Collecting before and after the October Revolution: the Archive of Nadezhda Dobychina

Abstract

Abstract Dobychina’s name and her Art Bureau are mentioned in the bibliography dedicated to the history of modernism thanks to the “Last Futurist Exhibition. 0,10” which was held there in December, 1915–January, 1916. However, it should be noted though that Dobychina hardly belonged to the radical avant-gardists. Her interests as a collector and a curator in the pre-revolutionary years included artists of the World of Art and the Blue Rose groups, but she also had in her possession some artworks by Natal’ia Goncharova, Mikhail Larionov, David Burliuk, Natan Al’tman, Marc Chagall, Wassily Kandinsky. The documents from the Dobychina’s archive, kept at the State Russian library, prove that she played an important role in the art field and acted as an art dealer both before and after the October revolution. In the early 1920s, she was in charge of the exhibition departments of the several institutions in Petrograd (Leningrad), from 1932 to 1934 she worked as a senior researcher at the State Russian Museum; after that she moved to Moscow, where she headed the Art Department of the Revolution Museum. Throughout these turbulent years she tried to keep her art collection. The three collection inventories, compiled in 1919, 1924 and 1930, show that some artworks constituted the collection’s integral part and not intended for selling. The most striking paintings and graphics by Mikhail Vrubel’, Valentin Serov, Viktor Borisov-Musatov, Dmitriĭ Stelletsky, Alexandre Benois, Martiros Sar’ian, apparently, belonged to Dobychina for decades and were sold mostly after her death to the famous Soviet collectors – Solomon Shuster, Aram Abramian, Aleksandr Miasnikov, and Valeriĭ Dudakov.