Ilya Kushnirskiy Attended the International Icon Conference at the Louvre
A large-scale international icon conference titled “Flesh and Gold: Gazing at Icons, 15th–20th Century” (En chair et en or: regards sur l’icône, XVe-XXe siècle) was recently held at the Louvre Museum in Paris, attracting dozens of big names in the Christian icon world. The event was attended by iconography experts from the United States, European countries, and the Middle East (Lebanon and Syria). Ilya Kushnirskiy, Director of Russian Icon Collection, was also present at the event to take part in an intellectual discussion of the role of antique icons in modern research and the rediscovery of the global icon legacy.
The Life Path of the Abou Adal Icon Collection
The international icon conference was organized to commemorate a significant milestone—the acquisition of an extensive icon collection of the Abou Adal family by the Louvre Museum. The collection was started by the Lebanese collector Georges Abou Adal and expanded further by his son, Freddy Abou Adal. Over the years, it grew to 272 hand-painted icons created in the 15th-20th centuries in the Balkans, Crete, Greece, Levant, Russia, and other regions with a long-standing history of icon painting tradition.
The icons were publicly displayed for the first time in 1993 at the Carnavalet-History of Paris Museum. Next time, the public could see the collection at the Museum of Art and History in Geneva in 1997. After the exhibition, the icons were put in storage and spent there around two decades until in 2025, the Louvre Museum acquired them for its Department of Byzantine and Eastern Christian art.
Programming of the International Icon Conference
The new icon collection of the Louvre Museum is a living testimony to the rich icon painting tradition of the 15th–20th centuries. Some items offer a unique glimpse of the iconographic methods and themes of the 17th-century Greek Patriarchate of Antioch and the iconographic nuances of Arabic-speaking Christians in the Middle East and Jerusalem. The Abou Adal collection is expected to become a rich source of historiographic research in the field of regional icon painting.
The opening session of “Flesh and Gold: Gazing at Icons, 15th-20th Century” was dedicated to the pivotal role of historiography in present-day research and icon studies, where the speakers raised the issues of authorship tracing, regional icon painting traditions, the cultural and historical significance of Russian icons, and the modernist, 20th-century icon painting innovations. The second day of the conference was related to the reception and circulation of icons in the 20th century, with reference to specific historical periods and the evolution of icon collecting.
Among the speakers were Dr. Greger Sundin, Curator at Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, Sweden; Simon Morsink, Executive Director at the Icon Museum and Study Center in Clinton, MA; and Dr. Agathoniki Tsilipakou, Director of the Museum of Byzantine Culture in Thessaloniki, Greece. Ilya Kushnirskiy also had a chance to present the Oleg Kushnirskiy collection of Russian icons during the conference and get acquainted with all the speakers personally, establishing new connections with the leading icon experts from around the world.
Learn more about the conference on our YouTube channel!