George Costakis’s collection returns to Athens with a new reading of the Russian avant-garde
A collector who spent decades rescuing works that the Soviet state had pushed to the margins is now the subject of a major exhibition in Athens. At the National Gallery-Alexandros Soutsos Museum, a new show opening April 15 and running through September 27 revisits the legacy of George Costakis (1913-90), the Moscow-born collector of Greek descent whose eye helped preserve thousands of Russian and Soviet avant-garde works.
Curated by Syrago Tsiara, the exhibition shifts the focus from connoisseurship alone to a broader theme: humans and their relationship to the environment. That framing gives fresh context to artists such as Kazimir Malevich, Liubov Popova, Gustav Klucis and Olga Rozanova, whose work emerged from the upheaval of the Russian Revolution and the radical belief that art could help shape a new social order.
Costakis began collecting in 1946 after encountering Rozanova’s “Green Stripe” (1917) while working at the Canadian embassy in Russia. According to the exhibition’s account, he immediately recognized that the work was something new and valuable. From there, his collecting became obsessive and methodical. He sold silver, carpets and other possessions, visited the families of artists and their relatives, and assembled a remarkable body of work at a time when avant-garde art was officially discouraged and often hidden from view.
His daughter, Aliki Costaki, recalls a household organized around the collection. The family exchanged a car for some Popova works, and Costakis’s large apartment in southwest Moscow became, in her words, “an open museum, 20 hours [a day].” The risks were real. As the collection gained attention abroad, it was burgled several times, and a dacha used for storage was set on fire.
When Costakis left the Soviet Union in 1977, he donated some works to the Tretyakov Gallery and took a substantial part of the collection to Greece. The National Gallery in Athens first presented the collection in 1995. Three decades later, the institution is returning to it with a more explicitly historical lens, one that also reflects current debates about identity and attribution. Tsiara has noted the importance of naming the nationalities of artists often grouped under the label “Russian” avant-garde, including Latvian Gustav Klucis and Malevich, who was born in Ukraine to Polish parents.
The exhibition also points to the collection’s institutional afterlife in Greece, where it helped shape the Museum of Modern Art in Thessaloniki. In 2013, Aliki Costaki donated more than 600 works by Anatoly Zverev to the private AZ Museum in Moscow, extending the family’s long involvement with the preservation of nonconformist art.
More than a tribute to one collector, the show asks how art history is made: by artists, certainly, but also by the people willing to protect fragile work before it disappears into neglect.
