Out of the Past

From a very young age, Boris Stavrovski understood that specificity is the key to a meaningful collection. As a boy of only 16, he started amassing medieval Russian coins, becoming the chairman of Moscow’s premier coin club in college. By the time he was 30, his collection had grown so valuable that it was purchased by the Hermitage. “If you are collecting everything, you may not be able to collect anything,” he says.

But if this motto implies moderation, it is misleading. The walls of Stavrovski’s modest two-bedroom apartment on New York’s Upper East Side are so jammed with paintings by early 20th-century Russian artists that the resulting horror vacui might spark alarm about their stability. However, Stavrovski, a 62-year-old computer science professor at the City University of New York, worked together with a contractor on a steel exoskeleton that braces the apartment. The pictures, surrounded by spectacularly ornate Renaissance, Baroque and Art Deco frames, can hang plentifully and heavily without bringing down the drywall.

The remarkable paintings, drawings and sculptures that crowd Stavrovski’s home are only a taste of his nearly 400-work collection, which consists mostly of pieces by artists who collaborated with legendary Ballets Russes director Sergey Diaghilev. Stavrovski began collecting artists like Natalia Goncharova, Mikhail Larionov, George Annenkov and Alexander Benois—who all designed costumes and sets for Diaghilev’s Paris-based company—in 1994, three years after he emigrated to the United States. His passion is rooted in their artistic achievement but also derives from their status as fellow Russian émigrés.

Stavrovski’s deepest connection is to Boris Anisfeld, a figurative painter who left Russia in 1919 and lived in the U.S. until his death, in 1973. Standing before Anisfeld’s lush oil Adam & Eve, 1911, which covers nearly an entire wall of his bedroom, the collector explains the similarities of their stories: Both men displayed early mastery in their fields—Anisfeld, a portrait painter who completed Adam & Eve to qualify for his diploma from the St. Petersburg Academy at the age of 30; Stavrovski, a gifted nuclear physicist who finished his dissertation at 32. And just as Anisfeld, despite his talent, was initially denied his diploma because of a law that prevented Jews from residing in the capital, so Stavrovski had to wait 10 years for his final degree, and for a similar reason. “When my supervisor asked the Russian authorities why they did not approve of my dissertation,” he recalls, “they responded: ‘What do you mean why? He is 32-year-old Jew. It is unheard of.’”

Stavrovski’s empathy for Anisfeld, who also left Russia after it became clear that his career would be hindered by anti-Semitism, is so powerful that in the 1990s, he tracked down the artist’s grandson and acquired 37 paintings from him. That was enough to make Stavrovski the leading collector of Anisfeld worldwide.

Living in close quarters with his paintings, Stavrovski is reminded daily that his experience of emigration is not unique—a comfort that is compounded by the formal beauty of works like Anisfeld’s Jewish Madonna, a 1930 portrait of a woman rich in crimson tones and mounted in a nearly floor-to-ceiling frame from Renaissance-era Siena. “I can sit anywhere, and I can look at some piece, and I am happy,” Stavrovski says. “That’s what a real collector, from my point of view, should feel. Otherwise why are you collecting?”

Although he cherishes his works, he is generous in lending them. His paintings have toured Russia and Japan, and they made their debut in the United States last winter, when Michael Mezzatesta, the director of the Palm Beach Fine Art and Antiques Fair, organized “Faces of Russia,” a selection of the collection’s highlights that ran for the duration of the fair. Next year, Columbia University’s Miriam & Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery will display more than 100 of Stavrovski’s works in the first major U.S. exhibition devoted to the Diaghilev artists.