Prince Nikita Dmitrievich Lobanov-Rostovsky (Russian: Никита Лобанов, Никита Дмитриевич Лобанов-Ростовский) (born 6 January 1935), known as Nikita Lobanov, is a Russian and American geologist, banker, and notable art collector of Russian stage design of the period of 1880–1930 (in particular designs for Ballets Russes).
Biography
Childhood and youth A relative of the diplomat and Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Empire, Alexey Borisovich Lobanov-Rostovsky. Son of Dmitry Ivanovich Lobanov-Rostovsky (1907-1948) and Irina Vasilyevna (1911-1957), daughter of V. V. Wyrubov. His uncle (his mother's brother) is Nikolai Vasilyevich Vyrubov (1915-2009), a member of the French Resistance and a Knight of the Legion of Honor and Ordre de le Liberastion.
His grandfather, Prince Ivan Nikolaevich (1866 – October 13, 1947), left Russia with his sons in 1919. Nikita was born in Bulgaria, where the entire family settled.
In 1946, after Soviet troops entered Bulgaria, he and his parents unsuccessfully attempted to cross the Greek border: the family was arrested on Greek territory. The 11-year-old boy fell ill from malnutrition and was transferred to a criminal prison, the Sofia Central Prison, where conditions were better. He spent a year in prison; his mother and father was released six months later. However, in 1948, Dmitry Lobanov-Rostovsky was kidnapped by Bulgarian state security agencies and, as his son only discovered in 1992, was executed in a death camp near the city of Pazardzhik.(Camp "C").
On doctor's advice, to avoid rickets, Nikita took up swimming, and in 1951 he became Bulgarian youth champion in the 100- and 200-meter breaststroke. In September 1953, Nikita and his emigrated to Paris. He received assistance from his uncle, Nikolai Vasilyevich Vyrubov, one of de Gaulle's closest Russian friends, who worked at the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, and from the future lbest selling novelist and close friend of de Gaul Romain Gary (Deputy Ambassador of France to Bulgaria).
In 1956, Irina died, and while his mother was still alive, in 1954 Nikita, having received a scholarship from a refugee aid organization, moved to England to prepare for admission to Oxford University's Geology Department. It was then that he first saw the art he would dedicate his life to collecting, attending an exhibition in London dedicated to Sergei Diaghilev's "Seasons of the Russian Ballet." He was taken there by his godmother, Ekaterina Ridley, granddaughter of Count Benckendorff, the last ambassador of the Russian Tsar to England.
Career
He graduated from Oxford University in 1958. He moved to the United States to continue his education, enrolling in the Department of Geology at Columbia University in New York City, specializing in economic geology (ore deposit geology). He received his master's degree in 1960.He worked at the private bank Lobe Roads, explored oil in Patagonia (Argentina), and studied Spanish. Later, he prospected for mercury in Tunisia and Alaska, nickel in Venezuela, iron (itibarite) in Liberia, and worked in diamond mines in the Kalahari Desert in South Africa.
Returning to New York, he worked at Chemical Bank (now Morgan Chase Bank) and entered the evening department of New York University to study banking.
In 1962, he earned a master's degree in banking accounting, and at the same time married Nina Georges-Picot, the daughter of the French ambassador to the UN and the first deputy secretary-general of the UN.
From 1961 to 1967, he served the international of Chemical Bank.
From 1967 to 1970, he was assistant vice president of Bache & Co, also in New York.
From 1970 to 1979, he was vice president of Wells Fargo Bank in San Francisco, also heading its division Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.
From 1979 to 1983, he served as senior vice president of International Resources and Finance Bank in London.
After 1974, he visited the USSR numerous times on business for the banks where he worked, and met with the country's top government officials.
From 1987 to 1997, he was an advisor to the South African diamond monopoly De Beers.
He is a member of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists and the American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical, and Petroleum Engineers.
In 1979, the couple moved from San Francisco to London.
Collecting and Philanthropy Together with his first wife, Nina, he began collecting works of theater costumes and set designs by Russian artists from the first half of the 20th century. He first visited the USSR in 1970, together with his wife, at the invitation of the Central State Archive of Literature and Art (TsGALI), where he donated Sergei Sudeikin's archive. With TsGALI's assistance, he was introduced to leading collectors in Moscow, Leningrad, and Kyiv.
He is an advisor to Christie's auction house, and later to Sotheby's, which evaluated valued his collection every two to three years. He was a board member of the Theatre Museum Association in London and a life member of the Union of Benefactors of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
In 1967, he published a directory of theater designers, "Who's Who and Where?" (an encyclopedia of Russian stage artists).
He is a life member of the Union of Benefactors of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, a member of the Governing Council of the Cyril and Methodius Foundation in Sofia, a member of the board of the Institute of Contemporary Russian Culture in Los Angeles (California), a member of the Society of Collectors in Moscow and London, an academician of the International Information Academy at the UN in Geneva.
Lobanov-Rostovsky has endowed the Lobanov-Rostovsky Professorship in Earth Sciences at the University of Oxford, his alma mater, along with the annual Lobanov-Rostovsky Lecture in Planetary Geology. Scientists who have contributed extensively to the study of the Universe through the lenses of geology have been speakers, including the prominent Bernard Wood, speaker of the 2022 Lecture. He has endowed a position for a lecturer in organic chemistry at Christ Church in the name of his tutor Dr. P .Kent
Collection (N. & N. Lobanov-Rostovsky collection)
"The beginning of my collection was Sergei Sudeikin's costume sketches for the ballet "Petrushka," says Nikita Dmitrievich. "I bought them for $25 each." Lobanov-Rostovsky recalls the early stages of his collecting romantically: "I had no money. But then I developed a detective hobby. In the first years of my collecting, I worked during the day, had dinner, and from eight in the evening until eleven at night I did nothing but research russian theatrical art. At first, I found out which Russian artists lived where and at what address. I spent a lot of time with émigré artists. It was a world of poor people. Back then, no one needed their art. Many had already died. And widows or children didn't know what to do with their artistic inheritance. It disappeared gradually. There's a lot of Muslim in me. I don't drink vodka. I drink tea. And long conversations over tea in the homes of Benois, Dobuzhinsky, and Larionov bore fruit. In a foreign land, to talk about your past, to reminisce, to pour out your soul—is there any greater joy? In those years, seeing my interest and poverty, they would simply give me things, like Boris Pasternak's sisters, or sell me stage designs, costume sketches, and sketches for a modest price. We lived on two salaries: mine and my wife Nina's. We used one to buy paintings. That's how our collection was assembled in Europe and North and South America. I understood perfectly well then that I was fulfilling a mission: saving Russian art, which would have simply sunk into oblivion."
By 1980, he had amassed 90% of his collection. The collection is considered the world's largest private collection of Russian theater and decorative art, comprising approximately 1,100 works by 177 artists. The Lobanov-Rostovsky Collection spans 50 years of theater design, with a particular emphasis on the period from 1905 to 1925. It features works by Léon Bakst, Alexandre Benois, Natalia Goncharova, Konstantin Korovin, Mikhail Larionov, Chagal, Kandinsky, Malevich, Vrubel and others.
Since 1964, the collection has been exhibited at 50 venues in the United States and Canada, since 1982 in Moscow and Western Europe, and since 1998 in Japan. "This is one of the rare private collections that has traveled from exhibition to exhibition, from country to country, for 40 years, essentially without a permanent home," he says. The paintings, including the world's finest Baksts for Diaghilev's companies, were stored in warehouses in Germany, professionally packaged and always ready to embark on their next journey.
American art historian John Bowlt writes: "The Lobanov collection became a unique repository of many cultural treasures, saved from inevitable destruction and oblivion. The erudition and enthusiasm of the Lobanov-Rostovsky couple brought many artists' names and achievements back from oblivion. Only fanatical dedication to preserving Russian art and a passionate love for it could have inspired such a difficult undertaking as the creation of this unique collection."Gifts and sales
He participated in the creation of the Museum of Private Collections at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts. In 1987, he donated 80 works of Russian graphic art from his collection. A special place among them is occupied by Alexandra Exter's famous series "Theatrical Sets" (1930).
On the eve of the opening of the Museum of Private Collections in 1994, he donated porcelain from the first third of the 20th century to the museum.
In February 2008, he donated the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts a painting by the Italian Giorgio de Chirico, "The Poet's Melancholy" (1916), and a watercolor by the Dutch abstractionist Theo van Doesburg, "Black Zigzag" (1924), the subject of which led to the latter's break with Piet Mondrian.
The Marina Tsvetaeva Museum received a gift of "Portrait of Salomea Andronikova" by Alexander Yakovlev.
He donated a detail of a Cossack's head study for the painting "The Zaporozhian Cossacks Writing a Letter to the Turkish Sultan," by Ilya Repin, to the Kyiv Art Gallery National Museum.
Part of the collection (810 graphic sheets) was sold by him on January 24, 2008, to the Konstantinovsky Charitable Foundation for $16 million. An additional 31 sheets were sold to the in July 2010. This charitable foundation states its goal as the reconstruction and recreation of several architectural monuments in St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region, and was the main investor in the reconstruction of the Konstantinovsky Palace in Strelna (now the state complex "Palace of Congresses"). Currently, this part of the prince's collection is temporarily stored at the St. Petersburg State Museum of Theatre and Musical Art. The Konstantinovsky Foundation plans to move it to the "Star Path" complex, which is being built next to the Constantine Palace. In October 2013, Vladimir Kozhin, Chief of Staff of the Presidential Executive Office, announced that the collection would remain permanently at the Theatre Museum, St. Petersburg where it had been temporarily stored for the past five years.
The remaining portion of the collection (150 works) is owned by the prince's ex-wife, Nina. According to the prince in a 2010 interview. She has concerns about preserving the integrity of our collection." In March 2014, after the Konstantinovsky Foundation transferred the collection to the Theatre Museum, she decided to donate an additional 38 exhibits (from her portion of the collection) to the museum so that the collection could be partially reunited.
The prince's 3,200-volume library and part of his photo archive were donated to the House of Russia Abroad in Moscow in 2010.
He proposed the creation of a National Portrait Gallery in Russia.