The Khanenkos in Rome: Art Collecting Strategies (1874–1914)

Kateryna Hotsalo, Ph.D.

The project explores the activities of Ukrainian collectors Bohdan and Varvara Khanenko within the Roman art market during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Like individual philanthropists and intellectuals of the time, the Khanenkos transformed their estate into a publicly accessible museum, which now houses the most significant collection of world art in Ukraine. Since their private archive disappeared in the 1920s under still unclear circumstances (simultaneously the names of the Khanenkos were removed from the museum's name due to "lack of merit to the communist regime"), there are multiple gaps in knowledge about the collecting strategies and personal contacts of Bohdan and Varvara in Rome, where they were part of the microcosm of connoisseurs, purchasing artworks over a period of forty years.

Using as a starting point testimonies from Bohdan Khanenko's "Notes", the auction catalogues and the inventory books of the Khanenko Museum, I aim to reconstruct the sociocultural contexts that influenced the Khanenkos' vision of their collection – its function, its meanings, the content of its interaction with the exhibiting spaces of their house, and later the museum. Consequently, the project is guided by, but not limited to, the following questions: how did conditions of the Roman antiquities market influence the Khanenkos' acquisition of artworks and their subsequent placement and replacement in the stylized interiors of the Kyiv estate? How socio-cultural background was reflected in the Khanenkos' self-identity among European art connoisseurs of their time?

During my time at Biblioteca Herziana, I research the interplay between the Khanenkos and collectors such as Ludwig Pollack, Lionello Venturi, Giorgio Sangiorgi, Attilio Simonetti (and others) within the Roman art market. The study also sheds light on Varvara's collecting activities among Roman intellectuals, as scholarship from the 1920s onwards left her partly in the shadow of her husband.