Art To Make Walls Sing

Nonconformist Soviet artworks go to Rutgers
By Tova Navarra
May 21, 1991

Balalaikas seem to be serenading the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, of Rutgers University in New Brunswick.
Rutgers president, Dr. Francis L. Lawrence, and museum director Dennis Cate announced at a press conference yesterday that Zimmerli is the recipient of the George Riabov and the Norton T. and Nancy Dodge collections of Soviet art valued at $18.5 million.
Lawrence, Cate and Allen Maitlin, chairman of the Zimmerli Board of Overseers, expressed their gratitude to the Dodges, of Mechanicsville, Md., and Riabov, of Westwood. As they spoke, slides of some of the Nonconformist pieces – so different from the Socialist Realist style long dictated by the Soviet government – were shown on two large video screens.
How did it all “escape” to the West? It wasn’t always easy to get the work through Soviet customs and into this country, said Dodge, professor emeritus of economics at St. Mary College in Maryland and director of the CASE (Committee for the Absorption of Soviet Emigres) Museum of Russian Contemporary Art in Exile, in Jersey City.
“Some of it was rolled in Oriental rugs,” he said. “Often an acquisition was a matter of how well you manipulated Soviet officials.” The Dodges collected about 5,000 works over 30 years. With Abstract, Surrealist, Conceptual, Pop, Expressive Realist and Social Commentary styles represented, their collection is the largest of its kind in the world.
Riabov collected more than 1,000 works over the last 45 years with the intent of developing a survey of Russian art from the 15th through the 20th centuries. Born in Poland of Russian heritage, he came to the United States in 1945 and received a bachelor’s and master’s degree from Rutgers. A language consultant for the Museum of Modern Art, Riabov thanked Rutgers for a “free education” and quipped that his walls are bare now except for one painting given him by a friend.
Riabov and the Dodges acknowledged that the works will have a greater educational and aesthetic impact once Zimmerli becomes their home in the fall of 1993. Cate said prior to the permanent installation, the collections will be exhibited from Dec. 8 through Feb. 25, 1992.
Cate added that the museum must expand in order to accommodate the new acquisitions, and a five-year fundraising campaign has been initiated for facility, research and operations expansion. One million dollars have already been donated anonymously.
So the tormented Nonconformists haven’t worked in vain. These artists, including Wassily Kandinsky, Liubov Popova, Ivan Shishkin, Komar and Melamid, Eirk Bulatov and others, were officially allowed to work from 1956 to 1986, but they were denied public exhibitions and any satisfaction save that of making art. Now that their paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures have “defected” to America, the world at large can study and appreciate them.