Andrei Vladimirovich Tolstoy, the Russian art critic and historian from the illustrious Tolstoy family, died in Moscow on 11 February. Tolstoy’s departure left a hole in the city’s art world where he was both a youthfully impish and professorially rumpled presence, as requisite at openings as the art itself. He was just 59, and hundreds of artists, curators, fellow critics, students and not a few Tolstoys poured into his two funeral ceremonies, one civil and the other religious, held at the Russian Academy of Arts and in the Russian Orthodox church attached to the State Tretyakov Gallery. The farewell felt as much a requiem for a community increasingly divided by ideology as it did for a man who was known for bringing its disparate members together.
Tolstoy was not a direct descendant of the writer Leo Tolstoy, but they shared a common 16th-century ancestor, a link that made him part of the family. He participated in the Tolstoy clan gatherings at the writer’s Yasnaya Polyana estate, according to Andrei Tolstoy-Miloslavsky, a cousin from London. Vladimir Tolstoy, a great-great-grandson of Leo and cultural adviser to Russian President Vladimir Putin, also attended the funeral.
Bon vivant Friends describe Tolstoy as a bon vivant who loved to have friends and family around at his dinner table, knew his wines and did not object to shots of vodka, loved indie rock and jazz, and was addicted to books. According to a Facebook post written after his death, in the 1990s friends had to intervene by clearing his apartment of some books so he would not die in an avalanche. He was also universally known for never saying no to a friend in need and for a complete absence of snobbery.
Tolstoy was part of a close-knit, highly talented group of students who studied at Moscow State University in the 1970s, with a rich intellectual life fostered by professors who preserved pre-revolutionary academic traditions and breathed life into the stagnant Brezhnev-era Russia. He graduated from the art history department in 1979.
As an art historian Tolstoy was known primarily for his research on artists who had left Russia both at the turn of the 20th century and after the Bolshevik Revolution, especially for France. Tolstoy spoke French fluently and dug through archives in Paris. His efforts produced a doctoral dissertation that was published as a monograph, Artists of the Russian Emigration (2005). It has not been translated into English, but it is a reference book for post-Soviet dealers and collectors in search of forgotten names were cut off from Russia after 1917.
Breaking new ground In 2011, as a deputy director of the Pushkin State Museum, he was curator of the first exhibition in Russia of the School of Paris, which included works by Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall and Amadeo Modigliani, and a number of artists originally from the Russian Empire, such as Natalia Goncharova, Mikhail Larionov, Chaim Soutine, Sonia Delaunay and Jacques Lipschitz. Tolstoy placed Russian art in a European context and showed that émigré Russian artists were not forced to conform to foreign conventions—a theme that has become relevant again as Russia becomes increasingly cut off from the world, according to Mikhail Kamensky, an art expert in Moscow and friend of Tolstoy’s.
Tolstoy’s interests extended to Russian contemporary art as well. He was an active participant as curator of contemporary art exhibitions, wrote about the latest art and counted radical contemporary artists among his closest friends. Before going to the Pushkin Museum, he worked for several years at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art and organised an exhibition that explored the relationship between the museum’s classical architecture and contemporary art.
Tolstoy’s immediate family was also involved in the Russian art world. His father, Vladimir, is an expert in Soviet art. A sister works in the Moscow Kremlin Museums, another was a top research official at the Tretyakov Gallery. Tolstoy’s wife, Natalia Sipovskaya, whom he married in the heyday of Pinakotheke, an art journal where he was deputy editor and she was editor in chief, is the director of the State Institute of Art Studies.
In 2013, Tolstoy became the director of the Research Institute of Theory and History of Fine Arts, affiliated with the Academy of Arts, of which he was a member of the presidium. Tolstoy was mild-mannered, but ambitious. He left his post at the Pushkin, where it was difficult to work under the steely hand of Irina Antonova, but critics describe both the academy and the institute as Stalinist relics that are not for the faint of heart.
Cultural civil war As a Russian aristocrat raised in the Soviet Union, Tolstoy tried to find his way in a post-Soviet Russia. With the Russian art world suffering a large ideological divide, many people have stopped speaking to each other following the invasion of Ukraine and Crimea. “Right now there is a cultural civil war going on,” says Anatoly Golubovsky, a historian whose friendship with Tolstoy dates from their university days. “It’s bloodless, but not completely,” Golubovsky says. Tolstoy, he adds, “didn’t want people to fight and thought there should be equal conditions for everyone”, but that does not suit either side. His funeral might have been the last place where it was possible.