Collecting Asian Art in the Urals: A Regional Phenomenon in the European Context

Abstract

This article summarises the experience of over ten years behind the study and presentation of Asian collections from the Urals between the nineteenth and early twenty-first centuries. The material presented reveals the regional peculiarities of this process and focuses on the facts and features characteristic of the European tradition of collecting materials from this historical period. The relevance of this material is due to the lack of knowledge of eastern collections in different regions of Russia, mainly kept not in museums of art but in local history museums of various formats, as well as the need to analyse and determine the place of Russian regional collections in the pan-European process of collecting Asian art objects. During this period, in the Urals, which did not have close territorial ties with the countries of the East or large art markets, there was a continuous process of accumulation of extensive collections representing a comprehensive picture of the development of art in several Asian countries (Japan, China, Tibet, Mongolia as well as Buryatia, a Buddhist region of Russia closely associated with it). The article notes objective and arbitrary reasons and events leading to the arrival of individual artworks and entire collections in the Urals, gives examples of such processes in Europe and reveals the specifics and differences between the Ural collections and those in the capital. In addition, the material is supplemented by information about the composition and quantitative indicators of private and museum collections that have formed in the Urals over two centuries. Also, the authors outline research lacunae in the study of individual collections. Following this, the article is divided into three time-blocks, on the one hand, coinciding with historical periods, and, on the other, reflecting changes in the socio-political and cultural life of the country, affecting the nature of the formation of Asian collections in the Urals from the mid-nineteenth century to the present.