CLINTON, Mass., July 16 (by Karin Zeitvogel for RIA Novosti) – When American businessman Gordon Lankton bought his first icon at a Moscow flea market in 1989, he knew nothing about the 2,000-year-old art form.
Nor did he have any inkling that the painting he saw lying on the ground at the Izmailovo Flea Market would ignite a passion in him that would lead, some 17 years later, to his opening a museum in this industrial town in central Massachusetts, which today hosts the largest collection of Russian icons in North America.
Lankton bought the icon he saw at the flea market for $25. It’s not a very good example of iconography and was “in bad shape,” but he took it home and studied it.
“And I decided that icons were quite interesting, and from that point on, whenever I went to Russia on business, which was basically every four months, I would go to museums and monasteries to see icons. And then, I started buying them,” Lankton told RIA Novosti.
Today, 81-year-old Lankton has one of the largest collections of icons outside Russia.
He used to keep his 500-plus icons at home, but when his wife said the collection had become a bit overwhelming, Lankton took a 150-year-old mill just steps away from the plastics company he ran for decades in Clinton, and turned it into the Museum of Russian Icons.
The museum put Clinton on the map for something other than the large dam just outside of town. But having icons in a museum also irks some people, who bristle when they see the religious paintings outside of a place of worship.
“There are people who come here and say icons should be in churches,” Lankton told RIA Novosti.
“I can understand why they say that, but on the other hand, when we built this museum we had it blessed by Russian Orthodox priests. When I tell people that, they feel much better,” he said.
An ornate icon of the Virgin Mary and Jesus, part of the large collection of Russian icons collected by industrialist Gordon Lankton, now on display at the museum he founded in Massachusetts. (K. Zeitvogel)
Alexandra Rawls, a young Russian mother who brought her two children to the museum, said she has no problem with seeing icons in a museum setting.
“I think if you have God in your heart, it’s enough, and if you have an icon in your home or a museum, it’s allowed,” she said.
The museum, which opened in 2006, was drawn five years later into the diplomatic spat over the Schneerson Library, a collection of tens of thousands of Jewish manuscripts and books collected by Lubavitcher Rebbe Yosef Yitzchok Schneerson and his descendants.
Originally from Russia, Schneerson eventually immigrated to the United States but the collection that carries his family name, and is sacred to the Lubavitch Hassidic community, is still in Russia.
When a US judge ordered the collection to be transferred to the Lubavitch movement in Brooklyn in 2010, Russian officials responded by ordering all icons on loan to US museums to be sent back to Russia.
The Museum of Russian Icons was hosting 37 pieces on loan from the Andrey Rublev Museum of Ancient Russian Culture and Art at the time, and to avoid any difficulties when he next traveled to Russia, Lankton cut short the exhibit and sent the historic paintings back.
Although icons are now treasured in Russia, they were hard to find during the Soviet era, when they were banned by the Bolsheviks, who said religion was “the opiate of the masses.”
Gordon Lankton jumped on a plane for Amsterdam when he found out that this iconostasis, thought to be from around 1590, was for sale there. (K. Zeitvogel)
Under Stalin, nearly 40,000 Christian churches and 25,000 mosques were closed down and converted into clubs, cinemas, schools, and warehouses; church bells were melted down as scrap metal; church leaders were jailed or killed; and icons were burnt.
When the Soviet Union broke up, icons returned to favor. But their scarcity after a 70-year ban led Russian authorities to block exports of the religious paintings.
Lankton admits that he tried to take a few out anyway, but gave up after he spent two nights in a Russian jail being questioned by police.
The export ban was eventually loosened, but Lankton decided to get his icons from collectors in Western Europe, where “Stalin sold icons by the truckload to raise money during World War II,” he said.
“You don’t get into trouble that way,” he said, adding that most of the icons in the Clinton museum were bought from collectors outside of Russia.
Around a year ago, Lankton got a phone call from Amsterdam about a large iconostasis, or wall icon, that was up for sale.
“They called me and said, ‘If you want to see it, come on over.’ And I said, ‘I’ll be there at 9:30 tomorrow morning,’” Lankton told museum visitor Ann Weaver as they stood in front of the 12 images, believed to date from around 1590, that now adorn around 12 feet (3.7 meters) of the wall in an upstairs exhibition hall.
The museum also has two of only a handful of 3-dimensional icons in existence, both showing St. Nicholas.
The Museum of Russian Icons has two of these rare 3-D icons, both of St. Nicholas, the patron saint of Russia. (K. Zeitvogel)
“The Orthodox Church bars 3-D icons but an exception has been made for St. Nicholas because he’s the patron saint of Russia and very popular,” Lankton said.
“We have two of the 3-D icons, the Tretyakov has about five of them in Moscow and the Rublev has about 15 or so. But there’s not many in the world,” he said, clearly proud of his icons.
Around 15,000 people made the trip to Clinton to visit the Museum of Russian Icons in the past year, and those numbers are expected to go up according to Lankton, indicating that the museum is succeeding in its quest to teach Americans about Russian culture through its art.
Last week, when the museum waived its normal $7 entry fee for adults, it welcomed nearly 1,000 visitors on a single day.
“I thought it would be full of expat Russians but I’m glad to see that we are the only Russians here,” Rawls said on the day she visited the museum.
The icon that ignited Lankton's passion for the ancient art form back in 1989 turns out to be an icon of St. Nicholas, that dates from the late 19th century.
It may not be the best example of an icon, but it's still dear to Lankton's heart and museum docents make a point of telling visitors the story of how a $25 flea market find grew into one of the largest collections of icons outside of Russia.
