Additional Images

Provenance:

Collected by Igor Lavrov, Russia, ca. 1940s
George Costakis, Russia and Greece
Thence by descent

Note:

The present work was collected circa 1940s on the Western edge of the Bering Strait by Russian scholar and artist Igor Lavrov, and subsequently acquired by the Greek-Russian art collector George Costakis.

While little information is readily available in English regarding Igor Lavrov, his involvement with Chukchi and Yupik craft workshops in Uelen, on the Russian side of the Bering Strait between 1955 and 1958 echoes the work of James Houston in the Canadian Arctic. Lavrov built a rural craft industry, laboured to improve the working conditions of Inuit carvers, and encouraged the telling of old myths and stories through their creations. He both reacquainted carvers with their heritage, as well as recorded and shared their own stories among them. The undertaking, fraught with danger amidst the conflicting imperatives of the Soviet Government, who encouraged a craft program rooted in Inuit history, but were opposed to anything too closely associated with religion. While in Chukotka, Lavrov collected a small number of ancient and historical artworks in wood and ivory, which later passed to his close friend, George Costakis.

George Costakis is now well known for his semi-mythical collection of artwork by the early Soviet avant-garde. Almost single-handedly, Costakis preserved their legacy for future generations through his acquisition and care of their artworks, which, under Stalin, were at best regarded as outmoded, and at worst as counter-revolutionary.

Costakis would almost exclusively come to focus on collecting the early Soviet avant-garde and its precursors. His early collecting however was omnivorous, and included silver, Dutch School landscape painting, and other areas, which he later perceived as a distraction from his chosen subject. Eventually forced to leave the USSR in 1977, Costakis’ collecting, divisive under the repressive Soviet state, was made possible in large part by the diplomatic immunity he was granted by working for over thirty years at the Canadian embassy in Moscow, an opportunity for which he expressed great gratitude to Canada.

Waddington’s is honoured to offer fifteen works of ancient and historical Arctic art from the Lavrov-Costakis collection, lots 277-291 in the present auction.

Mikhail M. Bronshtein, “Uelen Hunters and Artists”, Études Inuit Studies, Volume 31, Number 1-2, 2007, 83-101
Peter Roberts, George Costakis: A Russian Life in Art, (New York: George Braziller, 1994)