Momentous Happening in Moscow

One of the world's greatest collections of 20th century art hung, until now, in an unexpected place: a seven-room apartment in a prefabricated building on Vernadskovo Prospekt. on the outskirts of Moscow. There, from floor to ceiling, cramming the rooms and narrow corridors, were about 380 paintings from the critical years of the Russian avantgarde, 1910-25: the work of such artists as Wassily Kandinsky. Kazimir Malevich, Alexander Rodchenko, Vladimir Tallin. El Lissitzky, Marc Chagall, Liubov Popova. An official storeroom of officially disapproved art? Not at all: a private collection belonging to a pipe-puffing, guitar-playing Greek named George Costakis.

Costakis' apartment has long been a place of pilgrimage for art connoisseurs visiting Moscow. Nowhere else in the world could one see such, a concentration of major works by Russian artists whose output is still insufficiently known in the West. The eventual fate of the Costakis collection has therefore been a subject of much guesswork both in Russia and outside it, but now the question appears to be settled. Under the terms of an agreement with the Soviet Ministry of Culture, Costakis is giving about 300 paintings to the government, with the understanding that they will eventually be shown as a group in a still unfinished Tretyakov Museum building. Some time this summer, he is planning to leave Moscow and settle somewhere in the West, taking about 80 of his favorite paintings with him --provided. Costakis adds, that he can return to Russia "if I get too homesick or if I want to come back to die."

Official Thaw. It is a moment of some importance, for it signals an official thaw in Soviet attitudes to the cultural avant-garde of the past. Before Lenin died and the hand of Stalin squashed experimental art like a bug, the link between "revolutionary" art and revolutionary politics in Russia was closer than it has ever been in the West. The idealist abstract order of works like Lissitzky's Proun, 1919, was deeply connected to social visions of Utopia: when Tallin designed his extraordinary spiral tower as a monument of the revolulion, there was no doubt in his mind thai the appropriate language for radical politics was radical design. The energy of that period ran through the entire fabric of the Russian avantgarde, from Mayakovsky's poetry to Eisensiein's films, with their complex rhythms and shuttling montages. Revolulion provided a subject matter for unexpected artists. Who, for insiance, would have supposed that Marc Chagall, whose studio for the past 35 years has been a kitsch factory producing the same sugary brides, bouquels and flying lovers, was in his youth capable of an image like Forward, 1917, with its arrowy figure leaping againsl a bright red quadrilateral?

The Costakis collection bears invaluable witness to a vanished moment in Russian culture, long disregarded and suppressed by the Kremlin. That it should now be accepted is perhaps proof that the original impact of these works is lost: they have become history. Art grows harmless before lilerature does, and the fact that artists like Popova and Ivan Klyun now find their way into a museum does nothing to stop the persecution of Russian writers.

Costakis, nearing his 65th birthday in July, is the son of a Greek tobacco merchant who moved to Moscow before the revolution. He started his collection in 1948 by buying antique Russian silver and paintings by conventional artists. He soon tired of that and shifted to the avantgarde. He had very little money. Even today he earns no more than $8,500 a year as an administrative officer in charge of Russian employees at Moscow's Canadian Embassy. But in the beginning, he recalls, "this kind of art --including Chagall and Kandinsky --was selling at a very low price, even in the West. Here, their paintings were available, if you could find them, for $135 to $160.1 found paintings in barns and under tablecloths, and I paid very little for them."

Peace and Quiet. Costakis claims that he never expected to make a fortune from his pictures. "If I had been thinking of making money," he says, "I would have gone to Leningrad after the war and bought some of the many Western paintings available there. But I bought these paintings because I loved them. People were telling me years ago that the painters I collected were not important. Maybe I had a few, like Chagall, but the rest, like Popova, Klyun and Rodchenko, were just followers. I didn't agree with them. It is not nice to say it, but I think I am somewhat unique in that I understood the meaning of these artists. That they are now recognized is for me a momentous happening."

Costakis' plans for the future are not yet settled. He mildly complains of the fatigue of receiving so many visitors, a crowd a day, to his collection: "My wife and children want some peace and quiet, so that's why I'm leaving." Being a Greek national, he is thinking of settling in Greece, but he may also go to the U.S. An astute businessman, he refuses to estimate the value of the paintings that the Ministry of Culture is letting him take out of Russia. (In view of the prices now being paid for major works of the early Russian avantgarde, it could run to more than $3 million on the Western market.) Costakis plans to sell only "a few, enough to support me."

About parting with the bulk of his collection, "I'm not at all sad. I have a feeling that I have done something more with my life than merely making a collection of paintings. The best place for it is in a museum, where people can enjoy it. I have four children, so I could split up the collection and give it to them. But I felt that after I died, if God would grant me the privilege of rising up from the coffin, I might come back and see my collection sold and my heirs riding around in big cars and fur coats. So this is the way I've decided."

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