[dedulya37]

Сообщение от Tjutchev

Matthew nobody helped, and bought something that nobody wants.

You are mistaken, my dear.
Now it is presented as the salvation of Russian artists from hunger, but all was redeemed "for beads."
And the need is again practical Americans to "keep a controlling stake" paintings by Russian artists and be a monopolist.

http://www.tmora.org/about.html

And here's another. Sorry, that in English.

http://www.gif.ru/eng/greensearch/?search=Ray Johnson

From Russia, with love

'The world recognizes the greatness of Russian ballet and Russian writers. Why not visual art? ' Ray Johnson, right, is pictured with 'Anxiety,' a work by Geli Mikhailovich Korzhev-Chuvelev at the Museum of Russian Art in Bloomington

Читать дальше... 

Ray Johnson casts himself as equal parts opportunist, capitalist, conservationist and philanthropist.

As a kid, he made his own arrows and sold them to a string of sporting goods stores. A stint as a Lutheran minister inspired him to revolutionize the funeral business. A fascination with wooden duck decoys led to the Wooden Decoy national retail chain.

Wealthy from real estate deals, Johnson has poured millions more into another accidental discovery - 20th-century Russian Realist painting.

Slender, silver-haired and 66 years old, Johnson has spent the past quarter of his life discovering, purchasing and accumulating the work largely ignored by the contemporary art world. He estimates his collection is 14,000 pieces - curators at Moscow's state-run Tretyakov Gallery have told him there is none larger.

Oddly, no major American museum has shown interest until now - the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, today opens an exhibition of Russian art drawn equally from the Tretyakov and Johnson collections. "In the Russian Tradition: A Collection of 20th Century Paintings" is on view through mid-March.

Now, after single-handedly developing an American market for this period of Russian art, Johnson suddenly finds himself in a struggle with Russians determined to repatriate the artwork.

"I look at my collection as America's fair share," Johnson says, pointing to the unavailability of Soviet art through much of the latter 20th century. "If I hadn't collected it, I don't know that anybody else in this country seemed disposed to do it on their own."

JOHNSON OF ALL TRADES

An infant when his father died and raised by a mother disabled by polio, Johnson developed quiet senses of independence, entrepreneurship and social stewardship while growing up on a farm in Iowa. Of all his disparate ventures, none was more out of left field than art.

"Probably the closest thing to art in our home was a calendar," he says.

He first explored art through catalogs and began buying prints of classic French Impressionist paintings, along with antique frames to go with them. During his ministering in the northern Minnesota communities of Crosby-Ironton, he often exhibited his prints to a public he felt otherwise had little chance to study the great Impressionists.

Johnson has no heritage or innate interest in anything Russian, beyond his daughter's pursuits in ballet. But after Mikhail Gorbachev decentralized the Soviet Union's economy, it opened the door for potentially global exposure to a half-century of the country's art.

Johnson, who fostered a personal taste in artistic realism, saw this branch of Russian art as an open niche for enjoyment and investment. He amassed the collection by purchasing hundreds of paintings at a time from smaller collectors in London, Germany, Turkey, France, Italy, Mexico and Canada.

"The world recognizes the greatness of Russian ballet and Russian writers. Why not visual art?" he says.

"Most people know Russian art is dreary, somber, colorless, that it was all produced by the state, that it's all propaganda. That's the stereotype, right?" Johnson continues. "It's the stereotype our government wanted people to believe, and if enough people believed that, nobody would go to Russia."

RUSSIAN CARETAKER

Married 27 years, Ray and Susan Johnson live in a wide block house of granite and marble, built by one of the daughters of beer magnate Theodore Hamm, on Lake Minnetonka's Browns Bay.

"We're really not the formal people this house might imply," he says. "I don't think of myself as being wealthy at all. I'm a poor guy who's responsible for a lot of money."

Many of the artists represented in Johnson's collection, or at least the ones on view in his museum and home, were heavily influenced by the French Impressionists. The collection is dominated by landscapes and still lifes, with humanity unfolding through the etched and painted snapshots of farm and factory work and the mundanity of domestic life.

Few Americans will recognize the names at the foundation of Johnson's collection, despite their achievements within Russia. Aleksandr Gerasimov, tightly connected to Stalin's regime, was regarded during his prime as the "People's Artist of Russia." Johnson says he owns 375 pieces by Sergei Tkachev.

Perhaps because of the government-imposed shroud covering the art until the late 1980s, art historians outside of Russia are just beginning to explore its place in contemporary art. Johnson senses a prejudice to art created and influenced under governmental rule. The reasons are more complex, one local authority says, for the West's indifference to this realm of art.

"Art of the Renaissance was heavily controlled by the church, and we don't look back on that as not being worth showing," says Lyndel King, director of the University of Minnesota's Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum.

King first visited Russia in the mid-1970s. He organized a well-received exhibition in 2001 of Russian avant-garde art from the early 20th century and is preparing another for 2005.

Rather than prejudice, she suggests, Realism lost to Abstract Expressionism in dictating the tone of the dialogue for contemporary art.

"Figurative art wasn't as highly valued, but it's making a comeback, along with art that makes certain political statements," King says. "I don't think we'll know for another 10 years, at least, how Americans and Europeans embrace the Russian Realism."

The Smithsonian exhibition could foster a place for this art, King says. The exhibition came about through the Smithsonian's relationship with Moscow's Tretyakov Gallery, which turned Smithsonian directors onto Johnson's collection.

BUILDING A BRIDGE

Johnson opened the Museum of Russian Art two years ago in a little-trafficked business park in Bloomington and has loaned pieces to major museums in Europe, Korea, Mexico and Canada.

Johnson believes he can stamp an indelible legacy by furthering American and Russian relations through the arts. But to the Russians who have lobbied Johnson to sell the work back to Russian hands, he insists it isn't available.

"I think there are people who think I've taken advantage of the Russian people ... but all I did to those artists was make them a lot of money," Johnson says. "I brought the collection to the US to share it with the people here. My museum is a good first step, but only a first step in keeping it here. If it went back, that would be it."

Johnson is moving the Museum of Russian Art in mid-2005 to a converted Spanish-style church at Interstate 35W and Diamond Lake Road in Minneapolis, opening the doors with the exhibition now on view at the Smithsonian. Johnson also is recruiting corporate sponsors - the chief donor, to this point, has been country music star Ronnie Dunn, who has donated $ 3 million to Johnson's museum.

"I'm going to take this Russian art to a new level," he says. "I'm really only one person, but what I'm involved in is really big. So watch for the smoke."