George Costakis

From the 1860s an art-buying middle class in Moscow had ensured an interest in and a market for Impressionist, Symbolist and Art Nouveau works produced in Russia and the rest of Europe.

At first the Bolshevik Revolution under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin supported the new abstract art but from 1920 onwards the freedom of artists in Russia was increasingly curtailed.

At first Costakis had collected the Masters of the Dutch School of Landscape Painters but modernist works by Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse soon became his main subject, then in 1946 he came across three paintings in a Moscow studio by Olga Rozanova .

The 'détente' period following the signing of the Paris Peace Accords in 1973 opened up Russia once again to international cultural exchanges the first of which was the showing of the Costakis Collection in Düsseldorf in 1977.

The same year Costakis, with his family, left the Soviet Union and moved to Greece, but there was an agreement that he should leave 50 per cent of his collection in the State Tretyakov Gallery of Moscow.