American Collectors Eager To Donate Russian Art To Country's Museums - Expert

American collectors of Russian art would gladly donate works of art from their own collection to Russian museums if appropriate legal channels are organized, Anatoly Bekkerman, Anatoly Bekkerman, the owner of New York's ABA gallery and one of the leading dealers of Russian art in the United States, told Sputnik

MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 20th November, 2021) American collectors of Russian art would gladly donate works of art from their own collection to Russian museums if appropriate legal channels are organized, Anatoly Bekkerman, Anatoly Bekkerman, the owner of New York's ABA gallery and one of the leading dealers of Russian art in the United States, told Sputnik.

"You see, if you organize in the United States say a 'Friends of the Pushkin Museum' association, then collectors, patrons of art living in America, would give gorgeous art that can be freely exported from the US to Russia. And people would write off the costs of this noble cause from taxes, this is a double pleasure. Americans would have the opportunity to become patrons of this museum community, and at the same time would have a great financial interest," Bekkerman said.

Bekkerman believes that the initiative will be of interest to both US collectors and Russian museums, and will renew the art-lending practices between major Russian and American museums, which were frozen in 2010 because of the decades-long dispute over a library and an archive, known collectively as the Schneersohn Collection.

Not only did the Schneersohn Collection case worsen the already strained bilateral diplomatic relations, but it also hampered the overall cultural exchange between the two countries.�

"Museums would gladly support it, but there must be people who will do this, the correct legal papers must be filled in, but I think that this must be done. And people, let's say friends of Russian museums, I know for sure would gladly donate art to museum collections and provide masterpieces from their personal collections for exhibitions," Bekkerman added.

On November 9, the ABA gallery opened the exhibition called "Masterpieces of Russian Art from American Collections," in the museum-exhibition complex of the Moscow's Russian academy of Arts. The gallery featured the paintings by Nicholas Roerich, Robert Falk, Konstantin Korovin and Ivan Aivazovsky, some of whose works were being exhibited for the first time in Russia.