Fabricated Legacies: How Museums Confront Questionable Artworks of the “Russian Avant-Garde”
An online lecture by Maria Timina
Institutions that acquire and sell artworks, from museums to auction houses, have long developed policies to combat the pervasive issue of forgeries. But what happens when those safeguards fail, and questionable works infiltrate a field so extensively that they begin to outnumber the authentic pieces in circulation on the market, undermining scholarship and triggering a profound crisis of expertise?
This is precisely what has occurred in the field of the so-called “Russian avant-garde,” a term broadly applied to diverse Modernist practices across the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. What unique historical circumstances produced this situation, and how do museums—institutions charged with serving the public—confront and communicate about such an uncomfortable challenge within their own collections?
About the Speaker
Maria Timina is Curator of Russian and European Art at the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College. Before coming to Amherst, she worked as a curator at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow and pursued her PhD in art history at Lomonosov Moscow State University. Her scholarly interests include figuration and abstraction in Modernist painting, the history of collecting, provenance research, as well as issues of forgery and falsification in Russian and Soviet art.
On the latter subject, Maria has provided consultation to museums, auction houses, and law enforcement. In 2023–2024, she curated Art in Doubt: A Critical Examination of the Thomas P. Whitney Collection, a two-part exhibition at Amherst College’s Center for Russian Culture, which marked the first scholarly presentation of dubious works of modern Russian and Soviet art in North America. She is currently working on several exhibition projects, including one devoted to a new interpretation of the Thomas P. Whitney collection of Russian and European art at Amherst College.
Connecting with Zoom
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This program will be recorded and posted to the museum’s YouTube channel.