Nice to meet you. I'm GeorgŠµ Costakis. Our wonderful museum curator has already told you something. Including the moment I realized that I found dedicating myself to the Russian avant-garde extremely interesting and creative.
Gradually, but very actively, I started getting rid of everything I had before. I donated a painting to the Pushkin Museum, others were bought by collectors. Later, I exchanged some old paintings for avant-garde ones. I was acting completely blindly because I had no idea about the avant-garde. I knew the names Chagall, Kandinsky, heard about Malevich, but I didn't know who these artists were or their place in the history of painting.
I searched, and it turned out to be a difficult task. Firstly, the avant-garde was prohibited at that time, and those who had it, didn't publicize it. They hid it and tried not to show it to anyone. And no one was interested in buying avant-garde art back then.
Many friends and relatives pitied me. They believed I made a big mistake parting with the old collection, buying, as they unanimously considered it, some "nonsense". Among Moscow collectors, I gained an unfavorable nickname "the eccentric Greek" who acquires unnecessary junk.
After I managed to acquire a large number of works by Popova, I embarked on a new search. I was very interested in Olga Rozanova. It was very difficult to come across her trail. Throughout all the years of collecting, I managed to get only six or seven of her works, including watercolors and gouache. With great difficulty, I found and immediately acquired several works by Kliun.
Later I managed to buy several works by Tatlin, Lissitzky, Rodchenko.
I must say that if it weren't me, many avant-garde works would have perished. At that time in the Soviet Union, besides me, almost no one needed it. Only after I started collecting and showcasing my collection, some foreigners began to look at it. They began to specifically come to Moscow to search for avant-garde paintings and buy them.
Ambassadors, advisors, directors of Western museums, poets, writers who visited Moscow very willingly visited my collection in my apartment on Vernadsky Avenue.
Once Sir Norman Reid, the director of the Royal Academy at that time, came to Moscow and said to me, "If you had done for Britain what you did for Russia, you would be Sir Costakis." Gradually, the secret began to become apparent. People, including official authorities... and the KGB, realized that the "eccentric Greek" who had been collecting unnecessary "junk" for many years had actually collected a valuable collection. There came a moment when living in Moscow with such a collection became uncomfortable. We were always afraid of robberies, attacks on us and our home. Eventually, it happened: Once I was robbed.
This went on for a long time. We were all exhausted. And I couldn't take it anymore; I decided to leave the USSR. But it wasn't easy. I proposed to leave a large part of my collection as a gift to the Tretyakov Gallery and, at the same time, asked to be allowed to take the other part for myself.
It became the basis of the museum you've come to. In my collection, there are about fifty artists of the Russian and Soviet Avant-garde.