George Costakis

Born in Moscow to Greek parents, George Dionisievich Costakis spent thirty years assembling one of the most important private collections of early-twentieth-century avant-garde art made in the late Russian Empire and early Soviet Union. His collection—housed and exhibited only in the privacy of his apartment until he emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1977—featured hundreds of paintings and works on paper by leading modernist artists, including Marc Chagall, Alexandra Exter, Natalia Goncharova, Vassily Kandinsky, Ivan Kliun, Gustav Klucis, Mikhail Larionov, El Lissitzky, Kazimir Malevich, Mikhail Matiushin, Liubov Popova, Alexander Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, Vladimir Tatlin, and Nadezhda Udaltsova.

For most of his life, Costakis worked at modest day jobs in Moscow, first as a driver for the embassies of Greece (1929–39) and Finland (1939–42), and finally as an administrator for the Canadian embassy (1942–77). In these roles he escorted foreign diplomats to antique shops, where he began collecting objects in 1929, focusing on porcelain, silver, and sixteenth- and seventeenth-century paintings. His priorities shifted dramatically when he first encountered an abstract painting by Olga Rozanova in a Moscow apartment in 1946. Stunned by its intense luminosity and bright colors, he sold most of his existing collection in order to focus on acquiring modernist art made circa 1910–25. He initially sought out the advice of Nikolai Khardzhiev, a writer and art historian who, as a member of artistic circles in the 1920s, had been close with Malevich, Tatlin, and others. Yet Costakis disagreed with Khardzhiev’s narrow views, which led him to dismiss Popova as derivative and Rodchenko for his turn to photography. Costakis preferred to adopt a holistic approach to his acquisitions, preserving a broad selection of the dizzying range of possibilities that artists explored during the first decades of the twentieth century.

Many pieces were in private hands when Costakis began collecting in earnest in the 1940s. At the time, avant-garde art was not shown in Soviet museums, which favored Socialist Realist painting; the modernist works that museums held in their collections did not leave the storerooms. Working discreetly during a period when there were neither dealers nor a primary market, Costakis spent three decades assembling his substantial collection, often purchasing works directly from the artists or their descendants. He developed friendships with artists like Rodchenko, Stepanova, and Tatlin, and persisted in tracking down the relatives of artists who had already died. Interpersonal networks played an important role in the formation of his collection, as did the fact that his salary from the Canadian embassy was paid in hard (foreign) currency rather than in rubles. While this gave him more spending power, he occasionally sold possessions and borrowed money from friends to purchase works for his collection.

The art Costakis collected covered the walls of his Moscow apartments, first on Bolshaya Bronnaya Street, then on Leningradskoe shosse, and finally on Vernadsky Prospekt. As his collection grew, his home became an unofficial meeting place for artists and intellectuals, and he developed a reputation in Moscow as “the eccentric Greek” for his dedication to experimental art. After Stalin’s death in 1953, he began showing his collection to foreigners. Among his guests were Alfred Barr, founding director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, who first visited the Soviet Union in 1927–28 and returned in the late 1950s, and René d’Harnoncourt, who served as director of MoMA from 1949 to 1967. Postwar Soviet artists, too, came to see the collection, including Dmitry Krasnopevtsev, Dmitri Plavinsky, Oskar Rabin, and Anatoly Zverev. The exposure to avant-garde experimentation provided by the Costakis collection lit a spark for a generation of nonconformist artists.

Highlights of the collection included samples of Popova’s Constructivist fabrics from 1923–24 (now in the collection of the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow); Rodchenko’s only surviving Spatial Construction (acquired directly from the artist and now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York); and the INKhUK portfolio, a set of drawings produced for a debate at the research institute founded by Kandinsky in 1920 that led to the emergence of Constructivism (now held by the MOMus-Museum of Modern Art-Costakis Collection in Thessaloniki).

Costakis was eventually granted permission to leave the Soviet Union in 1977. As a condition of his emigration, he donated a portion of his collection to the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. While the agreement and total number of donated works were long shrouded in mystery, a catalogue listing 319 works was published by the State Tretyakov Gallery in 2014. Costakis was allowed to emigrate with the remainder and settled in Greece. The first exhibition of his collection abroad was mounted in 1977 at the Kunstmuseum in Düsseldorf, followed by a major exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1981. Both had a profound impact on the reception of Soviet avant-garde art among European and American audiences. For example, the collection was an important source for Camilla Gray’s 1962 book The Great Experiment: Russian Art 1863-1922, which introduced the Russian avant-garde to English-language audiences. After Costakis’s death in 1990, the Greek state purchased the remainder of his collection (1,275 objects) for the newly established State Museum of Contemporary Art in Thessaloniki, now the MOMus-Museum of Modern Art-Costakis Collection.