“It was like two philosophical trains running past each other on parallel tracks,” said Brad Shinkle, describing Russian and American art during the twentieth century. “Each had little or no awareness of the other—what it consisted of, or its rationale.” Shinkle is president and director of the Museum of Russian Art, the only institution in the U.S. dedicated to Russian art. For fifty-plus years during the Cold War, he pointed out, the Russians weren’t worried just about American nukes. They were also worried about a more insidious type of damage that could come from our “decadent” and “degenerate” art seeping into their country. At the same time, Russian art was virtually quarantined inside the Soviet Union; the few works Westerners did see were disdained as “propagandistic” or “intellectually corrupt.”
Understandably, then, most Americans have trouble conjuring any image at all of twentieth-century Russian art beyond, say, Wassily Kandinsky, or the propaganda posters and Social Realist paintings from the Stalin years. But the collection at the Museum of Russian Art—which will go on view May 9 in a new home in South Minneapolis—is meant to change all that. Many of its works invoke quietude and simplicity with brush strokes inspired by Late Impressionism. There are also glowing forests and reverently rendered birches. Frank, round faces of children stare out from the canvases. A stunning portrait of a composer in front of his grand piano might elicit comparisons to Alice Neel or even Alex Katz, except that it’s hard to believe the Russian artist ever saw their work. Nikolai Baskakov’s Milkmaids, Novella is especially arresting—these casual, laughing women are not the somber, chiseled Russian workers we’re used to seeing.
These works and others from the museum’s collection, together with paintings from Moscow’s State Tretyakov Gallery, make up In the Russian Tradition, an exhibition that was recently on display at the Smithsonian Institution. Its opening this month in Minneapolis will inaugurate the Museum of Russian Art’s new facility, a former church built in the Spanish revival style.
Shinkle recently led a visitor through the building as its $4.5 million renovation was heading into the home stretch. A mezzanine level had just been completed, halfway up to the building’s exposed rafters; an empty shaft awaited an elevator. “People have been here working elbow to elbow to get this place ready,” he said, pointing out the well that would soon hold a circular staircase.
If the dazzling new Walker Art Center was considered a modest building project compared with other products of our national museum-building boom, then this church renovation might seem quite minor as art facilities go. Nevertheless, the collection of twentieth-century paintings that will be housed at the new Museum of Russian Art is the envy of the top-drawer galleries in Russia.
Shinkle says that people are drawn to these works the first time they see them. “For fifty years, [Soviet] artists were told to paint so that common people can understand,” he says. “So there’s a comfort factor with these paintings.” Yet they are, he is quick to add, “the technical equal of other twentieth-century works.”
With more than ten thousand works, the museum’s collection began as the private passion of Ray Johnson, a Minnesota businessman with a soft sweep of white hair and a near-constant twinkle in his eye. When perestroika began to open doors in the Soviet Union, Johnson was already a seasoned collector. Suspecting that there might be some artistic surprises hidden behind the Iron Curtain, he sent a proxy to live in the Soviet Union for a year and learn about the art market there.
Johnson himself poked around in attics, sheds, and dachas, all the while building relationships with artists. Many of them were wary of showing their work to outsiders. Since 1945, the government, the only legal market for art, had exclusively purchased paintings that supported its official view of life in a communist state. So two or three generations of painters had amassed whole bodies of work that didn’t fit this mold.
Myths about Soviet art persist today because, frankly, few people have cared enough to dispel them. Recently, fourteen exhibitions of works from Russian museums were simultaneously on view in the United States—but none of them included Russian art. Even in St. Petersburg, tourists line up at the Hermitage to see French Impressionists, but few venture down the street to the State Russian Museum. Unlikely as it seems, that is the reason Johnson decided to build a public home for his collection in Minneapolis. He still sees barriers that need to be brought down and bridges that need to be built.
“These artists, as much as anything,” he says, “want Americans to understand that even if they couldn’t make a working toilet or a good car, they could make a beautiful painting. It’s like they’re saying to us, ‘We didn’t just make bombs.’ I’ve taken that very seriously because I’ve met some wonderful, talented old men who knew full well that Americans thought they only did poster art. They changed me from being just a collector to feeling that I have a real responsibility.”
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