From Mexican artists to the Soviet state: the story of an unwanted gift

Abstract

This article is based on original archival research (The State Archive of Russian Federation and The Foreign Policy Archive of the Russian Federation) and is dedicated to a donation process that took place in the period 1945-1949 when a collection of modern Mexican art was given to the Soviet state. The story behind this donation process was discovered by the author in 2016 and has never been published or mentioned by scholars before. In 1943, the Soviet ambassador to Mexico Konstantin Umansky had the idea to introduce Mexican visual arts to the Soviet public by donating works of the Mexican contemporary artists. Two institutions were involved in this process: "The Institute of Mexican-Russian cultural exchange" (MRI) as a sending party and the "All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries" (VOKS) as a receiving party. Preparations and letter correspondence took about two years until finally, the donation arrived in the Soviet Union in December 1947. Though the Soviet officials were involved in the process, in Moscow nearly all of the works were declared to be "formalistic and surrealist" and therefore not suitable for public display. Since the 1950s this unique, but eventually unwanted gift has been reported as lost. Reconstructing all the steps of the process and locating every artwork still has to be done.