In Nebesnaia golubizna angel΄skikh odezhd, Elena Osokina continues to explore the world “behind the façade” of the Stalinist economy and the Soviet afterlives of old regime material culture. This history describes how, in the 1920s–30s, the Soviet state accumulated and sold abroad treasured artworks—specifically, icons. Osokina also tells a parallel story of the formation of Soviet and present-day Russian art collections. At the heart of her argument are two paradoxes: the Soviet atheist state created remarkable museum collections of icons, and the Soviet socialist state fashioned a world market for Russian art. Violence underpinned both processes. Some of the most moving pages describe the nationalization of private collections and the seizure of church valuables. Osokina writes of icons from ravaged monasteries and estates heaped in overflowing basements, storage areas, and sheds; and of overworked experts trying to process them. She depicts the destructive conditions in which icons were kept and the damages they sustained—and the fragility of their wood and paint conjures the fragility of their owners. This is the origin of the displays that mesmerize us at today's Tret΄iakov Gallery. Likewise, the western collectors’ market for Russian religious art: not only was it made possible by revolutionary violence, but many of the Soviet officials who selected and assembled the icons for sale, transported them abroad, and negotiated with dealers and collectors perished during the purges.
Osokina's account is structured around a series of institutions—the Historical Museum, the Tret’iakov Gallery, the trading organization Antikvariat. Sensitive to the interplay between institutions and people, she draws telling portraits of curators, art critics, trade officials, collectors, and diplomats. Osokina takes readers behind the scenes of Antikvariat, whose job was to select and sell abroad old regime antiques. The money would help finance Stalin's industrialization. Antikvariat's leaders, such as Abram Ginzburg, Georgii Samueli, and Nikolai Il΄in knew little about art, but they emerge from Osokina's portrayal as skillful and cynical merchants, socialists with a sixth sense for capitalist commerce. If they did not sell many of the icons destined for the marketplace—and Osokina shows they did not—it was through no fault of theirs. It was because, in the midst of the Great Depression, the demand for old regime luxuries was meager. But they were the masterminds driving what foreign market there was. They did not take markets for granted and sought actively to shape the demand for icons. And they understood that to create a demand for ancient Russian art, they had to establish its position as art indeed.
Osokina stresses just how novel this idea was: foreigners saw icons as little more than curiosities and souvenirs, while Soviet officials understood them as material artifacts from a dark past of superstition and exploitation. The discovery of Russian icons as an art had belonged to the turn of the twentieth century, when modernist critics reassessed their aesthetic value. But no sooner had collecting begun in earnest than the revolution sent collectors packing for Europe or retreating to the servants’ quarters of their own houses. In the early days of nationalization, icons were still seen as historical documents: the Historical Museum's Department of Religion received a majority of them. During the anti-religious campaigns of the late 1920s, the department was demolished, its head Aleksandr Anisimov arrested, and hundreds of icons transferred to the Tret΄iakov Gallery. Osokina charts how, on the heels of the department's decimation, the recognition of icons as works of art emerged in Soviet culture—gradually and not until the mid-1930s. But attempts in the early 1930s to create a foreign market for icons represented an important stepping-stone. That recognition—icons as works of art—turned them into antiquarian merchandise. In another paradoxical twist of this story, Bolshevik brokers for industrialization completed the aesthetic work of the modernists. They did so by organizing an impressive traveling exhibition of Russian icons and framing it in scholarly, art critical terms. By contrast, domestic displays of icons served anti-religious propaganda and were structured according to a Marxist view of history. Osokina gives us marvelously rich analyses of icon exhibitions at the Tret΄iakov Gallery and abroad—in London, Berlin, and various American cities—in 1929–32. This exhibition touring Europe and the US was doubly consequential. Not only did it bring Russian icons to the attention of western curators, but, most immediately, it helped to consolidate the Tret΄iakov ’s icon holdings. For this is also a story of centralization: many icons did not return to the provincial museums that had loaned them—they resettled in Moscow. It appears from Osokina's account that impoverishment of provincial museums was, if not wholly calculated, then at the very least deliberate.
Osokina works against two contrasting arguments, or, more precisely, accusations. One is that the Stalinist regime, shortsighted and uncultured, sold imperial treasures for tractors. This accusation was formulated on the model of the pilfering of Renaissance canvases from the Hermitage. Osokina, however, demonstrates that the most important works of ancient Russian art were not, in fact, sold. Rather than turning them over to Antikvariat, curators safeguarded them in museums. Of those that did reach Antikvariat, a great number remained unsold and were returned to museums: there was no market for them during the Great Depression. By the time European and American economies began to recover, the Soviets’ urgent need for hard currency had passed. The second accusation Osokina dismantles is that the most valuable icons did indeed remain in Russia, because Antikvariat sold fakes. She examines inventory numbers on the backs of icons, tracks wooden tablets to their places of provenance, and follows their peregrinations among Soviet institutions and to private holdings and museums in Europe and the US. This is a work of painstaking reconstruction, in which Osokina matches multiple inventory numbers (icons had several, because they moved many times among museums) to transfer documents to authenticate Antikvariat's merchandise. She uses these numbers as material traces of the icons’ journeys. Along the way, Osokina addresses the question of authenticity. Challenges to Antikvariat's icons revolved around dating. While the dating was often revised, with some icons growing yet older and others becoming younger, Osokina uses initial prices from the 1920s and early 1930s as an indirect statement of value. But she also holds in tension prices, dating, and reputation. Looking ahead to how Antikvariat's icons faired on collectors’ markets in later decades, she depicts the markets’ instability: challenges to the icons’ authenticity wrought havoc on fortunes and undermined western museums’ collecting practices and investment priorities. This is what happened in the 1980s, when allegations that icons auctioned by Christie's were fakes rocked the market and embarrassed American museums.
Osokina designs her account in an investigative genre. She does not shun the first person and incorporates her research process into the narrative—how she cross-checked inventory numbers, how curators responded to her inquiries, what topics they were willing to discuss and why, the dead ends and eureka moments. This narrative choice allows readers to solve intellectual puzzles along with the author and to experience research vicariously. The book straddles the past and the present, in which contemporary curators attempt to shape how a history of their collections is written. For the past of the collection speaks to the present in newly-found moral and national languages.
After reading Osokina's book, it is impossible to look at icons in the same way again.
