Not a Review

By definition, a review involves a judgement or a discussion of qualities of the object under study, a look at its good and bad points. Is a review of an art collection feasible? Not in the full sense of the word. For the simple reason that a collection cannot have weak and strong points. Art collections — private or public, large or small — have for centuries been shaped by a variety of circumstances, personal tastes, ambitions, state policies, chance events, systematic work, and often all of these combined. The largest collections, usually state-owned and with a rather long history, be it the Louvre in Paris, the Art Gallery in Berlin or the Hermitage in St Petersburg, have seen all of the above, and every turn in their fate has affected the composition of collections. Is it possible to assess the quality of these collections? No. The only thing we can say about them is that they are huge!

With a smaller collection size, the problem of evaluation is even more pronounced. A small collection, what is it exactly? Raivis Zabis, speaking in an interview about the first catalogue of his collection, said that in 2015 it had about a hundred works. Was it small then? Now that the collection has crossed the three hundred items mark, can it be seen as big? If you come to collect Kiefer, or if you get passionate about installation art and attempt to collect it, even one work is already a lot. Just in terms of footprint. So again, it's all about subjectivity and approximation.

Names? Cost? Museum worthiness (the latter usually refers to the artistic quality of an artwork)? All these criteria change over time. In 18th-century Rome, there was no market for authentic antique sculpture fragments, as no one really needed hands, torsos or heads; the concept of a fragment's value did not exist yet, that had to wait until the 19th century. Antiques dealers worked tirelessly to churn out “antique Frankensteins”, offering Antinouses and Venuses for good money to the European royalty, especially enlightened rulers, who took to the fashion of having Vatican-like sculpture galleries. In the 19th century, the word impressionism first appeared in a critical article on Monet and kept having exclusively negative connotations for quite a while. Or, moving forth to the 20th century, let us take an example of Vladimir Serov, the Soviet artist who was greatly favoured by the authorities. President of the USSR Academy of Arts, People's Artist of the USSR, two-time winner of the Stalin Prize (1948, 1951); his name was synonymous with prestige and success throughout the 1950s and 1960s. In the 21st century, however, hardly anyone would care to open an album with reproductions of his works as he went from being famous to becoming odious. Forever? Who knows!

The value of works, present or future, is also a separate matter. European and American auctions often sell works by famous artists, and they sell better and more expensive year by year. Frida Kahlo's sales record is $34, 9 million (2021), Monet's is 110 million (2019). Kahlo created only about 250 works, and most of them are now owned by various institutions. Monet lived a long life, he was a very prolific painter, and quite a lot of his work ended up in private collections; and voilà — now what, not to collect works by artists who work slowly?

Thus, step by step, we have come to conclude that the best one can do in respect of any collection is to describe it in a fairly brief and general manner. Always remembering that the description will be relevant for only a certain while, as art collections tend to grow and change, sometimes in the most bizarre ways.

So what does the RZ Сollection look like in 2022?

The collection has a lot of paintings.

Paintings of the kind where artists are fascinated by material capabilities, if not outright adventures, of oil paint, by its ability to convey or imitate physical properties of surfaces and materials. Oil on сanvas. Two instruments to help create illusions that are different for each viewer. The materials for trompe l'oeil. The paintings in the RZ Сollection blend together like pieces of glass in a toy kaleidoscope to create patterns and tell narratives of the thorny paths of 21st century art.

The collection features works by Latvian, Russian and Cuban artists.

It's not a frequent combination. Still, an interesting common denominator can be seen here. All these countries went through a period — the 1930s in Russia, the 1940s in Latvia, and the 1960s in Cuba — when the natural course of art's evolution was broken by Socialist Realism, and contemporary artists have to overcome these traumas of the past or put up with them. Strange as it may seem, all of them have to cope, one way or another, with consequences of a conversation that took place as far back as a century and a half ago between Vladimir Lenin and Clara Zetkin, in which Lenin made it clear that he preferred the classics.

The collection is evolving and growing.

Just like the collar demands a striped sofa (as in Life and Collar by Nadezhda Teffi), a large assemblage of art requires publicity and sometimes also a kind of institutional arrangement. Exhibitions, new acquisitions, new reviews — it all starts to take on a life of its own and dictate terms to the owner. Well, there you have it, dear collector, that's a foretaste of the future. Art is a powerful thing. But then, you must already know that much.