Russian icons at Hillwood

Magazine Antiques, March, 2003 by Wendy Salmond

When Marjorie Merriweather Post (see p.82, PL I) arrived in Moscow in January 1937 as the wife of the United States Ambassador Joseph E. Davies (1876-1958), nothing in her background could have prepared her to become a collector of Russian icons. Since first beginning to collect in the 1920s, her tastes had been firmly focused on eighteenth-century French furniture, porcelain, and gold boxes. As a staunch Christian Scientist she can have felt little empathy for the Russian Orthodox Church, with its splendid rituals and faith in the miraculous. Yet icons and liturgical items used in the Orthodox rite became the most evocative mementos of Marjorie Post's Soviet adventure (see P1. III).

During their brief tenure in Moscow, the Davieses were among the last foreigners permitted to buy from the stockpiles of objects and works of art confiscated by the Soviet government in the wake of the Russian Revolution in 1917. The nationalization of private property in 1918 had yielded rich reserves of art treasures once owned by members of the imperial family, the nobility and the wealthy merchant class.

Although the finest icons removed from private collections were transferred to the Tretiakov Gallery in Moscow and the State Russian Museum in Leningrad, large quantities continued to accumulate in government storerooms. A second rich source were the numerous monasteries and churches that were subjected to systematic confiscations of valuables in the early 1920s or were simply closed or demolished to make way for workers' clubs or other secular purposes.

The idea of selling these confiscated properties abroad first arose in the early 1920s as a solution to the Soviet Union's chronic shortage of foreign currency. But not until the First Five-Year Plan was introduced in 1929 was a substantial export market for icons created. Even museums were obliged to contribute to this effort by deaccessioning part of their icon collections. A receptive audience and potential clientele in the West was cultivated between 1929 to 1932, when the Soviet government sponsored an exhibition of icons that traveled throughout Europe, England, and the United States. As a result, icons came to be appreciated abroad as "Russian primitives," comparable to the panel paintings of the quattrocento in Italy. Western visitors to the Soviet Union could legally purchase icons in government-run commission shops, while members of the diplomatic community were invited to shop in government storerooms. In the hard times of the 1920s and 1930s private citizens were often obliged to sell their icons , swelling the flood to such an extent that many travelers brought home one or two icons as souvenirs of their Russian experience.

By the time the Davieses arrived in Moscow, the great boom of art sales was winding down. Chances of discovering a major find in the official shops were relatively slim compared to just two years earlier, when the Soviet art export organization Antikvariat had helped the Pittsburgh businessman George R. Hann (1891-1979) put together a first-rate collection of icons, many with Impressive provenances from the Tretiakov Gallery. Nevertheless, the Davieses were able to assemble two fine collections of icons--one for themselves and the other for the ambassador's alma mater, the University of Wisconsin at Madison. The latter consisted of about twenty icons selected by "the most notable experts in Russia connected with the Tretyakov Gallery." (1) The Davieses' personal collection totaled thirty-seven icons acquired in the commission shops of Moscow and during their official tours of inspection throughout the Soviet Union. The collection mirrored the vast range of icons cast adrift by the social upheavals of the revolution.

Monumental church icons were high on the list of desirable prizes, distinguished by their size and purity of color and form. The Davieses found four such icons: a pair of sixteenth-century royal doors with the canopy still attached (P1. V), a large icon of Saint George slaying the dragon, one of the Old Testament Trinity, and a Menologian tabletka--a small calendar icon recording the saints and feast days celebrated in the month of March (P1. I). The remainder captured the variety of icons used for private devotional use: numerous smaller images of the Mother of God, Christ Pantocrator, and various saints, many adorned with the silver covers (oklads, or trappings, as they were then called in the United States) that became so popular in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

In 1939, the year after the Davieses left Moscow, the Soviets imposed a ban on the export of art, and the steady exodus of icons and other works of art came to an abrupt halt. By this time, however, two decades of emigration and state-sponsored export had created a supply of icons large enough to meet the West's growing demand. The capitals of Europe were rich hunting grounds for collectors of Russian art in these years. Paris, for instance, abounded in emigre collectors and artists turned antiques dealers.