COMMENTARY

FROM RUSSIA

WITH

LOVE

BY HARRY SCHWALB

            Don't expect skittery, disembodied air-kisses from this high-spirited blonde. When Elena descended on one of my exhibitions at a Shadyside gallery some seasons back, she enfolded me in her arms - and bit an ear.

        It wasn't quite a Van Gogh moment, but it sure made my evening.

        The lady is Dr. Elena (pronounced Lee-en-a) Kornetchuk, holder of a Ph.D. in the politics of Russian art from Georgetown University (as well as an honorary doctorate from the University of Havana) and an M.A. in Russian literature and linguistics from the University of Iowa.

        She's been a research fellow in Russian studies in, among other places, Harvard, and is the author of countless scholarly monographs, giver of countless lectures, and guest curator for countless museum shows in a broad spectrum of venues (would you believe Great Falls, Montana?).

        La Elena is one of the most respected professionals in gallerydom. Also, may I mention it, a one-woman phenomenon who just may have contributed - if indirectly - to the breakdown of the Soviet Union.

        Let's get to this point right away. Dr. Kornetchuk, founding director and president of International Images Ltd. in Sewickley, built a career out of helping underground artists in the former Soviet Union reach a Western audience. Despite the dreaded secret police.

        "The very fact that there was a dissident art world - and a dissident music world - helped make chinks in a monolithic regime," she has said. "If you see things figuratively, it helps change the way you think."

        During visits to the U.S.S.R. she met with banned artists in their homes, combing the back streets of Moscow and Leningrad and Riga and Tallinn by night, in brimmed hat and scarves. ("Homes" is used loosely; these were cramped apartments, often stacked ceiling-high with unsold art.)

        Our mystery woman carried gifts of toothbrushes, cosmetics, vegetable seeds, tubes of paint (dissidents were denied access to art supplies).

        Addresses were memorized. Notes might incriminate artists who were painting the "wrong" subjects. this could mean KGB harassment, interrogations, perhaps a mental hospital, a labor camp. Or worse. Evgeny Rukhin perished in his torched studio.

        American Elena was herself of interest to the KGB because of her Russian father, a decorated hero of the Great Patriotic War. The colonel had defected to Munich a year before she was born, where he helped set up Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe. (She attended American schools there, and when it came time for college, was sent to the U.S.)

        Elena made her first trip to the Soviet Union in 1973 with her then-husband, Jonathan Showe, a trade official in the Nixon and Ford administrations. She was a student doing research for her Ph.D. under the legendary Georgetown professor Norton Dodge, a world authority on Russian dissident art. In the days that followed, in the 70's and 80's, she was able to rescue hundreds of banned works, sometimes rolled inside a propaganda poster or in the lining of her boots. A nicely packed suitcase might do it too.

        Elena had expanded her artist contacts after winning exclusive rights in 1978 to export government-approved Soviet art to the U.S. This had taken 18 excruciating months to negotiate. Her first shipments were confined largely to approved works - they were a great cover for banned stuff as well. The rest, as they say, is history. Art history.

        I met the lady in June 1978, at the opening of Russian Images Ltd. Always audacious, Elena sited America's first gallery devoted to Soviet art amidst the marble and paneling and polished brass of the Bank Tower at 307 Fourth Avenue in Downtown Pittsburgh. The neighboring suite housed haute-capitalist Merrill Lynch.

        In addition to Dr. Zhivago-style snowscapes and folksy village scenes there were stunning graphics from the Baltic states and (here Mr. Khrushchev rolls over in his grave) avant-garde abstraction. Director Kornetchuk was 27, with bottomless blue eyes and masses of golden curls. A ringer for the young Michelle Pfeiffer.

        Her mix of viewers matched the mix of art: corporate executives, foundation heads, ad agency art directors, curious artists, nostalgic expatriates.

        No punchbowl here. It was all ice-cold Stoli, out of an antique samovar. Oh, and the show sold out.

        Three years later, as the gallery expanded its range of artists, it became International Images Ltd. and moved to Sewickley's historic Flatiron Building, 514 Beaver Street, which Elena had bought and renovated into an elegant yet somehow intimate three-story showplace.

        Here she exhibits work from Eastern and Western Europe, the Americas, Africa and China. Pittsburgh, too. For the past few seasons she has introduced major artists from Cuba.

        The openings are supplemented from time to time with glorious parties in Elena's 150-year-old hilltop home, a colonnaded mansion built by a riverboat captain who wanted a good view of his river.

        The house has its own picture gallery. And a guard, a long-haired dachshund named Schnipp Fidelius Adelzahn.

        Schnippy is trilingual. He responds to Russian and German as readily as to Sewickleyese. But, of course.