Antiques and Minor Dutch Painters

Costakis’ first steps towards collecting were associated with the buying of antiques. Together with the staff of the embassy he worked for, he bought antiques that he found and liked in Moscow shops. It was mostly decorative silver, porcelain, carpets and paintings by Minor Dutch painters.

Later, Costakis himself treated this part of his collecting as a misunderstanding, calling that period a “period of the first mistakes”, although in the 1930s and 40s paintings by Dutch artists of the 17th century were considered the best art investment. Since the times of Peter the Great, paintings by Rembrandt and his associates have fully agreed with the "Russian taste". The purchases of paintings by Nicholas Berchem (landscapes) or Willem Kalf (still lives) were for Costakis a kind of symbolic gesture of familiarising himself with high art.

At some point, he lost interest in the old masters - they all, in his words, "merged into one picture." The collector's logic was as follows: “If you continue to collect old canvases, you will not achieve anything. Even if one day you come across a Rembrandt, people will say you were lucky, that's all. " Parting with the Minor Dutch took place when a new passion flared up - the paintings of the avant-garde artists of the early twentieth century.