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“Useless Trash”: The Story of the Collector Who Bought Great Works of the Russian Avant-Garde

Exhibition “Utopia and the Avant-Garde”. Russian art from the Costakis Collection, housed at the Russian Museum in Malaga, Spain

The collection compiled by the Greek-Russians George Costakiswho at that time was considered in Moscow “an eccentric Greek who buys useless junk”, appears in the new temporary exhibition at the Russian Museum in Malaga, along with prominent names of the Russian avant-garde.

A total of 470 works and one hundred original archival pieces will remain in Malaga until April 2025 thanks to an agreement with Thessaloniki Museum of Modern Art (MOMus), which in turn opened an exhibition on July 11 funded by the Malaga hometown of Picasso.

Aliki KostakisThe daughter of a collector, she recalled in the show how her father, despite having no artistic training or prior contact with those creations, became “the best specialist in the Russian avant-garde” at a time when little was known about that movement.

George Kostakis (1913-1990) in 1973 (Tony Evans/Timelapse Library Ltd./Getty Images)

Kostakis (Moscow, 1913, and Athens, 1990) was wise enough to “choose not only already famous names, such as MalevichBut she started collecting everything, including works by female artists.”

At a time when the avant-garde in Russia was “forgotten and banned,” many of the pieces he acquired “were hidden or destroyed by some people,” according to Aliki, who noted that painters such as Alexander Drevin They were even arrested and executed during Stalinism.

The family apartment on Vernadsky Boulevard in Moscow, consisting of only three rooms, had accumulated more than 3,000 works, and in the 1960s and 1970s it became a refuge for banned avant-garde art and an unofficial museum frequented by many foreign intellectuals, diplomats and politicians.

Exhibition by Momus, Museum of Modern Art in Thessaloniki, Greece

When Costakis returned to Greece in 1977, he left part of his collection at the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, “where there were amazing pieces,” his daughter said, and the rest of the collection, 1,277 works, would be acquired by the Greek state in 2000 for allocation to MOMus, which also acquired his archive, donated by the family.

For this part, Maria TsantsangeloThe MOMus director and curator of the exhibition explained that when Costakis began collecting these works in his apartment, “a lot of people said he was crazy, because he was collecting useless things,” but he was convinced that one day “we will learn to appreciate this art.”

A total of 470 works and one hundred original archival pieces will remain in Malaga until April 2025.

It was in 1981, with the major exhibition of the Costakis collection at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, that “it was discovered that this chapter of art history had not yet been written and could be started to be written,” according to the exhibition’s curator. The collector, he noted, had saved these pieces “from oblivion and destruction.”

This is the largest exhibition to date at MOMus outside Greece, where the various movements of those decades are presented in an “encyclopedic manner” and which, in addition to Malevich, creators such as Lyubov Popova, Ivan Klyon, Gustav Kluches, Mikhail Larionov also Pavel Filonovamong other things.

Source: EFE

[Fotos: EFE/Jorge Zapata]