Research Catalog

Title

Witness to the crime : two little-known photographic sources relating to the sale and destruction of antiquities in Soviet Russia during the 1920s / Robert H. Davis, Jnr. and Edward Kasinec.

Author

Davis, Robert H., Jr.

Publication

Oxford : Journal of the History of Collections, 1991.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Additional Authors

Kasinec, Edward.

Description

p. [53]-59 : ill., port.; 25 cm.

Summary

During the 1920s and 1930s, the Soviet government sold confiscated art, books and manuscript treasures abroad for currency. A little-known biography, by Professor Max M. Laserson (1887-1951), detailing his experiences as an expert in the Goskhran [State Committee for the Care of Valuables] during the early 1920s, provides the most detailed Western account yet. Laserson's account is unique in the fact that it is accompanied by visual witnesses-namely, two photographs located in his archives at the Hoover Institution in California and reproduced here for the first time. Laserson's written account and his photographs testify to the irreversible cultural and artistic losses suffered by the Russian people at the hands of their own government.

Subjects

• Art and state > Soviet Union
• Cultural property > Protection > Soviet Union
• Larsons, M. J
• Soviet Union > Cultural policy

Note

• In: Journal of the History of Collections, 3, no. 1 (1991), p. [53]-59.
• Caption title.

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references.

Call Number

Desk-Slav. Div. 91-3998

OCLC

NYPX91-B5768

Author

Davis, Robert H., Jr.

Title

Witness to the crime : two little-known photographic sources relating to the sale and destruction of antiquities in Soviet Russia during the 1920s / Robert H. Davis, Jnr. and Edward Kasinec.

Imprint

Oxford : Journal of the History of Collections, 1991.

Bibliography

Includes bibliographical references.

Added Author

Kasinec, Edward.

Research Call Number

Desk-Slav. Div. 91-3998