What Makes a Master
A master is not made by fame or by price. A master is made by training, by skill, and by the truth of what he puts on the canvas. Judge Ivan by those, and by the people who saw his work in his own lifetime.
Why Ivan matters
Painting: Self-Portrait with Palette, 1957.
Ivan was trained in the old Russian academic tradition: art school in Rostov-on-Don, then, from 1937 to 1941, the Academy of Arts in Leningrad, the school where Repin had taught. He was among the last generation schooled in that tradition before the Second World War swept that world away.
Ivan carried it with him into exile. For nearly forty years, in Salzburg and in Philadelphia, he went on painting in it while the art world around him turned to modern art. His paintings, kept together with his own papers, are a rare record of one survivor's twentieth century: war, forced labour, exile and a new life in America. The human spirit survives.
"A young, highly talented painter ... who has already won high recognition in the circles of the Künstlerhaus in Salzburg."
GŁOS POLSKI, SALZBURG, 1948
A gem waiting for its moment
Painting: Salzburg by the River.
The great auction houses deal in artists with a sales record. Ivan Garikow has almost none: only a handful of his paintings have ever been sold. Since 2004 his life's work has been kept together, apart from one painting sold for charity in 2007, so it could not be broken up and scattered.
That choice saved the collection, and it also kept it unknown. The art world will not value what it has not seen, and the collection cannot be properly seen without a home.
So it is a rare thing: most of a twentieth-century survivor's life's work, with his own papers, never broken up and almost never shown. The right museum, patron or partner, someone with foresight and a sense of adventure, has the chance to bring Ivan out of the dust of history, and to be remembered as the one who did.
"Mr. Garikow, the artist ... is certainly a man of talent."
MIDTOWN CRIER, PHILADELPHIA, 1955
Questions you may be asking
Painting: Prancing Horses, 1981, his last dated painting.
Why haven't I heard of him? Because almost nobody has seen his work. Ivan showed in New York in 1954 and opened his own gallery in Philadelphia, but he kept most of his paintings with him. After his death in 1982 they spent more than twenty years in storage. Two of his paintings are held in Moscow, at the House of Russia Abroad.
Why did the few paintings that were sold fetch so little? They were sold in 1990 and 1991 by estate liquidators in Florida, without his story or his papers. Those sales reflect where and how the paintings were sold, not what they are.
Is it too good to be true? Judge for yourself. The collection was bought from the painter's only son under a signed contract in 2004. It comes with Ivan's own papers, and they check out: his refugee file at the Arolsen Archives in Germany and the 1951 passenger roll of his ship match the documents he kept, down to the number on his luggage tag. Researchers and serious enquirers are welcome to see the evidence.
"They come from my imagination."
IVAN GARIKOW, PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER, 1968
Notes on the Paintings
The Garikow collection has had very few public showings since Ivan painted it. Brittany Ober studied five of the paintings closely and wrote notes on each. Read her notes on the paintings.
The next chapter
Painting: Travellers in a Blizzard.
For more than twenty years the collection has been kept together: nearly 200 paintings and Ivan's papers, photographed, catalogued and researched across four countries. His story has been traced from a village on the Russian steppe to a house of paintings in Philadelphia. The next chapter is a permanent home, where the collection stays whole and is seen, studied and remembered.
The right home
Somewhere there is a gallery director, a curator, a professor or a foundation that has been waiting for a story like this one without knowing it.
It might be a museum of Russian or East European art. A university gallery with students looking for a subject no one has written about. A museum of immigration, of the Second World War, or of the displaced persons who rebuilt their lives in America. A Russian or Ukrainian cultural centre. A gallery in Philadelphia, the city where Ivan painted for thirty years, or in Salzburg, where his career began.
Perhaps you know that person.
For institutions
Institutions like yours exist to save stories like this one, before they are lost. The Garikow Collection, nearly 200 paintings by Ivan Garikow with copies of his personal papers, is available to the right institution, to be kept whole. A catalogue of works, a research sourcebook and access to the paintings in Orlando, Florida are available on request. Acquisition, long-term loan, exhibition and research partnership are all open for discussion.
For researchers
A largely unstudied painter, most of his surviving work, and his own papers: an open subject for a thesis, a catalogue raisonné, an exhibition or a documentary.