The exhibition “Francis Haskell’s Engraving Cabinet” opened in the In Artibus Foundation hall. Review

The exhibition “The Engraving Cabinet of Francis Haskell” has opened in the exhibition hall of the In Artibus Foundation: almost 200 sheets, ranging from the 16th to the 20th centuries, from Italy to Russia, several first names, but more rare and original figures. But on top of all this deep professional knowledge is an amazing story of one of the most famous married couples in the history of art history with almost detective plot twists and a happy ending. Kommersant’s art columnist says Kira Dolinina.

The history of this exhibition contains a lot of personal names and personal passions. This exhibition was invented and brought by Moscow gallery owner and collector Ildar Galeev. It was thanks to his almost 20-year-old kind and attentive friendship with the widow of the great art historian Francis Haskell, Larisa Salmina-Haskell, that a significant part of their collection moved to Moscow to live with Galeev for permanent residence. Larisa Nikolaevna donated her European prints with the idea that they would end up in Russia, while other parts of the Haskell collection remained in the Ashmolean Museum (Russian collection) in Oxford, in the London National Gallery (paintings) and the British Museum. This was how the intra-family geography of the legacy of a remarkable Anglo-Soviet couple was outlined, the two sides of which met by chance, got married through an almost categorical “impossibility” and lived a long, happy life in science and love.

The 30-year-old commissioner of the Soviet pavilion of the Venice Biennale, Larisa Salmina, and the 34-year-old talented Cambridge graduate Francis Haskell met in 1962 and married in 1965. Everything here was accidental: the appointment of such a young and non-party member of the Hermitage to a high post; and their acquaintance in a nice company, which suddenly left the couple alone, resulting in conversations until the morning; and a hasty romance with a marriage proposal right there, on the banks of the Venetian canals; and the connections of Haskell’s father, who, due to his balletomanic hobbies, knew the officials of the Soviet embassy well, solved the most difficult case with a permission for the marriage of a citizen of the USSR with a capitalist foreigner. This marriage will be remembered for a long time in the Hermitage – no one there will allow themselves such dizzying tricks for a long time.

On the other hand, it does not seem at all accidental that the very English son of a Russian emigrant had an affair with an amazing Soviet museum worker who knew four languages ​​and was open to the most varied versions of her science, which was completely ossified in her homeland at that moment. Yes, in this marriage he will be a great scientist: in 1963, his first acclaimed work, “Patrons and Painters,” was published, after which the “social history of art” became an equal component of the entire discipline. After moving to Britain, she had to move away from Tiepolo and the Italians, whom she studied at the Hermitage (England had enough of its own specialists), but she was able to become an indispensable expert on Russian art, working until her old age to replenish the Oxford collections with its best examples. In recent decades, Salmina has talked a lot and willingly about the ups and downs of her Soviet life, sometimes inserting completely incredible events and getting confused in the facts (like the plot with her almost losing a box with Matisse from the Pushkin Museum), but an unshakable part of her story was her couple with Haskell, who never left, traveled around the world, lived within a select professional circle, honoring talent and education above many other conventions. It is with the Haskells that the Soviet spy, the best expert on Poussin, part-time relative of the queen and keeper of her collection, Sir Anthony Blunt, will be hiding from the press.

The Haskells’ house in Oxford was overflowing with books and works of art. Almost no first names and million-dollar acquisitions. This collection is a reflection of the owners’ tastes in science more than in art as such. This is why it is valuable: English caricature, French art of the 19th century of the second series, rare subjects in old European engravings, the Russian Silver Age not in masterpieces, but “en masse”, a kind of demonstrative corpus. Many Italians are a tribute to Larisa Nikolaevna’s first love, there is a clear bias here – they were very actively collecting the works of Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, in which the baroque meeting of the North and South of Europe is read with a special thrill.

Francis Haskell will die in 2000. Larisa Salmina-Haskell is still alive and has devoted her last years to the correct, from her point of view, distribution of her inheritance. Moscow is very lucky in this sense: collections so full of individual interests and meanings are not often found. Of course, the opening of the catalogue, the admission by the owner of In Artibus Inna Bazhenova that for her “Haskell’s engraving cabinet” is interesting in comparison with her personal collection, looks a little funny. There is little close here: the British collection is part of the professional toolkit of a scientist with world fame and very original ideas. The businesswoman, although she has collected a very representative private collection, is on the other side of the art world, not the academic one. On the other hand, when neophytes recognize not only the exhibition potential of the first names and top personalities of museum fashion, but also the pleasure of getting to know the chamber and office practices of studying art, this is always gratifying. And certainly the Haskell collection in this case is a wonderful example of a non-attractive, quiet, very original conversation with the potential for great discoveries.