The artistic quality and historical significance of Russian icons-religious paintings of characters and scenes from the Eastern Orthodox Bible-have been of a consistently high order ever since they first emerged in that country in the eleventh century CE. Less constant, however, have been the care with which these works have been treated and their commercial value. Russian icons were at various times encouraged, then vandalized, then exported, then banned from export; during the worst privations under the Tsars and the Bolsheviks, people felt forced to use them as bartering counters and even sometimes as firewood.After the collapse of Communism and the disintegration of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, Oleg Kushnirskiy (born 1960) came to the West and set about assembling a collection of Russian icons in the United States, where they would be well protected from physical decay and safe from further religious and political upheavals. Acquired from a variety of sources-ecclesiastical, civic and domestic-the Kushnirskiy Collection is now stored in New York and exhibited periodically in universities, galleries and museums in numerous locations, thus fulfilling the collector’s ambition to bring these masterpieces to a wider audience than ever before. This complete catalogue features sixty works, the oldest created in the mid-seventeenth century, the most recent in the early twentieth. Accompanying the images are insightful analytical commentaries by distinguished art historians.
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