MOMus-Museum of Modern Art: The house of the Costakis Collection in Thessaloniki

In 1998 the Greek Ministry of Culture made the bold decision to begin negotiations to purchase the part of the Costakis collection, which the collector had taken with him in 1977 with the permission of the Soviet authorities when departing from the USSR to settle in Greece. On March 31, 2000, 1277 works from the Costakis Collection were finally purchased by the Greek state and given to the then State Museum of Contemporary Art (SMCA), based in the city of Thessaloniki at the Moni Lazariston, a renovated Catholic monastery dating from the late 19th century. From the enactment of law 4572/2018, the Metropolitan Organization of Museums of Fine Arts of Thessaloniki (MOMus) became the universal successor of the State Museum of Contemporary Art (SMCA). MOMus is the union of SMCA and its departments (Thessaloniki Museum of Photography and Experimental Center for the Arts) with the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art and the Museum Alex Mylona in Athens. This union institutes a new and dynamic platform of museums that promotes the development of all aspects of visual arts. Under a single administration operate five institutions that develop their dynamic program inside and outside Greece: MOMus-Museum of Modern Art, MOMus-Museum of Contemporary Art, MOMus-Experimental Center for the Arts, MOMus-Museum of Photography (all based in Thessaloniki, Greece) and MOMus-Museum Alex Mylona (based in Athens, Greece). MOMus-Museum of Modern Art is today the house of the Costakis Collection.

Costakis Archive

Through the steady and continuous support of the collector’s daughter, Aliki Costaki a rich and interesting archive came additionally from the Costakis family to the museum as a donation. The archive consists of:

• Original art books of the Russian avant-garde, mainly from the cubofuturist and constructivist periods,
• Original catalogues of major exhibitions of the Russian avant-garde that took place mostly in Moscow, St. Petersburg and Kiev but also in Berlin, Amsterdam, Paris and New York,
• Newspapers and art magazines of the avant-garde as well as educational printed material from the Unovis School as well as from the Inkhuk (Institute of Artistic Culture) and the Vkhutemas (Higher Artistic and Technical Studios),
• Posters and printed propaganda material, especially a big collection of “modern lubok” by Kazimir Malevich, Vladimir Maiakovskiii, Aristarkh Lentulov and other artists,
• Vintage photographs and glass negatives with portraits of artists, works of art, theater performances and documented art exhibitions of the Russian avant-garde,
• Handwritten and typed letters and postcards to and from different artists,
• Handwritten notes, articles, philosophical texts, sketches and typescripts,
• Material that deals with the story and the documentation of the Costakis collection, from the Moscow times (1960-1970) to the major exhibitions abroad (1970-2000).

Costakis Collection

Despite the fact that his collection was divided into two main parts in 1977, Costakis managed, even when dividing his collection, to maintain a unity and coherence in both parts of the collection.
The Costakis collection and archive at MOMus-Museum of Modern Art in Thessaloniki include works and archival material that are representative of all the periods of the Russian Avant-garde and cover almost the whole spectrum of artists. However, some parts include material that is essential for a complete study: Over 200 works by Liubov Popova allow one to follow the entire development of this great artist, who, even though she passed away at a very young age, travelled the whole path from symbolism to cubo-futurism, suprematism, constructivism and productive art. A retrospective of Liubov Popova based on the Costakis collection of MOMus was organized in Thessaloniki in 2019. The same applies to Ivan Kliun and Gustav Klucis. Especially the Kliun collection (paintings, drawings, archive) is so rich and complete that allows us to study the whole course of this artist. The great number of Kliun's sketches allows us to reconstruct many of the artist's lost works. Over 80 drawings by the constructivist Klucis allows us to get an important knowledge of the artist’s “axonometric drawings” that were attempts to combine painting with architecture. A big number of paintings, drawings and archival material by Solomon Nikritin are kept at the collection. Nikritin was a second generation Russian Avant-garde artist and founder of the Projectionism movement. Most of the works of this artist are kept today in the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow and the Thessaloniki SMCA. In 2004, in collaboration with the State Tretyakov Gallery, 350 works by the artist had been brought together for public viewing. Many previously unknown works were documented and identified, the artist’s various ‘series’ of works were reassembled and the whole oeuvre of Nikritin was presented to the public in a massive three-language (English, Greek, Russian) catalogue.
The works of the Ender siblings (two brothers and two sisters, all students of Mikhail Matiushin) occupy a very significant position in the collection. Through these works, one can detect the application of Matiushin's theory on extended vision, the fourth dimension and the organic relationship between art and nature and biology. A series of early paintings of Aleksandr Rodchenko from the period between 1919 and 1921, when the artist was a member of the Commission of Painterly-Sculptural-Architectural Synthesis (Zhivskulptarkh) and before he gave up easel painting to work on production art are also an important part of the collection. The unique sketches that Costakis collected on the subject of 'construction' and 'composition', the products of a discussion that had been initiated in 1921 at the Moscow State Art Institute (INKHUK), are of great scientific value because they present the theoretic roots of the constructivist movement. The collection of porcelain by artists such as Nikolai Suetin, Wassily Kandinsky, Natan Altman and others as well as the books designed by different artists of the Russian avant-garde including Malevich, Popova, Filonov, Rozanova and Klucis are both significant proofs of the attempts made by Russian Avant-garde artists to have an impact on mass production. A significant number of works created by the Avant-garde artists in the late 1930s and early 1940s give us the opportunity to find a new approach to the end of the Russian Avant-garde, an issue that is interesting and recently particularly open to debate.

Exhibitions

Since 2000 the SMCA organized a series of exhibitions and conferences in connection with the Costakis collection. These include, among others, the exhibitions: “Tatlin and Construction” in 2002, “Spheres of Light, Stations of Darkness. The art of Solomon Nikritin” in 2004 in collaboration with the State Tretayakov Gallery, “Light and Colour in the Russian Avant-garde”, an exhibition that travelled to Berlin (Martin Gropius Bau, 2004) and to Vienna (MUMOK-Ludwig Collection, 2005), and “Vers de Nouveaux Rivages” at the Maillol Museum in Paris in 2008. Also, a number of exhibitions were co-produced by the SMCA. These include “Lost Vanguard Found: Art and Architecture in Russia 1915-1935” (2008) which travelled under the title “Building the Revolution” at laCaixa in Madrid and Barcelona, at the Royal Academy of Arts in London and Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin (2011-12), “Rodchenko-Popova: Defining Constructivism” at the Tate Modern (2009) and the Reina Sofia Gallery in Madrid and “Cosmos of the Russian Avant-garde: Art and Space Explorations in Russia” at the Botin Foundation in Santander (2010-11). The SMCA collaborated with many museums by presenting big selections from the Costakis collection for important thematic exhibitions like i.e. the Kazimir Malevich exhibition “with selections from the Khardzhiev and Costakis collections” at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (2013), Tate Modern (2014), Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn (2014). The museum has been cooperating with a big number of Russian museums on the subject of Russian avant-garde, i.e. the State Tretyakov Gallery, Schusev State Museum of Architecture, Mayakovsky Museum, Moscow Manege, the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Centre etc. Since 2018 and under its new name and administration (Prof. Anderas Takis, President of the Board of Administration, Dr. Maria Tsantsanoglou, Director) MOMus-Museum of Modern Art-Costakis Collection organized two important exhibitions in Thessaloniki with the support of the newly formed Board of Trustees headed by Kristina Krasnyanskaya, that also made the architectural reorganization of the interior space of the museum possible: “Restart. The George Costakis Collection. Thessaloniki” (2018) and “Liubov Popova. Form. Colour. Space” (2019).