Minister of Culture

For much of the past year, the old Mayflower Church at Diamond Lake Road and I–35W in south Minneapolis has been sheathed in scaffolding. The 1930s Spanish revival–style building, long admired for its bell tower and wedding-cake embellishments, hasn’t served a congregation in decades, but when it reopens May 9, after an extensive remodeling, it will be again a site for renewal, reflection, adoration, and praise, though the activities won’t be religious in nature. Instead, the building will house The Museum of Russian Art, a 10,000- square-foot facility with the world’s largest private collection of Soviet realist art—a multimillion-dollar trove, assembled by Twin Cities businessman–turned–art collector Ray Johnson.

Johnson, sixty-six, is a soft-spoken fellow with white hair and heavy-lidded eyes. He is also a successful businessman, a millionaire, and a major player in the art world. Yet as he welcomes me into his office at the church, I realize he resembles a Lutheran minister—a job that, in fact, he once held. But Johnson doesn’t mention the power of the Gospel in our conversation. He talks about painting—and how exhibiting his collection might lead people in the United States to a better understanding of Russians and their culture. “Art has such a serious impact on people. It can change us,” he says. “[Viewing art] is one way Americans and Russians can relate that doesn’t involve television sound bites by one president or the other.

“What are Russian people like? Look at their art,” he says, pointing to the masterpieces on his office walls. “They’re passionate, talented, hard-working, and scholarly. [People] paint what they love. Their families, the land, expressions of their values.”

The art is beautiful. But will it move people to international understanding and cultural exchange? Johnson leans forward and whispers, “Art gets under your skin.”

As a youngster growing up in northern Iowa, Raymond Earl Johnson developed a love of rural life and landscapes, an interest that’s now reflected in the artwork he collects. In 1956, he left Iowa for Illinois, where he attended Carthage College, majoring in Greek and planning a career in the ministry. But an art class introduced him to painting, in particular Cezanne’s still lifes. “I suddenly had an interest I couldn’t get away from,” he says.

His newfound passion grew rapidly after he moved to Minnesota to attend what was then called Northwestern Lutheran Theological Seminary, located just blocks from the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. He visited the museum as often as he could and sent away for poster reproductions of famous works. “I framed as many as I could,” he says, “and became very familiar with them all.”

In 1963, he graduated, married, and moved to Northern Minnesota to serve a Lutheran parish in Crosby-Ironton. Preaching was among his favorite duties, he says: “It was a privilege to speak to my congregation from the pulpit once a week. It was my duty to say something that people could take home with them.”

But the ministry had only a tenuous hold on Johnson. While on sabbatical in the mid-1970s, he became a partial investor in three Twin Cities funeral homes and implemented what he believed were much-needed reforms of the funeral industry. A lifelong collector of wooden duck decoys, he also helped launch The Wooden Bird stores, a successful concept that sells decorative accessories and markets wildlife-art reproductions to galleries—and an investment that enabled him to collect art.

In the late 1980s, he abruptly changed course again. He purchased galleries in Scottsdale, Nashville, and Minneapolis (only the Scottsdale location is still open) and sold artwork to well-heeled patrons. Criticized by some because he often staged shows of artists he liked but whose work was not necessarily for sale, he says, “I wanted to expose people to the art. That alone was enough.”

About that same time, as the Soviet Union was dissolving, Johnson glimpsed an opportunity. For more than seventy years, Russia had been closed to outside influences—and all art had been barred from leaving the country. For decades, Russian products had been derided by Americans as inferior—and many of them were. But Johnson, recalling the great Russian artistic achievements in ballet, literature, and music, wanted to see what visual artists had accomplished under Soviet rule.

When Courbet moved toward realism in the 1850s, he was considered avant-garde, eschewing the traditional subjects of the day (classical myths, ruins, royals) for everyday, working-class scenes. As realism swept across Europe, pictures of peasants, farmers, mechanics, and common laborers popped up everywhere, including Russia.

In 1917, the Bolsheviks triumphed, the doors to Russia clanged shut, and socialism began its seven-decade reign in the Soviet Union. Realism’s messages about hard work and portrayal of life in natural, not abstract or surrealist, forms suited the Soviet Communist Party’s aims, and, in 1934, Stalin declared socialist realism the party’s official style. The party established schools for training artists, and those who joined the Union of Soviet Artists and churned out the right kind of work received handsome, regular payments from the Ministry of Culture. “The government didn’t insist that everyone do ideological work,” says Alexei Lidov, an art historian from Moscow and a visiting fellow at Princeton University. “But it was able to control anything that was anti-Soviet.”

Socialist realism became an important, but ideologically charged, part of the realist movement—a tradition that, along with modernism and other forms, ultimately flourished in the Soviet Union and now composes 90 percent of the art surviving from 1917 to 1991.

The collapse of the Soviet system in the early 1990s, however, made beggars of almost all Russian artists. Few Russians had money to spend on art.

It was then that Johnson began traveling to Russia to buy art—a shrewd move that some have criticized as predatory. But Lidov, who lived through that era, disagrees. “For most of those artists, it was not only material help but moral support,” he says. “When this strange American came and started to buy their works, it was [rehabilitating].”

Johnson, who possessed little knowledge of Russian art and culture and no understanding of the language, approached his new interest in earnest. He hired twelve art historians from the former USSR and asked each to list the most important artists of the period. “If the same artist showed up on five of the lists, then I made a point of collecting that artist’s work,” Johnson says. “We pinpointed the best artists.”

Over the next decade, Johnson and his associates collectively made more than 1,000 visits to artists. Gary Ernest Smith, a Utah artist who’s known Johnson since the early 1980s, recalls accompanying the collector on a St. Petersburg–Moscow train shortly after the Soviet economy collapsed. The conductors advised them to barricade the doors of their train compartment against robbers, and, says Smith, “they also told us to push clothes under the door to prevent gassing.”

Whenever Johnson met with an artist, he made it clear that he wanted the artist’s best work. “When they saw I was a major collector and an exhibitor of the paintings, more and more pieces would come out,” he says. “I was usually shown the best, and they made it possible for me to buy them. I sometimes paid artists more than they asked if I thought they might be making a mistake. I didn’t want to come back the next time and have them feel bad about the deal we’d made before.”

Nowadays, Lidov says, the market for Soviet realist art is beginning to flourish. “Ray changed the situation in the Russian market and in Russian minds,” he says. “This is his great achievement. Even ten years ago, nobody was interested in this art. Now the prices are going up.”

Since 2002, when Johnson founded The Museum of Russian Art as a nonprofit, its temporary home has been in a Bloomington office park. One afternoon, Bradford Shinkle IV, the museum’s president and director and a longtime friend of Johnson, showed me the collection, most of which is donated or on loan from Johnson’s private collection. Many of the paintings had agrarian themes and, I thought, recalled the brushwork of the early French impressionists or the American John Singer Sargent. Twenty-three of the museum’s paintings, Shinkle noted, were on loan to the Smithsonian for In the Russian Tradition, a traveling exhibit that opens May 9 at The Museum of Russian Art. This fifty-painting display, plus approximately 100 other paintings from The Museum of Russian Art, the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, and the collection of Johnson and his wife, Susan, is perhaps the most extensive showcase of Soviet art ever attempted in the United States.

All told, Johnson owns approximately 10,000 Russian paintings and 1,000 works of different provenance. “Americans have always been fascinated with Russia,” he says. “We’ve been taught that [Soviet art] is colorless, somber, full of military content and propaganda. That’s true for probably 10 percent of the paintings. But the bulk of the paintings have a real slice-of-life feel to them. They help us understand that Russians are a lot like Americans when it comes to genre painting, portraits, and landscapes.

“What I look for is surface quality. I’m not just looking for certain subject matter or a certain level of reality. I’m looking for a certain kind of paint quality. It has to do with the final surface achieved on the canvas.”

Johnson not only collects Russian art; he promotes it. He advises other collectors, has underwritten books and scholarship on the subject, and meets with museum directors who show interest in the genre. Along the way, several collectors have offered to buy particular paintings—or his entire collection.

Johnson says he’s not interested in selling. He bristles when asked if Russian curators have ever suggested that he return the paintings to their homeland. “I didn’t buy these paintings in order to ship them all back again,” he says. “I bought them to show the people of the United States how great this art is.”

“We’re friends,” he says of the curators at the Tretyakov and other Russian museums. “They’re very flattered that an American would take this much interest in their art. Would they love to have the paintings back? Of course. But that they have access to them, that I’ve conserved them, toured them around the United States, and established a museum for them [demonstrates that] I’m their friend and not just somebody who’s taken too many paintings out of their country.”

The Russian government seems to agree. Last fall, an ambassador from the Russian Federation, Yuri Ushakov, named Johnson an honorary consul of the federation.

But recognition isn’t Johnson’s endgame. His museum probably won’t make him a household name in Russia or the United States. His fondest wish, he says, is to give Americans a glimpse of Russian life—through paintings.

Art, in Johnson’s view, can be a conduit for better understanding between two nations. But he too is a vessel of sorts. When he talked with Russian artists, he says they often tried to impress upon him the importance of bringing back a message to the United States. “They wanted Americans to know,” he says, “that even if Russians couldn’t make a good toilet or fridge or car, they paint great art.”

Joel Hoekstra wrote about the Penumbra Theater in the December issue of Mpls.St.Paul Magazine.