Klavdiia Mikhailova

The Russian gallerist and patron Klavdiia Mikhailova (1875–1942) founded and ran the exhibition space Khudozhestvennyi salon(Art Salon) in Moscow from 1912 to 1918. Despite the brevity of its tenure, the gallery served as an important hub for modernist exhibitions and advanced the development of avant-garde art in Russia. Mikhailova’s salon provided crucial early patronage for painters including Marc Chagall, Natalia Goncharova, Mikhail Larionov, Kazimierz Malewicz (Kazimir Malevich), Vladimir Tatlin and others. She helped catalyze their careers by both exposing their works to a new, informed urban art audience and encouraging often confrontational and agitational promotional strategies that would later define modernist exhibition practices.

Born into a wealthy merchant family, Mikhailova trained as a painter, enrolling in the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture in 1891. There she met Ivan Mikhailov, a fellow art student, whom she married in 1896. She launched her artistic career in 1897 and, for the next fifteen years, worked as a professional painter, regularly exhibiting in the Moscow art scene with groups ranging from the critical realists The Itinerants (Peredvizhniki) to the Moscow Association of Artists (Moskovskoie tovarishchestvo khudozhnikov), among others. Her style was primarily symbolist, focusing on landscape painting and scenes from folklore.

In 1911 Mikhailova received a sizable inheritance following her father’s death. She used the funds to open theKhudozhestvennyi salon in November 1912, renting a grand building on Moscow’s prestigious Bolshaia Dmitrovka Street. The gallery’s name drew on the enduring popularity of the Parisian salon tradition, and its Latin motto referred to Mikhailova’s continuing interest in symbolist aesthetics: Vita brevis, ars longa est(Life is short, art is eternal).

At the time, private commercial galleries were still relatively rare in Moscow. The notable comparative to Mikhailova’s endeavor was Dobychina’s Art Bureau in Saint Petersburg, founded in 1911 and run by a female patron, Nadezhda Dobychina. These were among the first institutions to diversify the art market from the monolithic control of the Imperial Academy and its juried salon exhibitions. By prioritizing curatorial freedom over commercial needs, galleries provided the essential infrastructure for avant-garde art to thrive. They were small and streamlined enough to accommodate the rapid emergence of avant-garde splinter groups, providing not only a public space for them to be promoted but also a legitimizing framework that conferred status and endowed them with cultural credibility.

The Art Salon opened in November 1912 with an exhibition program that carefully balanced experimental displays with more mainstream shows that were less liable to stir controversy. In order to increase its cultural clout, the gallery strategically showed prestigious international artists; one of its early exhibitions displayed 220 imported, mostly French works, featuring artists such as Juan Gris, Fernand Léger, Henri Matisse, Jean Metzinger, and Pablo Picasso. Mikhailova also promoted domestic talent, resulting in a curiously contradictory artistic direction that simultaneously embraced Francocentric movements and renounced them in favor of Russocentric nationalism. Despite the inherent paradox, it was a successful strategy for launching the careers of young local artists.

The Art Salon was therefore adroitly positioned to adapt to the exigencies of an emergent Russian modernism. Implicit in each exhibition was the gallery’s status as a vector transmitting the competing currents of artistic influence from Western Europe and Slavic revivalism. This was especially evident in one of the most scandalous shows mounted by the gallery, Mishen’ (Target), organized in 1913 by the group Donkey’s Tail (led by Larionov) and explicitly intended to provoke the art establishment. Not only did it display works in the radical Rayonist style (among the earliest examples of painterly proto-abstraction), but it brazenly mixed high and low art forms (religious icons, popular prints, and shop signs displayed alongside oil paintings). Moreover, the featured artists were so militantly nationalistic that they used their exhibition press release to emphasize the fact that no foreign artists were invited to participate, expressing their desire for an autonomous, national movement in unmistakably activist terms: “We are against the West, which is vulgarizing our forms and Eastern forms, and which is bringing down the level of everything.”

On the eve of the exhibition opening, Larionov organized a debate about artistic currents from East and West. The discussion degenerated into a brawl between speakers and audience. The police intervened, and several participants, including Larionov, were arrested and charged with inciting public unrest. Melding exhibitions with exhibitionism would prove to be a reliable marketing strategy that became a hallmark of subsequent avant-garde shows. Mishen’ ran for two weeks; not a single work was sold.

As a patron of the arts, Mikhailova was unique, not just for her progressive promotion of the radical avant-garde but also for the equally radical reshuffling of gendered expectations that her career encompassed. One of two leading female arts entrepreneurs in early-twentieth-century Russia, Mikhailova shared a similar curatorial ethos with her rival Dobychina: they occasionally collaborated on traveling exhibitions, including a 1913 retrospective exhibition of Goncharova’s works.Indeed, Goncharova was arguably the artist most indebted to Mikhailova as a promoter because the legitimacy afforded by the Art Salon implicitly sanctioned some of her more radical works, leading to their acceptance among a broader public.

From 1916 Mikhailova’s Art Salon began to experience financial difficulties that caused several important shows to be cancelled. The material shortages caused by war affected the quality and quantity of paper available for advertisements and posters. In 1918, shortly after the Russian Revolution, the Soviets seized the Art Salon. It was nationalized and brought under the control of the Peoples Commissariat for Education. In 1924 it was closed to serve the needs of the Soviet state, which, by then, were evolving away from the fragmented multiplicity of modernism toward a centralized state-funded model of government-run galleries characterized by curatorial conservatism.