How your contribution is to be used

Your contribution will be used to hire a dedicated team, pay the programmer for work done, purchase the minimum necessary equipment and pay them and myself very humble wages. This should eventually bring more support for the next years, and pave the way for the Gallery to support itself and its team.

The team will consist of:

• a professional programmer who has been working on credit and doing a brilliant job;
• a marketing and promotion manager to locate new material; create mutually beneficial partnerships and extend services by bringing events of interest to the visitors; find experts and articles; etc;
• an art student to assist with manual development work (locating, proofing, recording, scanning and processing) so the website information base grows faster + some basic equipment and books;
• a forum manager and promoter to get the conversation going, start, keep and moderate; filter out the SPAMmers and trouble-makers, engage more participants;
• and finally – myself, to put it all together and coordinate the team’s efforts; answer feedback and implement the visitors’ suggestions; develop the new ideas; interviews experts; choose and add the new artists and expand the existing and insufficiently presented ones; write biographies for the new artists and rewrite the existing insufficient ones... still a lot of work for me to do, as you may see. 

Additional questions you may find interesting

The Russian Avant-garde Galley is unique

There are numerous websites and material on the Russian Avant-garde, I know many of them from my own research for each artist I publish or expand. Some focus on a single artist, most give the few top names and concise art-critic-style basic information about their artistic career, a small amount of the best-known works. Many are blogs which present bits and pieces with the most minimal information (too often none at all).

The Russian Avant-garde Gallery is unique.

Instead of focusing solely on the "technical" presentation of selected works, it aims to give an encompassing picture of the whole phenomenon, in the fullest and most human way possible. It strives to appeal to both sides of the spectrum of our visitors: the specialists and hobbyists – who may find the art-critic cryptic style sufficient; and the general public, who are largely unfamiliar with the terminology; the background, both historical and artistic; the happenings and social and political climate around the artists of the time; and the human factors involved. Due to the nature of the place and time the whole phenomenon is a mystery to them, and the art-critic language and view does nothing to help them understand it. The Russian Avant-garde Gallery tells the story in simple understandable language, accentuating the human side, the evolution of the phenomenon as it is reflected in the people and their personal stories, their art, the various expressions of their emotions and personalities. To connect to the people.

The Russian Avant-garde Gallery's second aim is building a vast resource to serve the whole spectrum of visitors, bringing together all interests and services required by each and every group, such as books, films, expositions, articles, fairs, discussions; And this part is still at a raw beginning stage.

My vision of the future of the Gallery

I see the Russian Avant-garde Gallery in two-three years from now becoming a vast resource on the whole historical, political, social and artistic phenomenon, and on everything to do with Russian Avant-garde in one place, but without the flashy, commercialized feel and endless intrusion of third-party advertising. Even today it is considered the best of its kind by many who work in the field of the Russian Avant-garde. I can clearly see it:

• offering an extensive and detailed overview of the phenomenon, and its background, in an easy-to-grasp way, for all those who are not experts in art;
• presenting as wide a range as possible of the works of hundreds of artists in various styles, both members of structured movements and groups of the time and unaffiliated ones;
• serving as a platform to publish the articles written on the subject by specialists all over the world, to show their new books and treatises;
• bringing current information on exhibitions, shows and events to those who want to go and see the works themselves;
• partnering with experts, galleries, auction houses and provenance services, antique book dealers and shops, to benefit the collectors and specialists;
• engaging in lively exchange between people on the forum, learning and teaching, discussing and sharing ideas, as a social network of people who share a passion for this art;
• becoming a thriving home for Russian Avant-garde art, which it has never had before.

And I see it offering the information for free to all visitors, as originally intended.

The project has great potential to support itself, provided the team first does some intensive work for a period of a year, at least, perhaps two, and to allow me to continue publishing further artists and their works, adding articles of interest, doing interviews, create the partnerships which would bring future support.

How the Russian Avant-garde Gallery came to be

My mother, Tatiana Kofyan, was an exceptional woman, an artist, graduate of the Leningrad (today St.Petersburg) Academy of Arts. Ever since she has discovered it at the age of 18 in the closed off store rooms of Leningrad’s museums, she had a passion for Russian Avant-garde art. All her life she collected books and stories, made the acquaintance of artists and their descendants, and her greatest pain was that people all over the world did not know about it. Even specialists knew very little. She has nurtured the dream of bringing it out to the world, opening up the stories of these artists, educating the general public about this wonderful phenomenon of growth and discovery, of freedom and enthusiasm, of true belief and new expression – and of the danger of ignorance in power and the brutal limitation of freedom of creation.

At the turn of the 21st century, with the development of Internet, she has finally found the way to realize her dream, and together we created in 2001 the Russian Avant-garde Gallery (www.russianavantgard.com).

In 2003, after a brief period of relentless work on the Gallery, my mother has died of lymphoma, leaving the website at a very beginning and raw stage. I have wowed to continue her life project, but for several years had no ability to give it the time needed. Until in 2008 along came a wonderful person, a collector and benefactor, who offered me a chance to work half-time on this project, for which I am endlessly grateful. By that time the Russian Avant-garde Gallery already had 400 visitors per day. There were then 73 artists and 2,336 of their works published in a rather primitive HTML-based site, and rather humbly representing each. We were still at concept level.

In 2008 the site was upgraded to a better CSS- HTML-based one (I had to learn to do that). Since then I added (working by myself, part-time):

• 4,000 works of 32 artists;
• my mother’s works;
• articles on each of the movements;
• articles on the Russian Avant-garde phenomenon for beginners;
• articles on over 60 artistic groups;
• a forum;
• made a section on events and shows;
• and more.

Today there are over 6,300 works on the website, about 100 artists. In 2011 the website has gone through a full upgrade database-oriented platform, by a wonderful programmer in India, who mostly worked on credit, and it needs much more work, to make it more easily manageable as it continues to grow. I converted all information to databases, an immense amount of work.

What is Russian Avant-garde Art?

The Russian Avant-garde art is a phenomenon in Russian art of the first half of the 20^th century, during which hundreds of Russian artists have taken art through great metamorphosis. In the space of three decades they have gone from classic Realism through the whole spectrum of evolution, such as has taken a hundred years and more in other places.

By early 1930s this blossoming artistic life was brutally cut off by the Soviet authorities, imposing the only “approved” style - Social Realism. As a result, most of the Avant-garde artists were persecuted, suppressed or made to conform, works destroyed or lost, secretly sold off to any who would take them for pittance, smuggled abroad.

Read more about it here.

During the last 4 years of my work on the site gave me a chance to connect to this phenomenon, to understand my mother’s passion for Russian avant-garde and come to share it myself. To discover so much about these amazing people and their dreams, their drive, their tragedy.

Your contribution will allow further development of the Russian Avant-garde Gallery, taking it  to the next level!