Igor Gerasimovich Terentiev

Among the most talented of the avant-garde to devote himself to the theatre, Terentiev began in 1918 as a member of the radical society 41 Degrees in Tiflis alongside the Zdanevich brothers and Alexei Kruchenykh. By the 1920s he was in Petrograd where he worked at the State Institute of Artistic Culture (GINKhUK) together with Malevich and Matyushin. He worked with Filonov on the infamous production of The Government Inspector at Dom Pechati in Leningrad, with costumes designed by artists from the Workshop of Analytical Art. He was arrested in 1931 and shot in 1937. 

The Soviet art critic and dealer Victor Kholodkov (1948-2015) was particularly drawn to the graphic works and typographical experiments of the Russian avant-garde. He published a number of articles on the subject and contributed to exhibitions after his emigration from the Soviet Union in 1989, including the 1992 Guggenheim exhibition The Great Utopia: The Russian and Soviet Avant-Garde. His extensive collection of papers and artwork relating to VKhUTEMAS was acquired by the Getty Museum in 1995 and his collection of Soviet music sheet covers is now in The Library of Congress.

The present selection of graphic works, oils and original film posters (lots 107-138) from the first half of the 20^th century is characteristic of Kholodkov’s interests in the convergence of artistic, cultural and political concerns of the period. He is known to have purchased much of his collection directly from the artists or their families; others were acquired directly from Nikolai Khardzhiev, another well-known collector of the Russian avant-garde.