Nikolai Pavlovich Riabushinskii(also Ryabushinsky, Ryabushinskiy and Riabouchinsky)

Collector, patron, critic, and artist Nikolai Riabushinskii promoted the work of artists and writers in both his native Russia and Western Europe. Though his tastes were heterogeneous, ranging from non-European artworks to old master paintings, Riabushinskii’s most enduring legacy remains his founding and sponsorship of The Golden Fleece (Zolotoe runo), a monthly journal of Symbolist art and literature active from 1906 to 1909.

Riabushinskii was the sixth of sixteen siblings, born to Maria Stepanova and Pavel Mikhailovich Riabushinskii. His father was the scion of a wealthy family whose fortune was built on banking, as well as involvement in the paper and cotton industries. Little record exists of Nikolai Riabushinskii’s early years, though he likely attended the Moscow Practical Academy of Sciences as did a number of his siblings. Unlike two of his brothers—Vladimir, a member of the Moscow city council, and Dmitri, an aerodynamicist and correspondent to the French Academy of Sciences—Riabushinskii possessed little political or scholarly ambition. He was instead a perennial source of family embarrassment due to his widely publicized gambling debts, profligate spending, four marriages, and involvement in numerous affairs.

Nonetheless, Riabushinskii shared with his family an interest in the arts. His brother Mikhail owned works by late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russian painters such as Aleksander Benois and Mikhail Vrubel, as well as contemporaneous French paintings by Edgar Degas, Camille Pissaro, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. His brother Vladimir also collected Russian icons. For his part, Nikolai collected quite broadly, amassing modern art and old master paintings, featuring examples from the Bruegels, Lucas Cranach, and Nicolas Poussin. Many of these works were purchased from Prince Golinicheff-Koutousoff, the personal secretary to the Dowager Empress Marie Feodorovna, and later sold at auction in New York in 1916 when Riabushinskii’s fortunes waned. As a collector, he distinguished himself from his brothers by focusing on even more recent Russian art, purchasing paintings by Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larianov, as well as Symbolists such as Vrubel and Pavel Kuznetsov. Riabushinskii also commissioned a frieze from Kuznetsov for the main gallery of his lavish Neoclassical villa, Black Swan, located in Petrovsky Park, a fashionable district in northwest Moscow. The majority of Riabushinskii’s Russian paintings were lost when his villa burned in 1914, leaving the precise contents and size of his collection unknown.

In December 1905, Riabushinskii founded The Golden Fleece, a monthly journal of art and literature initially associated with Russian Symbolism and in particular, The Blue Rose, a loose group of artists that counted Kuznetsov among its members. The publication was the second arts periodical to appear in Russia and was luxuriously illustrated. Issues were printed on imported enameled and silk paper using gold and silver ink, and bound with gilded rope. With the mission of promoting Russian art abroad and introducing French art to the Russian public, The Golden Fleece initially published articles in both French and Russian and was distributed internationally in eleven major cities: Paris, Berlin, Leipzig, Charlottenburg, London, Vienna, Rome, Madrid, Copenhagen, Constantinople, and New York. After only six issues, Riabushinskii was forced to reduce the publication’s pages and forego the French text due to his extravagant spending, as well as challenges associated with typesetting Latin letters in the Russian printing houses he employed. Despite The Golden Fleece’s expensive subscription fee—nearly three times as much as other contemporary publications—the journal enjoyed much popularity during its forty-eight-issue run, with Riabushinskii presenting the first nine issues in 1906 to Tsar Nikolai II, who would go on to become a sponsor.

The Golden Fleece initially served as a platform for the Symbolist interest in art as a means of mystical, creative self-expression. Featuring contributions from the writers Viacheslav Ivanov, Andrei Bely, and Aleksandr Blok, it was lavishly illustrated with examples of contemporary painting. As Riabushinskii became increasingly influenced by a younger generation of artists such as Goncharova and Larianov, The Golden Fleece shifted its attention to the more recent avant-garde, notably publishing translations of Vincent van Gogh’s letters, excerpts from Paul Gauguin’s Noa Noa, and Henri Matisse’s “Notes d’un peintre” in its later issues.

Under the auspices of The Golden Fleece, Riabushinskii organized two major salons in 1908 and 1910, as well as an exhibition of the Blue Rose in 1907—all in Moscow. The 1908 Salon of the Golden Fleece, co-organized with Larionov, included French painting among Russian examples and stands as one of the first public exhibitions of the work of Georges Braque, Albert Gleizes, and Matisse in Russia.

In 1909, Riabushinskii attempted to solicit investment from the Moscow Palace of Arts, a modern art museum, though the project went unrealized due to financial difficulties. The final issues of The Golden Fleece appeared in 1909; when faced with bankruptcy in the following years, Riabushinskii auctioned much of his collection.

In 1914 Riabushinskii moved to Paris, where he ran an antique store located first on the Champs-Elysées and later avenue Kléber. In the 1940s he relocated his business to place Beaumarchais in Monte Carlo and also opened the Galerie “La Rose Bleue” on boulevard Maréchal Pétain in Beaulieu-sur-Mer, France. No longer possessing the resources to purchase the volume or quality of works he had while in Russia, the gallery in Beaulieu-sur-Mer was likely a modest enterprise. During his final years, he supplemented his income through portrait drawing and painting, art lessons, and restoring paintings and antiques. Riabushinskii died in Nice, France, in 1951.