Soviet Nonconformist Art: Costakis Collection

Totalitarian policies in the USSR made the culture highly dependent on the ideological context. At the same time, in the depths of totalitarian society there were still alternative cultural manifestations.

Informal Art of the USSR (or alternative art, nonconformist art, underground art) - under this name unite representatives of various artistic trends in the fine arts of the USSR of 1950-1980s, which for reasons of political and ideological censorship were forced out of public art life by the official authorities.Though not in accordance with the official ideology, art was exhibited away from museums, but has taken refuge in private collections, salons and studios.

Soviet unofficial art, due to objective conditions of existence, had the following characteristics: non-marketability, total communicativeness in a closed environment, rejection of collectivism and equalizing system. As a consequence, nonconformist artists formed many micro-communities that claimed to be elitist.These artists were frequently engaged in various directions and styles, but all united by the idea of freedom and future-oriented creativity. Back in the day, they were forced to isolate themselves from the world art scene, but their innovative pathos and search energy could not be ignored.

George Costakis (1913 -1990) was a legendary collector who gathered and discovered the Russian and world artworks of the masters of the first Russian avant-garde, connoisseur and patron of the Soviet nonconformist artists. During his lifetime he was called "a mad Greek", and today his collection of paintings is included in the world' largest museums.

Costakis quite quickly realized that he does not want to assemble a collection of acknowledged masterpieces, but rather dreams of "doing something extraordinary". Russian avant-garde conquered the heart of George. He collected everything he could reach, bought paintings from relatives of artists who in the hungry postwar years were happy to get rid of unnecessary "junk" - so he got paintings by Klyun and Malevich, Matyushin and Popova. He found the work of Lubov Popova's "Amazon of the Avant-garde" at her relatives' summer house - the window was pinned with it. And Alexander Rodchenko's painting "Abstraction", which he bought, was used by former owners as a tablecloth. Despite rejection and even condemnation, Costakis continued to buy the Russian avant garde - works by Tatlin, Rodchenko and Lisitsky. Some of them were even hunted for years.

Costakis enjoyed playing beyond the limits and rules. Along with collecting the works of avant-garde artists, he began to collect the works of artists of the sixties, representatives of unofficial art. In 1960, Costakisi's apartment on Vernadsky Prospekt turned into an unofficial museum of contemporary art, where artists of the Soviet underground spent a lot of time. Costakis was one of the first to pay attention to and start supporting Dmitri Plavinsky, Oscar Rabin and about a dozen other young artists - every year he bought one or two works from each of them.  

One of the collector's favorite artists was Anatoly Zverev.Costakis purposefully bought up his works, and promoted them in the West. As Costakislater recalled, Zverev could draw a series of suprematic compositions as an answer to Kazimir Malevich.

Leaving the country in the late 1970s, George Costakis- partly forced, as a "payment for departure" - left much of his legendary collection to Soviet museums: paintings and graphics, icons, a collection of clay toys... The second part of the unique collection was bought back by the Greek government after the death of the collector. As a result, thanks to Costakis, the paintings of great avant-garde artists are available in the collections of the largest museums in Russia and other countries.

Text by Lisa Lukyanova @llukianova_