An unusual gift of Russian prints to the British Museum in 1926

An unusual gift of Russian prints to the British Museum in 1926

by GALINA MARDILOVICH

IN MARCH 1926, at a time of cautious diplomacy between the Soviet Union and Britain, the British Museum, London, received a gift of 218 Russian prints presented by a group of twenty Russian artists. The impetus for the donation was a gift of prints by the British artist Frank Brangwyn to the Moscow Museum of Fine Arts in the late summer of 1925.1 In his note in The Studio on this `unusual artistic exchange', Pavel Ettinger wrote that it was an example of `a rare proof of international brotherhood in the domain of art'.2 Upon accepting the Russian gift, Campbell Dodgson, Keeper of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum, petitioned British printmakers to contribute prints to be presented to the Russian institution as a reciprocal gesture of thanks. The ensuing British donation of more than two hundred works was received and exhibited in Moscow in September 1926. These prints, along with Brangwyn's, are still kept in the Museum, which was renamed the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in 1937.

Were these donations intended simply to augment institutional holdings, either those of the British Museum or of the Moscow Museum of Fine Arts, or was the exchange arranged to bridge political and cultural divides? What made it so `unusual', to use Ettinger's term? In the collection of the British Museum, this group comprises more than one-tenth of the institution's total number of Russian prints. But it is within the context of official Soviet programmes in the 1920s, which often used art as a form of cultural diplomacy, that this episode broke dramatically from typical state-sanctioned practices. This gift of Russian prints was unusual because it was privately initiated, included the work of ?migr? artists, and managed to avoid political subtexts. This gift, and the surrounding events, serve as a testament to the resilience of art in the politically charged environment of the 1920s.

Brangwyn's presentation of his complete printed oeuvre of 352 works to the Moscow Museum of Fine Arts included etchings, lithographs and woodcuts. While little-studied now, at the time Brangwyn was considered one of the most eminent British printmakers. In the series Modern Masters of Etching, Malcolm C. Salaman devoted two volumes to Brangwyn: one in 1924, which marked the beginning of the series, and the second

7. Illustration to Nikolai Gogol's The Portrait, by Aleksei Kravchenko. 1924. Woodcut, 10.7 by 9.4 cm. (British Museum, London).

in 1932. In Russia, Brangwyn had been recognised for some time, and a number of his works featured in World of Art (Mir iskusstva) exhibitions. In turn, the artist was concerned with the political situation in Russia, contributing an illustration for the cover of Leonid Andreev's Russia's Call to Humanity: An Appeal to the Allies, published in London in 1919, and even possibly visiting Moscow in the winter of 1924?25.3 Brangwyn had a history of presenting works to support charitable causes, such as the Red Cross and the National Institute for the Blind, so his donation to the Moscow Museum of Fine Arts was not entirely surprising.4

Research for this article was made possible by the Franklin Research Grant awarded by the American Philosophical Society. Part of this work was presented at the Cambridge Courtauld Russian Art Centre's conference `Exhibit "A": Russian Art: Exhibitions, Collections, Archives', held at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, 21st?22nd March 2014; I am grateful to the organisers and other participants for their invaluable feedback. I would also like to thank Claire Knight for her insightful comments on drafts of this article. 1 There are two published accounts of the exchange: L. Aleshina and N. Iavorskaia: Iz istorii khudozhestvennoi zhizni SSSR: Internatsional'nye sviazi v

oblasti izobrazitel'nogo iskusstva, 1917?1940, materialy i dokumenty, Moscow 1987, pp.36?38 and 115?25; and W. Werner: `Khronika razrushennykh nadezhd: Obmen graviur mezhdu Moskvoi i Londonom v 1925?1926 gg.', Pamiatniki kul'tury. Novye otkrytiia. Pis'mennost'. Iskusstvo. Arkheologiia. Ezhegodnik 1992 (1993), pp.292? 311. Werner believes Brangwyn donated his works sometime in the summer of 1925, whereas Aleshina and Iavorskaia claim it was in September of that year. 2 P. Ettinger: `Moscow-Reviews', The Studio 91 (1926), pp.142?43. 3 Werner, op. cit. (note 1), p.292. 4 L. Horner: Frank Brangwyn: A Mission to Decorate Life, London 2006, p.139.

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8. Landscape with pyramids, by Konstantin Bogaevskii. 1922. Lithograph, 34.7 by 53.3 cm. (British Museum, London).

Brangwyn offered his `modest gift'5 as a gesture of `a sincere respect and admiration for the Art of Russia'.6 Asserting his belief in the universality of art, he observed that the `Republic of Art is a true brotherhood of men knowing not the frontiers of States or the barrier of politics'.7 In the catalogue accompanying the exhibition of Brangwyn's donation, Nikolai Romanov, the Director and Keeper of Prints at the Moscow Museum, explained that the prints `have something in common with the art of our days, similarly seeking to find the monumental, [. . .] eloquent and clear style of a new art'.8 Romanov also acknowledged in his essay that in response to Brangwyn's donation, Russia's `best painter-printmakers' were giving a collection of their prints to Brangwyn with the intention of presenting it to the British Museum ? an element of the story that Ettinger also emphasised in his note in The Studio.9

The gift presented to the British Museum comprised a variety of techniques and subject-matter (Fig.8). The Print Room Register recorded on 10th April 1926 that the prints were `Pre-

sented by the artists through M. N. Romanoff '.10 Dodgson had written earlier to the Museum's trustees to say that this gift was a `unique opportunity of securing a collection of Russian prints which are entirely unknown in this country', and which `form a very desirable acquisition as a collection'.11 In his published commentary on the gift in the September 1926 issue of The British Museum Quarterly, Dodgson specified that `among the most interesting of these prints' were the etchings by Vasilii Masiutin, Ignatii Nivinskii (Fig.12) and Pavel Shillingovskii, the woodcuts by Aleksei Kravchenko (Fig.7), Il'ia Sokolov and Nikolai Kupreianov, and the colour prints by Anna OstroumovaLebedeva and Vadim Falileev.12 Dodgson noted that many of the prints, such as Florence by Konstantin Kostenko (Fig.11), were produced in the colour linocut technique, `a process now becoming popular in England'.

Shortly after accepting the Russian gift, Dodgson drafted a letter to British printmakers requesting donations of prints: `I feel that it is very desirable that some similar collection of

5 ` ', Aleshina and Iavorskaia, op.cit. (note 1), p.115. (Translations are author's own unless otherwise noted). 6 ` ', anon: `Khronika', Zhizn' muzeia. Biulletin Gosudarstvennogo Muzeia iziashchnykh isskustv 2 (1926), p.37. 7 ` , ', ibid. 8 ` - , , [. . .] ', in N. Romanov: Katalog vystavki graviury Franka Brengvina, Moscow 1926, p.11.

9 ` -', ibid., p.3; Ettinger, op. cit. (note 2), p.143. 10 The artists included were Konstantin Bogaevskii, Matvei Dobrov, Vladimir Favorskii, Vadim Falileev, Ekaterina Kachura-Falileeva, Adrian Kaplun, Sergei Kolesnikov, Konstantin Kostenko, Aleksei Kravchenko, Elizaveta Kruglikova, Nikolai Kupreianov, Vasilii Masiutin, Ignatii Nivinskii, Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva, Pavel Pavlinov, Aleksandr Pavlov, Ivan Pavlov, Pavel Shillingovskii, Il'ia Sokolov, and Vasilii Vatagin. For a complete list of works see Werner, op. cit. (note 1), pp.304?08; British Museum, London, Registry, 10th April 1926, `Modern Russian Prints', nos.5?222. 11 British Museum, London, Trustee Reports, report dated 27th March 1926,

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9. Hanging garden, by Paul Nash. 1924. Wood engraving, 16.7 by 14 cm. (Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow).

10. The jetty, Sennan Cove, by John Edgar Platt. 1922. Colour woodcut, 26.8 by 23.5 cm. (Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow).

British prints should be offered to Russia, not merely as a quid pro quo, but for the sake of making British art more known than it is in that country'.13 He elaborated that in Russia `modern British art means just ? Beardsley and Brangwyn'. Many artists responded to the appeal, and in August 1926 the Moscow Museum of Fine Arts received a gift of more than two hundred prints by over fifty British printmakers. Included were works by Robert Gibbings, George Underwood, Francis Sydney Unwin, John and Paul Nash (Fig.9), Sylvia Gosse, Malcolm Osborne, Job Nixon, John Edgar Platt (Fig.10), Robert Bevan and Marion Cowland. As with the Russian donation, these prints were by established British artists. Several of the contributors held prominent teaching positions at London's Royal College of Art, for example, and many were featured in Dodgson's 1922 publication Contemporary English Woodcuts. The British prints were exhibited in Moscow in September, accompanied by a catalogue that reiterated the chain of events leading up to the gift: Brangwyn's donation and the response of the Russian printmakers, whose works, as the curator Vera Nevezhina wrote, were to be exhibited at the British Museum

later that year.14 In her subsequent review of the British gift, Nevezhina shrewdly reflected that these prints were significant `on the one hand, as milestones that marked the course of art, and on the other ? as those examples of technical achievement, artistic finesse and consistency of style, which can never lose their value'.15 Nevezhina continued: `All these artists, great and small, are important to the history of printmaking for they are both the necessary links between the present moment and the brilliant past of English prints, and the inspirational figures preparing the path of graphic art of tomorrow'.16

What on the surface seemed to be a mere exchange of prints between British and Russian artists, or an attempt by a Soviet institution to augment its holdings, was in fact a delicate strategic move. By the mid-1920s there was an established practice of officially sanctioned exchanges in the USSR. Soviet organisations such as the All-Union Society for Cultural Ties Abroad (VOKS), which was formed in 1925, explicitly encouraged cultural reciprocity in the form of exhibitions, exchanges and donations of books in order to foster diplomacy between the newly formed Soviet Union and other countries. In its initial dealings

Campbell Dodgson to the Trustees. Translation of the letter into Russian is published in Werner, op. cit. (note 1), pp.303?04. 12 C. Dodgson: `Contemporary Russian Art', The British Museum Quarterly 1 (September 1926), p.53. 13 British Museum, London, Trustee Reports, copy of letter dated 10th April 1926 from Campbell Dodgson to `Dear Sir'. Translation of letter into Russian is published in Werner, op. cit. (note 1), p.304. 14 V. Nevezhina: Katalog vystavki. Sovremennaia angliiskaia graviura i litografiia, Moscow 1926, pp.3?4. 15 ` , ,

, ? , , ', V. Nevezhina: `Angliiskaia graviura XX v. Muzeia iziashchnykh iskusstva', Zhizn' muzeia. Biulletin Gosudarstvennogo Muzeia iziashchnykh

iskusstv 3 (1927), pp.12?16, as quoted in Aleshina and Iavorskaia, op. cit. (note 1), p.124. 16 ` , , , ? , , , y ', Nevezhina, op. cit. (note 15), p.124.

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11. Florence, by Konstantin Kostenko. 1913. Colour linocut, 21 by 42.7 cm. (British Museum, London).

VOKS exploited existing personal connections as a way to cultivate broader public support in Western countries for the nascent Soviet regime.17 Similarly, the British Society for Cultural Relations between the Peoples of the British Commonwealth and the USSR, founded in 1924, could have facilitated and promoted such an artistic exchange. But, as gleaned from new archival evidence, that was not the case. While the exchange in part mimicked the typical structure of VOKS's early activities, the Russian gift was exceptional in side-stepping government control and thus avoiding political implications. In fact, the gift of Russian prints was a rare episode at this time of volatile relationships between states: instigated by a British artist and developed by a Russian ?migr?, the exchange was carefully orchestrated, and seized on by Romanov and a group of Russian artists as a unique chance to assert themselves in a period of great social and political instability in the Soviet Union.

In Romanov's personal archive, held by the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts' manuscript department, there is a revealing set of letters between the curator and Aleksandr Bakshy, a Russian art critic living in London, who acted as a go-between with Brangwyn.18 It becomes apparent that Brangwyn had first offered his gift not in 1925, but before the October Revolution in 1917. In the earliest letter, dated 6th October 1917, Bakshy responded to Romanov's proposal to accept Brangwyn's donation for the Rumiantsev Museum, Moscow, agreeing that the institution would be the most appropriate Russian museum for the British artist's gift, `the aim of which is to assist in the spiritual

rapprochement of the two peoples'.19 Bakshy went on to say that barring unforeseeable problems, upon Brangwyn's return to London, the critic would send the gift to Romanov via a courier. This letter confirms that Brangwyn initiated the donation of his prints to Russia, but that it was intended as a gesture not towards the new Soviet state, but rather for the broadly defined Russian art world, and that there was no plan for a Russian gift in return. Brangwyn's intention, however, was not realised; and a subsequent letter from Bakshy to Romanov, dated 16th January 1925, alludes to Brangwyn's abrupt postponement of his gift until `a more auspicious moment' ? presumably alluding to the Revolution.20 The critic had decided to approach Brangwyn again and persuaded him to reconsider his donation, to which the artist responded `with the same enthusiasm as before'.21 Bakshy was thus writing to Romanov to see if this gift would still be accepted, this time by the Moscow Museum of Fine Arts, of which the Rumiantsev Museum became part in 1924, and of which Romanov was director. If so, Bakshy recommended an immediate course of action to `prevent the chance of seeing his [Brangwyn's] action as a political act', possibly because Brangwyn was hesitant of being stigmatised as a supporter of the Soviet Union.22 First, Bakshy advised, the Museum should formally request such a donation from Brangwyn; second, it should propose that a collection of prints by Russian artists be presented to `say, the British Museum', an idea Brangwyn himself had suggested when reconsidering his gift.23 It appears that the establishment of diplomatic relations between Britain and the Soviet Union,

17 M. David-Fox: Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to the Soviet Union, 1921?1941, Oxford 2012, pp.28?97. 18 Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow (Gosudarstvennyi muzei izobrazitel'nykh iskusstv imeni A. S. Pushkina), Department of Manuscripts (cited hereafter as GMII), f. 14 (Nikolai Romanov), op. III, ed. khr. 5?16. 19 ` ', GMII, f. 14, op. III, ed. khr. 5. 20 ` ', GMII, f. 14, op. III, ed. khr. 6. 21 ` , ', GMII, f. 14, op. III, ed. khr. 6.

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22 ` , ', GMII, f. 14, op. III, ed. khr. 6. 23 `, ', GMII, f. 14, op. III, ed. khr. 6. 24 GMII, f. 14, op. III, ed. khr. 17. 25 For more on the reorganisation of the Department of Prints and the Rumian-

tsev Museum, see K. Bogemskaia, ed.: Era Rumiantsevskogo muzeia: Graviurnyi kabinet; Iz istorii formirovaniia sobraniia GMII im. A. S. Pushkina, Moscow 2010, II, esp. pp.38?63. 26 `

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albeit still strained in 1924, revived the idea of an artistic exchange that had been conceived much earlier.

Romanov was still eager for the donation to be made, even though the political situation in Russia had shifted, and was only too willing to follow the recommended steps. Although his correspondence has not been found, his archive contains a letter from Brangwyn, who wrote: `In your letter so generous in appreciation of my work, you remind me of the offer which I made several years ago to present to the Artists of Russia a collection of my prints. I respond to your reminder all the more readily'.24 Such a prestigious exchange offered the opportunity for Romanov both to affirm his position and to support Russian artists whom he had known for years. The destabilisation and reorganisation of artistic and educational institutions had become a common occurrence since the Revolution, which, in addition to the growing scarcity of art materials, contributed to a decline in public interest in certain media, especially fine-art prints. As the first Russian public museum to collect Russian prints systematically, the Rumiantsev Museum was known for advancing contemporary printmaking by holding exhibitions of artists such as Ostroumova-Lebedeva, Falileev, Nivinskii and Masiutin, all of which were organised by Romanov. Yet in 1924, following extensive discussion and debate, the Rumiantsev Museum was closed, and its collections subsumed into the Moscow Museum of Fine Arts.25 Although the curators of the Rumiantsev's print department, including Romanov, Vladimir Adariukov and Erikh Gollerbakh, were transferred to the new museum, the future of contemporary Russian printmaking was unclear. Already in 1922 Gollerbakh had written, `In the most recent times, the art of printmaking here [in Russia] has suffered a perceptible decline. It is true that there are individual artists [. . .] who continue to work, but their productivity has waned noticeably'.26

As attested by the example of the Rumiantsev Museum, Russian prints, both old and contemporary, were receiving some critical attention under the new Soviet regime. In 1922, for instance, besides Romanov's monographs on Masiutin and Falileev, and Adariukov's volume on Ivan Pavlov, Gollerbakh published his book Contemporary Russian Printmakers, which was followed in the next year by his History of Engraving and Lithography in Russia.27 That same year, the Russian Museum in Petrograd held an exhibition with an accompanying catalogue on Russian lithography of the previous twenty-five years.28 Russian printmaking was promoted again when Ksenia Zelenina published Past Russian Printmakers and Lithographers in 1925.29 Yet, in 1926, the year the Russian donation arrived at the British Museum, Aleksandr Chaianov implied that all this attention to Russian prints and printmakers had not been enough: `Based on the interest in classical printmaking, there should inevitably arise an interest in contemporary graphic art, which can then further enable the development of new Russian graphic art, so brilliantly begun by the works of Masiutin,

12. St Sebastian, by Ignatii Nivinskii. 1915. Etching, 39.5 by 33.2 cm. (British Museum, London).

Falileev, Kravchenko, Favorskii, Kupreianov and others'.30 This notion underscores the urgency with which the artistic intelligentsia sought to assert the importance of printmaking in the changing hierarchy and value of art in the Soviet Union.

Due to the volatility of the political climate, the exchange of prints had to be made carefully. Additional letters in Romanov's archive unravel the layers of precise co-ordination in the exchange that ensued. Bakshy relayed to Romanov, for example, that before Brangwyn could fully commit to his donation, the artist needed to ensure that the British Museum would accept the Russian gift.31 Although Dodgson would not guarantee it immediately, he assured Brangwyn that `[i]t is quite certain that the proposed offer of Russian prints would be accepted, and welcomed' (this letter was then forwarded by Brangwyn to Romanov).32 In early February 1925, two weeks after Bakshy's renewed proposal, Romanov began to approach Russian printmakers for contributions to the planned gift to Brangwyn and the British Museum. In a letter to OstroumovaLebedeva, Romanov explained that Brangwyn wanted to avoid any political connotations and so, to make it appear very clearly a private gift of an artist appreciative of Russian art,

. , [. . .] , ', E. Gollerbakh: Sovremennye russkie gravery, Petrograd 1922, p.8. 27 N. Romanov: Oforty V. N. Masiutina (1908?1918), Moscow 1920; N. Romanov: V. Falileev, Moscow and Petrograd 1923; V. Adariukov: Graviury I. N. Pavlova (1886?1921), Moscow 1922; Gollerbakh, op. cit. (note 26); idem: Istoriia graviury i litografii v Rossii, Moscow 1923. 28 V. Voinov: Russkaia litografiia za poslednie 25 let, Petrograd 1923. 29 K. Zelenina: Starye russkie gravery i litografy, Moscow 1925.

30 ` , , , , , , ', A. Chaianov: Staraia zapadnaia graviura. Kratkoe rukovodstvo dlia muzeinoi raboty, Moscow 1926, p.13. 31 GMII, f. 14, op. III, ed. khr. 8. 32 GMII, f. 14, op. III, ed. khr. 19.

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