(2 Jun 2019) LEAD IN :
As sanctions and economic woes push culture down the Kremlin's agenda, wealthy individuals are filling a gap, bringing much-needed cash to a struggling art market and supporting young Russian artists.
STORYLINE:
Roman Babichev is an art detective.
"They had a cardboard folder under the bed," says Babichev, recalling his visit to an artist's family in their cramped apartment. "With paintings taken off their frames because they would have filled one of two rooms the family of four lived in."
"They were just lying there, awaiting their destiny," he adds. H bought the lot, adding these works by Alexander Vedernikov to his collection of Russian modernist art.
In the 1990s Babichev gave up gave up a successful business career to dedicate himself to his passion, collecting art.
His apartment on Moscow's outskirts is both gallery and living space, with paintings and sculptures displayed floor to ceiling.
Babichev dug back into Soviet history, discovering forgotten artists of the 1920s -1950s.
With determination and detective work he tracked down their neglected works and pieced together the artists' stories.
Many of these artists studied abroad or witnessed the flowering of Russian avant-garde art just after the Revolution.
Isolated and under threat, they still saw themselves as part of the global modernist art movement they had glimpsed briefly.
Some were forced to hide their work; others were persecuted, several were executed.
Babichev's collection of some 4000 works displays dazzling, unrealized potential.
"If that tragedy of 1917 had not happened, Russian art might have attained a different place," Babichev says of the Russian Revolution.
The AZ Museum in Moscow is the brainchild of Natalia Opaleva, a banker and head of a Siberian gold mine, who collects Soviet-era underground art.
She opened the museum in 2015 and called it after the artist Anatoly Zverev.
An "unofficial artist" of the 1960s, Zverev's exuberant, accessible work makes him popular with the public.
A small space tucked between grand apartment blocks in central Moscow, AZ Museum is packed for openings. Older visitors remember the unofficial artists as heroes of their own Soviet youth.
Focusing on underground art of the 1960s-1980s, Opaleva has amassed some 2,500 works.
This generation of artists experienced Russia's cultural 'thaw' after Stalin's death in 1953 and refused to go back to socialist realism.
"They are united not just by the time they all lived and worked, but by the understanding of 'non-official art' that's what united them. They didn't want to work in the tough framework dictated to them by the government of that time" she says.
Banned by the state, starved of materials and public recognition, they continued to create in a period of 'Soviet Renaissance ,' a term Opaleva uses with some irony.
"They still found time and a way to continue their art and their creativity" adds Opaleva.
Opaleva has ambitious plans to boost AZ's reputation in Russia and abroad, staging her first international show in Florence last year.
She sees collecting art as a personal, even patriotic mission and is determined these forgotten Soviet artists will gain global stature.
Moscow property developer Dmitry Aksenov fell into art by accident.
He bought an abstract painting for his new house and just over 10 years later, owns a growing collection of contemporary Russian and East European art.
A physicist by training, Aksenov took a scientific approach once he decided to collect art, studying cultural history to train his eye.
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