George Costakis: A Russian Life in Art

Born in Moscow of Greek parents, George Costakis (1912-1990) began collecting paintings of the condemned Russian avant-garde in the mid-1930s. He and his Russian wife Zinaida crammed their apartment with works by Chagall, Kandinsky, Kasimir Malevich, Liubov Popova and others, at great personal risk to themselves. Costakis's holdings, which today form the core of the Tretyakov Collection in Moscow, were instrumental in making the Russian avant-garde known to the West. In this delightful biographical study enlivened by 30 b & w photos and color reproductions, Roberts, former Canadian ambassador to the U.S.S.R. (1983-1985), extensively reproduces Costakis's own recollections from taped interviews made in 1987. Roberts refutes the theory, popular in the West, that Costakis was protected by the KGB; he shows that the KGB waged a campaign of personal terror in the 1970s against the art collector. We also learn of his mother's and brother's imprisonment in Stalin's gulag, and of his friendships with Chagall, Vladimir Tatlin and Aleksandr Rodchenko. (Sept.)