The Hermitage Receives an Unusual Collection as a Gift

On 13 January, 2012 the President of the AVC Charity Foundation, M.A. Avelicheva, presented Mikhail Piotrovsky, the Director of the State Hermitage Museum, with a collection of 848 envelopes that were decorated by artists from the Soviet underground and the post-Soviet period. They include such famous masters as Ilya Kabakov, Erik Bulatov, Francisco Infante-Arana, Ivan Chuikov, Igor Makarevich and Dmitry Prigov.

This collection was put together from 1980 to 2005 by George Machere, an economic advisor at the French consulate in the USSR in the 1980’s and a collector of unofficial Soviet and then post-Soviet art.

G. Machere approached artists he was acquainted with and asked them to decorate an ordinary postal envelope. As he continued this practice for many years, the collection grew to include autographs and self portraits from 848 leading Russian and Soviet artists.

The AVC Charity Foundation acquired the collection from G. Machere’s wife, Nadezhda Volkonskaya-Machere, and then donated it to the Hermitage.

Donating George Machere’s collection to the Museum

M.B. Piotrovsky, the Director of the State Hermitage Museum, and M.A. Avelicheva, President of the AVC Charity Foundation