Larionov cost from a couple of dollars up to twenty dollars, while an excellent Bakst could be purchased for a hundred dollars. For how many years did you cherish this dream, before you began to make it a reality? So long as I lacked the material means, I engaged in the study of Russian art of this period and in collecting information. At the time, people were still alive who remembered the artists of Dyagilev's company. Their reminiscences and stories about who was related to who and what had been kept by whom brought me in contact with children, former wives and husbands, lovers, friends and acquaintances. Resulting from this overabundance of material was my major article "Russian Painters and the Stage". My first purchase was the series of sketches by Sergey Sudejkin for a production of "Petrushka", for 25 dollars apiece (in 1959). Three years later, together with my first wife Nina, who was half-Russian and half-French, a journalist and also carried away with early 20th century Russian art, we bought for a hundred dollars a set design by Alexander Benois for this same production. As my career developed, our collection was also purposefully augmented. Wherever we were, and even in places where you would least expect it, we had the fate to get on the trail of our beloved artists. Once on a hot June day in 1964, Nina and I were walking down Stadiu Street in Athens. We wanted to have a drink and saw a sign saying "Cafē Petrograd". We went inside, and suddenly at the very end of the room I noticed some bright watercolours. These reminded me of costumes designed by Pavel Chelishchev during his Kiev period. But the works were unsigned. We called the proprietor, who turned out to be a Russian emigrant Nikolay Jakovlev. Having understood straight away that we were not ignoramuses, he confirmed that I had solved the riddle and invited us to his top floor room. I was hard-pressed to contain my excitement, seeing three watercolours by Kandinsky on the walls, as well as costume designs by Goncharova and Chelishchev, and drawings by Korovin. Stacks of watercolours by these same artists were piled on the table and the floor. Jakovlev asked for 1000 dollars for each Kandinsky watercolour, 150 dollars for a Korovin or Goncharova, and the works of Chelishchev he rated at 100 dollars. Our choice was the last of these, and we were not wrong, since he was highly rated by the professionals. When in 1996 a major exhibition of our collection was shown at the Metropolitan Museum, this particular watercolour was reproduced on the cover of the catalogue. We were particularly fortunate in Madrid. I looked up Mikhail Benois, a former baritone and director of the "Paris Private Opera", who in the late 1960s was living in Madrid, and whose walls were entirely covered with masterpieces by Alexander Benois, Ivan Bilibin and Shchekhotikhina-Pototskaya. We learned that Mikhail Alexandrovich and his wife were preparing to buy a house in the Canaries, and had decided to make up the sum they lacked for the purchase by selling off their works of art. Thus, my collection was augmented with works by members of the Mir iskusstva group. Our acquisition of paintings by Alexandra Exter was a whole long event in itself. In 1965, the Bank of New York sent me to Paris for six months. A close friend of Exter already from her time in Kiev, the artist Simon Lisim, had told me in America that she had died in the Paris suburb of Fontenau-aux-Roses. At the first opportunity, my wife Nina and our acquaintance the Viscount Martin de Noor went there to find the artist's former address. Nina spent a great deal of time fruitlessly, until she had the idea of showing her press card at the mayor's office. Suddenly, the officials quickly found an entry from 17 March 1949, registering the death of a Madame Georges Nekrasoff (born Alexandra Grigorovich), living at 29 rue Boucicaut. The current tenants knew nothing of the artist, but gave the Paris address of the landlady. She, in turn, helped find nurse Micheline Stroll, who had looked after Exter. In the humble two-room flat belonging to the hospital, where Madame Stroll lived, we discovered real treasures. There were five large paintings by Exter on the walls and several silk screens. Commodes painted by the artist had two drawers full of her prints. From what time can your acquisitions begin to be called a collection? In 1965 we were invited to help organise an exhibition of Russian theatre art. We lent 46 works. But the following year, out of 112 works displayed at the Metropolitan Museum, 105 belonged to us. In the following two years, our collection was shown at 12 museums in the USA. Now there are many influential people in Russia and also in Latvia amassing collections. Many of them regard it as a good investment. Is this true? A collection is not the best sort of capital investment. Insurance, restoration, storage, security, transport - all these things need money. For me, collecting has never meant a good investment. It was a passion, which often led to financial complications. But I paid no attention to this. Forming a collection is a delight in itself. If money had been the most important factor, I could have collected 17th century Dutch art. Art collecting is hard work. Sometimes a collector works like a detective. If it's done in a dilettantish way, buying whatever happens to be fashionable at that particular moment, you can lose out in the long run. Fashions have a tendency to change frequently. The real value of a work of art can be determined only by a good specialist and... by time. In the 1940s, works by the Russian avant-garde could be bought for a couple of tens of dollars (sometimes even less). By the 1980s, the prices had risen to four- and six-figure numbers - depending on the work. Price fluctuations are cyclical. At the end of 1920s, works by Leon Bakst, both in Paris and New York, fluctuated at precisely the same amplitude as they do now - from 10 to 50 thousand dollars. But in the years of the Second World War they could be bought for 20 or 30 dollars. The prices of works of art in Russia are a complete mystery to me. Four years ago, the "Portrait of the Artist's Mother" by Kandinsky was sold in an auction organised by Gellos for a million dollars, but at the same time in the Western market the price did not exceed 250 thousand. My advice to collectors is to try to get works from the original source, not from an intermediary. Have you chanced to buy paintings from dealers too? Of course, in that world too I have many acquaintances. I know who to turn to. But that's always going to be more expensive than if you seek it out yourself. Some consider that the demand for the Russian avant-garde has diminished in recent years. This is connected with the appearance of forgeries, or simply trash, so that auction houses were forced to pay up large sums. But all of this in no way reduces the prices of original Russian avant-garde works. According to calculations by Sotheby's, the value of my collection has increased seven times during the past 30 years. Every year it becomes 23 percent more valuable. In addition, the total value of the collection significantly exceeds the sum that might be obtained by selling it in parts. As a united whole, it can create a picture of Russian art, and so its collective value is greater. I know that the Moscow authorities have expressed the wish to acquire this collection, and you are not against it? Aren't you sorry to part with it? Oh heavens, I can't take it with me to the grave. Unfortunately, I have no heirs. In the course of my life, I've given away about 500 works, starting with the Metropolitan Museum etc. I have a large collection, and I will have enough to leave myself as a memory of my country. But you're selling your collection to Moscow... My experience is that the attitude towards things given as presents is quite different from that towards purchased items. I hope to sell 400 works to Moscow. They have been valued by Sotheby's at 4.5 million dollars. The total value of my collection is 7.4 million. Where do you keep your collection? At a warehouse in Germany. I have to admit, that it's not cheap - there's a big difference between me and Krez. What difficulties do you meet with, transporting your works of art to your museum in Moscow, to exhibitions in Russia (including gifts) and, to my knowledge, to Ukraine as well? The greatest mistake is the customs duty imposed on works of art imported into these countries. It transpires that in returning national treasures to my own country, I'm forced to pay 30 percent of their value. This is complete nonsense. Thank God, there are bribe-takers at the border. Give him 100 dollars, and he'll take the picture right to the museum if you want. This works particularly well in Ukraine. But customs officials too are not all the same, and the system doesn't always work. Quite recently at a royal banquet in honour of Putin's visit, I talked of this with Kudrin, the Russian Minister of Finance. He agreed that the situation is truly absurd, and promised to make changes in the near future. How do you like contemporary art? I don't like to pass judgements without knowing the essence of the matter. From a human perspective, it seems to me that what is called art today represents a complete collapse, and that this has a vast range of manifestations. Once at an exhibition I saw a pile of silver knives and spoons that had been smashed with a hammer. The work was entitled "Contemporary Silver". What I completely fail to understand is why such art has its admirers, why people buy it. Last year a visual arts prize was received by a project involving naked light bulbs hung in an empty room. You come into the room, switch on the light and... it turns your thoughts to "something more sublime". Neither do I get any aesthetic pleasure from Hirst's rams in chloroform behind glass. In 20 years time, all of this may seem amusing, but most of it will have been forgotten. For centuries, people have sought a charge of aesthetic energy in art. This they obtained, looking at the works of Velasquez and Titian, Repin and Chagall. I live in the world of Bakst and Benois, so I'm immensely distant from what's being created today. Aren't you overtaken by pessimism, thinking about the visual arts? Doesn't it seem that humanity has exhausted itself in this field? If art has been able to survive for five thousand years, then I don't see why we should fear for the future. In history, there are often moments of crisis, but art has always continued to develop. Today as well, it's nothing to be appalled at. There have been many exhibitions in recent years in London of ancient African, Chinese and Aztec art. Seeing all this, there's no room in the soul for pessimism. Who do you regard as the most outstanding personality in contemporary art? I'm not very well acquainted with contemporary artists, though I do go to exhibitions. In Britain, in the first place it's Bacon, then Freud and after him Hockney. Quite recently the Russian Embassy invited me to an opening of an exhibition of works by a portrait painter well-known in Moscow. His works seemed to have everything: he can draw, his work has a professional feel, and to some the works even seem interesting. But there's no painterliness, no soul. Even if one of his works were given to me as a gift, I wouldn't know where to put it. Do you have works by Latvian artists? Once I bought a work by Ludolfs Liberts from his widow in New York. He is a great master, but I'm not an admirer of pastel tones. You know, each has his own passion. I myself prefer bright, gawdy colours. I have some works by the wife of Drēviņš. But I have no works by Drēviņš himself. He's never interested me. But I very much like Klucis, he's a wonderful master. Unfortunately, I don't have any of his works connected with the theatre. Are you thinking of visiting Riga? I was there a couple of years ago. It's a pleasant city. If circumstances permit, I'll go there, but no such visit is planned for the near future. When our conversation was coming to a close, the prince unexpectedly invited me to see "something very interesting". He left the tea room where we were talking, and returned a few minutes later holding a manuscript. This turned out to be a transcript of a conversation almost 20 years ago. The participants were Nikolay, the son of Alexander Benois ("also a good artist, but not on the same level as his father") and John E. Bowlt, the present director of the Institute for Modern Russian Culture in Los Angeles. The conversation was never intended for publication. The three gentlemen were simply lunching at the hotel restaurant and conversing on art, and Bowlt had the idea of switching on the tape recorder. Just for the archive. This material has never been published. The prince kindly offered the right of first publication to Studija. | |
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