John Stuart, art expert; Independent obit
Hyfler/Rosner
Scholar of icon painting and expert on Russian history
22 July 2003
John Spencer Innes Stuart, Russian scholar and writer: born Aberdeen
20 May 1940; died Ockley, Surrey 12 July 2003.
John Stuart was a leading scholar of icon painting with an international
reputation, and an expert on all aspects of Russian history and culture. He
was a man with an intensely developed visual sense, which he brought to bear
not only in his chosen field of scholarship, but in every part of his life,
from his greatly admired London house to his passion for British bikes,
leather jackets and the glamour of rock'n'roll.
He was born in Scotland and educated at Eton. Passionate about art and drawn
to spirituality from boyhood, he converted to Russian Orthodoxy at the age
of 18, and introduced himself to the small émigré community in London, one
of whom, Count Kleinmichel, became his godfather. He went on to St John's,
Cambridge, where he read Slavonic Studies under Dr Nicolai Andreyev, the
former head of the Kondakov Institute in Prague, a pre-war bastion of
Russian émigré thought and culture. His first trip to Russia was in the
mid-1960s with his friend Camilla Gray, who was researching her
ground-breaking book on the Russian avant-garde. In 1970 he spent a year
working in the Grabar Central State Restoration Workshop for Medieval
Painting in Moscow studying under the great Adolf Ovchinnikov, its leading
restorer.
In 1963 Stuart joined Sotheby's as a porter, and owed his quick promotion to
expert status to the legendary Russian collector George Costakis who, in a
meeting with Peter Wilson, the then Sotheby's chairman, informed him that
the porter in the icon department seemed to know a great deal more about
icons than their expert of the time. But timetables and deadlines were not
his greatest strength, and Stuart quickly came to grief when a catalogue of
important Russian silver only came out a day before the sale, instead of the
usual month.
From then on, he took the role of consultant, and from the late 1980s until
1995, the exciting period when Russian clients appeared on the international
market for the first time, he oversaw every aspect of the Sotheby's Russian
sales. In 1995, after overseeing undoubtedly the finest sale of Russian
paintings and works of art ever held anywhere, he left Sotheby's to set up a
private art consultancy business and to concentrate on his life's work, a
mammoth overview of East Christian painting that will be published in the
near future.
His first book, Ikons, published in 1975, remains to this day the best
overview of icon painting in English. He also wrote Rockers! (1987), the
definitive text on post-war British bike culture, St Petersburg, Portrait of
an Imperial City (1990), contributed to numerous publications on Russian art
and culture, co-curated the icon exhibition "Gates of Mystery" at the
Victoria & Albert Museum in London in 1990, and advised the same museum, as
well as lending exhibits, for their "British Street Style" exhibition a few
years later.
It was in 1988 that he asked me to join him at Sotheby's. It was my first
"proper" job, and it did not take long to understand what a privilege it was
to be working with him. In a few weeks he redirected my entire understanding
of history, art and above all quality, and made me rediscover an enthusiasm
for applied learning that I had completely lost at university. Like all good
teachers, he inspired loyalty and a sense of mission in his pupil. In the
world of the Russian market he towered above everybody else in his knowledge
and passion for his subject, and he shared this willingly with everybody.
But he was also a glamorous figure, a rebel-scholar, whose arrival in
Conduit Street was heralded by the roar and backfire of his Triumph bike,
whose telephone book contained the line: "Johnny Rotten: (Mum's number)",
and who just because he was Johnny Stuart could get away with wearing
motorcycle leathers when everybody else was in a suit and tie. He would
dictate a footnote on Hesychasm and 14th-century Byzantine theology, and
then answer the telephone and advise George Michael or the Stray Cats on
what they should wear for their next video.
During these years he made many important discoveries; a parcel of dog-eared
papers that appeared on his desk in 1990 turned out to be the long lost
"Sokolov Archive", evidence collected at the scene of the crime of the
murder of the Imperial Family lost since the 1920s. Stuart's sale catalogue
made headlines in Russia, which was going through perestroika, and the
archive is now in the Russian State Archive. A small panel believed by the
owner to be a Russian 19th-century icon was identified by him as the only
known Byzantine depiction of the Triumph of Orthodoxy (the defeat of
iconoclasm) and was then acquired by the British Museum. With his uncanny
ability to identify everybody, he single-handedly created a market for
Imperial photographs; a sale of the personal albums of Grand Duchess Xenia,
sister of the last Emperor, was widely written about in the press at the
time and sold for many times its pre-sale estimate thanks to his expert
cataloguing.
History was alive for John Stuart; he read memoirs avidly, collected
portraits and had a personal relationship with his favourite historical
figures. He often started anecdotes with the words "of course, I remember
when the beautiful Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna . . ." and it soon became
clear that he was "remembering" things that had happened a century ago.
Once, when interrupted in one of these reminiscences by someone who
questioned whether he could really have witnessed these events, he
irritatedly started remembering things that happened in the 18th century. He
hated historical cliché and inaccuracy; the common perception of Rasputin,
for instance, was one of his bêtes noires; a sure way to make him cross was
to hum Boney M's song, and the lines ". . . lover of the Russian queen". He
was not her lover, nor was she a queen.
In museums in Soviet times, when Imperial portraits were mysteriously
labelled if they were labelled at all, he used to cause consternation
amongst the curators and guards by identifying all the sitters loudly by
name; worse, he used to point out buildings, and even rooms within
buildings, and talk about their former inhabitants as if they were still
there. But it was for this reason that he made so many friends in Russia,
intellectuals and artists who were bowled over by this handsome, long-haired
English gentleman who knew so much about their country, and who was not even
slightly taken in by the drab fellow-traveller-ism that submerged so many
foreign Russophiles. Mstislav Rostropovich, in an eloquent tribute to John
Stuart, remarked that his knowledge of Russian culture was such that he
often wondered whether it was not a Russian heart that was beating in his
chest.
He spoke many languages, and was an expert mimic, which allowed him to give
the impression that he spoke a language when in fact he did not, often with
unexpected results. Like a piece of linguistic blotting paper, he would
absorb his interlocutor's intonations, accent, and even grammatical
mistakes. When you met John, it was always obvious from his voice whom he
had just been talking to. He had an extremely wide circle of friends, and
his glamorous parties would see Romanov Grand Duchesses rub shoulders with
members of the Clash.
He loved Coronation Street, daytime TV adverts (especially ones where
unfortunates received money unexpectedly just by ringing a telephone number)
and the idiotic tunes of children's TV. In many ways he was an innocent in
the modern technological world: he never knew what day or even month it was,
and I quickly understood that his timekeeping was a sort of code: "half
hour" (for some reason in a German accent) meant sometime in the future,
possibly today; a "quick lie-down" would mean that you would probably not
see him again until the morning. Just as time outside of John Stuart was a
meaningless measure, so inside him he preserved a child-like quality, a
spiritual simplicity and directness that was all-conquering.
On a crowded aeroplane he once gave up his seat to a lady, and made as if to
stand, bus-style, at the back of the plane: he was quickly ushered into
first class. In general, he had to be shepherded around airports; on his own
he more than once ended up in queues that would have taken him to Cairo when
his destination was St Petersburg, and once he was found in the right seat
but on the wrong aeroplane. And during his final illness, he told with
relish of a visit from the hospital psychiatrist who asked him what the
highest mountain in the world was, and to subtract seven from 100. He
thought he got one of the questions right. He was the finest and most
brilliant man.
Ivan Samarine
Michael Rhodes
> John Stuart
> Scholar of icon painting and expert on Russian history
>
> unfortunates received money unexpectedly just by ringing a telephone number)
Where we had something in common. I howl with laughter at such adverts
- especially on Channel 5 - of an afternoon.
--
Michael Rhodes