July 22, 2025

Masterpieces of Sacred Art from the Oleg Kushnirskiy Collection

We are honored to present Dr. Irina Shalina’s article on the Oleg Kushnirskiy Collection, published in the journal Bulletin of the Russian Medieval Art Department, a periodical of the State Institute of Art Studies.

Masterpieces of Sacred Art from the Oleg Kushnirskiy Collection

Any art owner, for whom collecting has become not just a business but a genuine passion and connoisseurship, dreams of the opportunity to show their gathered treasures to the world. To some extent, the public exhibition of their beloved artifacts becomes a unique measure of the collection’s level, both among professionals and critics and among ordinary visitors. This was clearly demonstrated by the exhibition Masterpieces of Sacred Art from the Oleg Kushnirskiy Collection, held from October 26, 2024, to January 26, 2025, at The Museum of Russian Art (TMORA) in Minneapolis, Minnesota (USA) [Fig. 1]. Over two decades of the collection’s formation, this was the first public presentation of sixty Russian icons, mostly created in the famous icon-painting centers of Palekh, Mstyora, Kholuy, Vetka, and Guslitsy in the last decades of the 18th–19th centuries.

The collection proved to be surprisingly cohesive both in its artistic appearance and in the mastery level of included works. “Today I see the collection on the walls for the first time; for the first time, it has appeared to me and to everyone present here in its entirety,” the owner confessed at the grand opening of the exhibition. “All these years, the icons were in storage—and even I, knowing every icon down to the smallest detail, look at the collection with completely new eyes today. I am happy and deeply touched. It is a great honor for me to exhibit the collection in one of America’s best museums and to see so many genuinely interested people” [Fig. 2, 3].

The New York collector and professional photographer, who worked extensively for private collectors and museum institutions, including the State Hermitage, before emigrating in 1992, evidently honed his eye on works of the highest level back then. A successful business facilitated the purchase of icons in America, but collecting became a way of life. Unlike many owners, Oleg Kushnirskiy personally selected the pieces, becoming fascinated with the aesthetics of late Russian icon painting, and this at a time when almost nothing had been written about its history; and far from the rare museum professionals who studied it [Fig. 4].

The venue that provided its space for the exhibition also proved significant—The Museum of Russian Art in Minneapolis, which currently remains the only specialized center in America where works and artifacts related to Russian art (a total of 13,000 exhibits) are stored and exhibited. Despite its modest size, it is quite a significant overseas center for studying our culture and history. Scientific projects are developed here, and dozens of annual exhibitions are held, dedicated to a wide variety of phenomena, from icons and paintings, graphics and porcelain, works by contemporary Russian emigrant artists, to photographs, lacquer miniatures, textiles, Soviet posters, and folk art. There are also unexpected but very festive exhibitions here: for example, of colorful matryoshka dolls from the 18th–20th centuries, representing the products of various artists and centers; or of rare Christmas tree decorations from the second half of the century, a unique collection of which is in the museum’s funds. Along with fine art, its storerooms house ancient icons, lacquer miniatures, porcelain, sculpture, jewelry, national costumes, embroidery and fabric items, carved wood, up to large-format window casings from Nizhny Novgorod villages. The museum does a great deal to popularize Russian art, with lectures, concerts, and master classes being held.

Its founder was gallerist and art dealer Raymond Johnson, who owns an impressive collection—over 10,000 selected paintings by Soviet artists, mainly realists, which led to his inclusion in the list of the top 100 collectors in the USA [Rodionov, 2005]. A certain part of it formed the basis of the museum he founded in Bloomington in 2002. Three years later, it moved to Minneapolis, housed in a renovated church building he purchased, built in the Spanish Colonial Revival style in 1940 for the Mayflower community [Molodin, 2024. C. 246–250] [Fig. 5]. Currently, it remains a unique place uniting all those who care about Russian culture.

The artifacts from Oleg Kushnirskiy’s collection exhibited in the Mezzanine Gallery of The Museum of Russian Art are extremely informative and indicative of the nature of collecting Russian icons in America. They quite concisely reflect both the owner’s personality and the tastes of the era as a whole, which became a certain stage in the collecting of old Russian art. The owner himself wrote: “A collection is a living organism. Just as a writer or artist is often guided by their work, a collector at a certain point also becomes a conduit for meanings that first by their will, and then, as if independently of them, fill the collection… And of course, a collection lives in dialogue with its viewers and researchers, revealing itself differently to everyone. For me, it is a great joy to hear feedback from friends and people I don’t know, who find their own meanings in my icons—religious, artistic, historical….”

Interest in icons among Russian collectors never waned, even during the “darkest” Soviet years, when romantically-minded enthusiasts, mostly artists and writers, who deeply appreciated the beauty of medieval Russian painting, undertook pilgrimages to ancient cities and villages in search of it, saving hundreds of forgotten artworks from imminent destruction [Shalina, 2015]. In those years, preference was given only to ancient icons, and icon painting even from the 17th century was treated quite disdainfully. The situation changed drastically at the turn of the 21st century, when a genuine icon boom gave rise to a whole new generation of icon admirers. Dozens of art collections were formed, with their distinctive feature being the collecting of works by New Age masters, often court iconographers of the late 19th—early 20th centuries.

In this regard, Oleg Kushnirskiy’s home icon museum, which centered its preferences on icons from this era, organically fits into modern artistic traditions. It houses about 60 works of Russian icon painting from the 17th to the early 20th centuries, executed in a variety of styles. This relatively small number of works, by the standards of other collections, is of great interest, primarily due to its integrity. Most of the images follow the traditional icon-painting canon, dating back to 16th-century art, mostly painted in the icon-painting villages of the Vladimir province (Palekh, Mstyora, Kholuy) and the Old Believer Guslitsy and Vetka, whose iconographers uniquely interpreted the language of ancient icon painters. With rare exceptions, all of them are executed in a characteristic traditionalist manner, based on Stroganov’s imagery. But there are also examples of ornate Baroque, elegant Rococo, and strict Classicism [Fig. 6–10], i.e., those grand styles that Russian icon painting of the Modern Age went through. They are recognizable in the works of masters who worked in the Volga region, Moscow, and St. Petersburg. Each of these directions, which influenced the development of icon art as a whole, is interesting in its own way, as Oleg Kushnirskiy’s collection demonstrates.

Among them are a large number of first-class miniature paintings from the Vladimir centers, distinguished by technical perfection of execution and unusual artistic solutions, as well as unique iconographic features of complex compositions. Judging by their abundance in the collection, one can confidently speak of the owner’s preferences, clearly gravitating towards icons of exquisite craftsmanship with numerous small “melky” details, as icon painters called them, which one can admire for a long time, examining every element.

The deeply personal character that defines the appearance of any collection is clearly demonstrated by the numerically dominant icons dedicated to a distinct iconography—the Resurrection of Christ (Descent into Hell), surrounded by various scenes, mostly evangelical events, the Passion of Christ, and the Twelve Great Feasts. The iconography of such artworks—”polnitsy” (full-cycle icons)—developed by Palekh masters in the late 18th century [Fig. 11], proved to be one of the most sought-after in Modern Age icon painting; they continued to be painted in huge quantities, both in this center and in other icon-painting villages of the Vladimir province. Due to the richness of their program—a full cycle of the main holidays and events of the liturgical and calendar year is presented on one board—such images were most often commissioned for home prayer rooms. The status of the patrons varied, but Oleg Kushnirskiy’s collection contains works of high artistic level that were expensive at the time.

Every collector dreams not only of exhibiting their collections but also of publishing them. A catalog is not only a scientific description of the monuments but also the most significant insurance, protection against any encroachment on their integrity. The appearance of a lavishly published album-catalog, including all the works belonging to Oleg Kushnirskiy, long before the exhibition opened in Minneapolis, greatly increased the collection’s significance.

It is gratifying that for a number of years, genuine scientific cataloging of the collection was carried out, which is extremely rare for private collections. Moreover, the impeccably accurate attributions and datings of the works, belonging to the author of the book [Russian Icons, 2023], Anna Ivannikova, curator of icon painting from the 18th—early 20th centuries at the State Hermitage, make it a unique benchmark for future research of pieces from Mstyora, Palekh, Kholuy, and other icon-painting centers of the New Age. The publication of the album proved the well-known old thesis that the special mission of the most enlightened collectors is their significant influence on the development of icon painting studies as a whole.

It is extremely important that the collection located in America, now widely known thanks to the exhibition and catalog, continues the noble work of popularizing the Russian icon, its vibrant, unfading spiritual and aesthetic beauty far beyond Russia, which is especially relevant in our difficult times.

References

Molodin, A. “Here is the Russian Spirit…”: One Hundred Special Places in the USA. Washington: Nasledie Publishing, 2024.
Rodionov, V. “Muzej russkogo iskusstva v Minneapolise” [Museum of Russian Art in Minneapolis]. Tret’iakovskaia Galereia [Tretyakov gallery] № 3 (08) (2005): 54–59.
Birina, S., ed. Russian Icons from the Mid-17th to the Early 20th Century: The Oleg Kushnirskiy Collection. Moscow: EKSMO, 2023.
Shalina, I. A. “Sluzhenie krasote. Kollekcionery Vorobyovy i ih sobranie” [A service for the beauty. The Vorobyov collectors and their collection]. In Sluzhenie krasote. Drevnerusskoe i narodnoe iskusstvo iz sobraniya Vorobyovyh [A service for the beauty. Old Russian and folk art from the Vorobyov Collection], 26–57. Moscow: Muzej russkoj ikony [Museum of Russian Icons], 2015. Exhibition catalog.

Irina Shalina
Ph.D., Leading Researcher at the State Russian Museum