Artist and art historian Andrei Khlobystin collected archival documents relating to the art scene in St. Petersburg over several decades. In 2000, part of his collection became the core of the St. Petersburg Archive and Library of Independent Art at the Museum of Nonconformist Art at Pushkinskaya 10. The remainder was transferred to Garage Archive in St. Petersburg.

The Andrei Khlobystin archive contains documents on the history of Leningrad and St. Petersburg art from the 1980s to the 2000s, including a large collection of photographs of artists, exhibitions, and bohemian life, posters, leaflets, invitations, and other ephemera that allows us to reconstruct the history of the city’s cultural events, including its famous dance nights.

A section of the archive is devoted to the New Artists and the New Academy of Fine Arts, and features Timur Novikov’s manuscripts, artefacts related to the work of Georgy Guryanov and Vladislav Mamyshev‑Monroe, self‑published catalogues and posters, Vadim Ovchinnikov’s mail art, documents about the NCH/VCH Club and more. The archive also contains materials on the institutions created to provide a platform for and promote new art (Leningrad Art Historians’ Club, City Institute of Art and Culture) and documents on specific exhibitions and events.

It contains a large number of manuscripts by Alla Mitrofanova, Viktor and Margarita Tupitsyn, Timur Novikov, Boris Koshelokhov, Andrei Khlobystin, and others. Along with writing on art theory the archive includes a selection of journal and newspaper articles on art events in Leningrad and St. Petersburg.

The archive also contains artists’ books and handmade catalogues, samizdat publications, underground periodicals like Susanin, Khudozhestvennaya volya and Mitin zhurnal, and limited‑edition catalogues of artists including Vladislav Mamyshev‑Monroe and Irina Waldron. Many publications and catalogues from Andrei Khlobystin’s collection are now available at Garage Library in St. Petersburg.

Andrei Khlobystin (b. 1961, Leningrad) is an artist and art historian based in St. Petersburg. After graduating in Art History from Zhdanov Leningrad State University in 1983, he managed the Lower Park Palaces at Peterhof, and worked as a registrar at the Hermitage Museum’s Research Library and the Diaghilev Museum of Modern Art of St. Petersburg State University. He has taught at Herzen State Pedagogical University of Russia, Russian Christian Academy for the Humanities, and St. Petersburg State University. He was among the founders of the Leningrad Art Historians’ Club in 1985, collaborated with the New Artists from the early the 1980s, and became the Secretary of The New Academy of Fine Arts in 1995. He published the journals Khudozhestvennaya volya and Geniy and the newspaper Susanin (www.susanin.zarazum.ru).

In 2000, he founded St. Petersburg Archive and Library of Independent Art at Pushkinskaya 10, and in 2008 the St. Petersburg Video Archive. He has published texts in samizdat and is the editor of the reference book Neofitsialnaya Stolitsa (2000) and the author of Shizorevolyutsiya. Ocherki peterburgskoi kultury vtoroi poloviny XX veka [Schizorevolution. Essays on St. Petersburg Culture of the Second Half of the 20th Century, 2017].

The Secret Art of Petersburg