„From derision to rewriting art history: The Costakis Collection”– lecture by Maria Tsantsanoglou

George Costakis grew up in Moscow where his family moved from the Ionian island of Zakynthos. He worked as a driver for an embassy when he decided to follow his passion and started collecting the Russian Avant-garde art. Years later in his recollections he mentioned that in the mid-1940s he was nicknamed a ‘crazy Greek’ because of his interest in progressive art of the 1920s which was forbidden in the age of Stalinism. He was a friend of artists such as Vladimir Tatlin, Alexander Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, Marc Chagall, Mikhail Larionov, and Natalia Goncharova. Costakis believed that one day their works will be appreciated again and his rather modest apartment in Moscow served as an unofficial Museum of Modern Art in the 1960s and 1970s.  

The event accompanies the exhibition ‘The Avant-garde Museum’.

Maria Tsantsanoglou is the director of the State Museum of Contemporary Art Thessaloniki, Greece). She was awarded her PhD, with thesis on “Russian Futurism, history and reception”, at Moscow Lomonosov University in 1993. Her research field and publications mostly refer to the period of Russian avant-garde, especially visual poetry, the relation of art and politics and intercultural relations. She has organized plenty of exhibitions of modern and contemporary art, has published a significant amount of articles as well as has participated in numerous conferences in Greece and abroad.