Valentin Skurlov is an Honorary Academician of the Russian Academy of Arts (St. Petersburg), art historian, professor, Scientific Secretary at the Fabergé Memorial Foundation, consulting researcher in the Fabergé’s masterpieces at the Russian Art Department of Christie’s Auction House selling antiques, and an expert in valuing treasures of art belonging to the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation.
He was a confidant, friend, and co-author of the historiographer of the Fabergé firm and the great-granddaughter of the jeweler to the imperial court Carl Fabergé, Tatiana Feodorovna, who lived in Switzerland. They jointly wrote a book dedicated to Agathon Karlovich (also spelled Carlovich, 1876-1951), Carl Gustavovich Fabergé’s grandfather, published in 2012 and titled “Agathon Fabergé in Red Petrograd”.
Recently, Valentin Skurlov was interviewed by Galina Semyonova from Rough&Polished in St. Petersburg and spoke about the history, grandeur, and modern significance of the “Fabergé” brand and trademark.
Recently, the illegal use of Fabergé’s name by unscrupulous companies has become topical again, not only in Western countries, but also in Russia. Many publications have appeared on this topic. Could you share your opinion?
In the family archive of Tatiana Fabergé, there are many documents explaining the position of the members of Fabergé’s family on this issue. In 1984, one of the grandsons of Carl Fabergé, Alexander Alexandrovich Fabergé (born in 1912 in Moscow, died in 1988 in Austin), professor at the University of Texas at Austin, explained the situation at the request of Christopher Forbes, a famous art collector.
Here is an excerpt of the letter written by A. A. Fabergé to Christopher Forbes:
“In 1922, two of Carl’s sons, Eugène and Alexander (I am Alexander’s son), founded a modest business in Paris at 23, rue Saulnier, Fabergé & Cie., in partnership with Andrea Marchetti and G. Guerrieri, to sell old jewelry items and also manufacture and design jewelry items. The company was closed down in 1960 when the last member of Fabergé’s family working there, Eugène (1874-1960), died. The manufacturing of the pieces in Geneva was carried out by Feodor (Théodor) Agathonovich Fabergé (1904-1971) and his daughter Tatiana.
Unfortunately, the name of Fabergé has never been registered as a trademark. It never occurred to their minds, because it had been a family business for generations well known to anyone in the jewelry world. In any case, trademark laws are different in each country and change at different times.
“Fabergé” as a brand has a rather complicated history. There was also company called a Fabergé Inc. - where did it come from?
This company was founded in 1937 by a certain Samuel Rubin (Sam Rubin), the owner of Spanish Trading Corp. that imported soap and olive oil. Later on, in partnership with his father, he founded Fabergé Inc. - the predecessor of today’s Fabergé Inc., registered in 1944. Rubin used Fabergé’s name as it was associated with high quality and luxury.
There were some lawsuits initiated by the members of Fabergé’s family that were unsuccessful, weren’t there?
After the Revolution of October 1917, the contacts between the members of Fabergé’s family were lost. Eugène and Alexander settled in Paris and set up Fabergé & Cie. They found out only after World War II that Rubin had used the name of Fabergé, and had also registered this trademark and produced perfumes and jewelry.
Long lawsuits were not beneficial to the family, so an agreement was concluded, under which the “Fabergé” trademark could only be used for the production of perfume. In 1964, Sam Rubin sold his company for $26 mn, making a fortune with the help of Fabergé’s name. Presumably, he heard this name from Armand Hammer, who collected many jewelry items by Fabergé while he lived in the USSR.
And not a single member of Fabergé’s family had ever worked at Fabergé Inc. The company changed through many hands until Unilever bought it in 1989 for $1.55 mn. In 2007, South African businessman Brian Gilbertson (former president of SUAL-Holding and BHP Billiton) acquired all rights to the “Fabergé” brand from the Unilever company for $38 mn.
As for Hammer, tell us more about how he managed to build up a big collection of the jewelry items by Fabergé?
You know, after the Revolution of October 1917, these jewelry items were easy to get through Bolshevik functionaries, these items came from the families of those executed and those who fled the USSR.
Armand Hammer arrived in Moscow in 1921 and settled in the former Moscow Fabergé store on the Kuznetsky Most Street. At that time, he got to know about jewelry items by Fabergé and actively bought them at flea markets and from antique dealers. A certain dropout-student Benediktov helped him. By the time he left the USSR in 1930, Armand Hammer had over 2,000 jewelry items in his collection of jewelry by Fabergé, including almost a dozen imperial Easter eggs. For comparison, in all Russia’s museums, there were no more than one thousand jewelry items by Fabergé in 1997, and now, there are already over 3,000 items.
In one of the post-perestroika (post-restructuring period in the USSR) publications in the Izvestia newspaper, it was directly stated that Armand Hammer carried out financial instructions given by the Third International.
At that time, many of the jewelry items were sold through the Hammer Galleries in New York managed by Victor Hammer, Armand’s brother, who forced him to study art.
And what happened to the valuables that belonged to Agathon Fabergé, Tatiana’s grandfather, and remained in Russia?
The jewelry items confiscated from Agathon Fabergé’s dacha (summer house) located in the dacha area Levashovo near Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) in the fall of 1919 also entered the Third International Foundation, the so-called Comrade Zinoviev’s Foundation, as Zinoviev was the almighty ruler of “red Petrograd” and the chairman of the Third International in those years.
Agathon Karlovich Fabergé, Tatiana Feodorovna’s grandfather, was imprisoned two times (for one and a half years and for nine months) from 1919 to 1921; and in December 1927, he escaped with his wife and little son Oleg (born 1923) to Finland across the ice of the Gulf of Finland.
His brother, Alexander Karlovich Fabergé, was an inspector for the protection of artistic treasures in Moscow at the People’s Commissariat of Education in 1919, and also served time in prison, from where he was rescued by his seriously ill wife Nina Belisheva and transported to Finland with the help of their loyal Finnish friends (through a ‘loophole’ on the Finnish border), and he left Finland for Paris.
What are the descendants of the famous family doing now and who owns the brand?
Agathon (1898-1966) and Peter (1901-1970), the eldest sons of Agathon Karlovich (both served in Yudenich’s White Army), lived in Switzerland in the early 1920s, and left the country for Brazil in the same years. Peter Agathonovich had 8 children (born between 1923 and 1942). They and their children live near São Paulo now and are poor farmers. Only the youngest, John, or Joao in Brazilian, is prospering.
Alexander’s son, Professor A. A. Fabergé, has repeatedly gone to the US courts with lawsuits against the illegal use of Fabergé’s name. Unfortunately, the remaining members of Fabergé’s family cannot apply to court to protect their name and succeed, as significant money are required.
And Sam Rubin’s company, Fabergé Inc., became part of the largest multinational company, Unilever. The legal department of Fabergé Inc. issues licenses for a fee for the right to use Fabergé’s name. This right is used by the Franklin Mint company in the USA producing enameled items that are very far from Fabergé’s style. In whole of Europe, the right to produce jewelry items with the “Fabergé” trademark was bought by an enterprising German businessman, who in turn resold the right to the “Fabergé” brand name to Victor Mayer, a gemstone-cutting company based in Idar-Oberstein, Germany”. The latter produces gemstone-cut items under the “Fabergé Victor Mayer Collection” brand. Unilever also controls the Fabergé store in Paris that also has no connection with the members of Fabergé’s family. The Paris-based Elida Gibbs Fabergé company specializing in perfumes sold the “Fabergé” brand name” to a St. Petersburg jewelry company that advertises itself as “Fabergé from Ananov”. However, as you can see, the legal rights of the Paris-based company for the “Fabergé trademark” are very dubious (Andrei Ananov used this license for two years.)
In addition to Feodor (also spelled Theodor) Agathonovich, his brother Igor (died in 1982) was also involved in the jewelry business in Switzerland, he had the Igor Carl Fabergé firm. Nikolai (also spelled Nicholas) Karlovich Fabergé (1884-1939), the youngest son of Carl Fabergé, had an illegitimate son, the firm’s secretary Dorise Cladish gave birth to him. In 1969, someone told Theo Cladish to check the information in the church registers, where Nicholas Fabergé was listed in the “father” column. Thus, the 47-year-old carpenter got his real surname Fabergé. The carpentry firm Theo Fabergé was set up, producing mainly wooden Easter eggs. By common opinion, they are not of the Fabergé’s style, they are the perversion of it. However, a luxurious album about the artist-carpenter-jeweler Theo Fabergé has already been published.
The latest example of the theft of Fabergé’s name is the story of the setting-up of the so-called Fabergé Arts Foundation, registered in February 1990 in Washington.
Another Fabergé Foundation?
This foundation does not include any members of Fabergé’s family, but it included such a well-known figure as Mr. Geza von Habsburg, who published a number of books about Fabergé. In his autobiographical book, published in Helsinki in late 1991, Oleg Agathonovich Fabergé noted, “A few years ago, a book was published written by a certain Geza von Habsburg, who considers himself an “expert in Fabergé jewelry.” In his desire to find something new for his readers, this self-proclaimed ‘expert’ took the liberty to link my father’s name to several fakes, based on rumors (!) that appeared in Helsinki, according to the author. This ‘expert’ is completely unaware that my father has never been a jewelry craftsman, that he has never owned or run a workshop in Helsinki, and to top it all off, Finnish professional craftsmen have never been involved in the production of forgeries! Naturally, I could not let it pass without condemnation. After a short correspondence with Geza von Habsburg, in which he, of course, apologized, but at the same time, refused to comply with my demand to refute his offensive statements in several art magazines I had mentioned, I took matters into my own hands. I sent copies of the offensive text, together with the copies of our short correspondence, to those people who might be interested in the matter (150 letters), including to some museums, antique dealers, art experts, auction houses, art magazines, and many well-known individual Fabergé jewelry collectors... The letters attracted the attention they deserved.”
The Fabergé Arts Foundation is currently working hard in St. Petersburg to acquire a building that belonged to Fabergé before the Revolution, the famous House of Fabergé at 24, Bolshaya Morskaya Street. Under the guise of the so-called Gold Egg project (which Oleg Fabergé wittily called a ‘rotten egg’), the Fabergé Arts Foundation planned to set up a mass production of copies of the jewelry items created by Fabergé.
Isn’t that a bad idea?
Exactly. Imagine a ‘wave of handicrafts’ falling on consumers. This is what the heirs of Fabergé fear most. It may happen, that in just one generation, people can start associating the fakes made by the Fabergé Arts Foundation with the genuine jewelry items by Fabergé. Fabergé’s style and quality can be reduced to the level of kitsch. But getting a house for the Fabergé Arts Foundation means getting an opportunity to use it for subleasing. In the twinkling of an eye, we will see a ‘conglomerate of galoshe-making, gasoline-producing, and banana-selling companies’ in the center of St. Petersburg.
Tatiana Feodorovna Fabergé has a last will and testament of Carl Fabergé, where he left this house to the sons of Agathon Fabergé, that is, to Tatiana’s father.
At one time, Tatiana Fabergé, who actively worked with her father, a jeweler, as a jewelry artist and designer, carried out work to set up a company in Russia under her own name, to continue the traditions and preserving the ‘spirit’ of the Fabergé firm.
The Fabergé researches have become a kind of sector of studying the art and history. What issues does it deal with now?
The Fabergé researches focus on studying the legacy and biography of Carl Gustavovich Fabergé (1846-1920), a famous Russian jeweler, as well as the jewelry artists and craftsmen of the ‘Fabergé Circle’. The representatives of this direction of studies are called the ‘Fabergé Researchers’. The term “Fabergé researches” has not yet been established, but the ‘Fabergé researchers’ exist.
The start of the Fabergé researches goes back to the first half of the 1930s. Over eight decades of studying Fabergé’s legacy, many scientific and other works have been published, including articles, notes, commentaries, and reviews. Dozens of monographs were published in English, Russian, French, German, Italian, Swedish, Finnish, Thai, and other languages. New works of art are constantly coming for a detailed scientific study of the Fabergé firm’s masterpieces, they are coming from the antique market, as well as from museum and private collections. During the period of work of the Russian Art Departments established as part of the largest auction - houses Sotheby’s (1974) and Christie’s (1975) - at least 25,000 art works created by the Fabergé firm have appeared to date. Over the past 40 years, more than 300 auction catalogs have been published by the Sotheby’s and the Christie’s auction houses alone. Some of them contain independent, full-fledged archival, historical, and art history references (provenance) of outstanding jewelry items. Aliya De Tiesenhausen (worked at Christie’s since 1984) and Gerard Hill (worked at Sotheby’s from 1976 to 2013) took part in compiling them. In the 2000s, jewelry items by Fabergé were sold by other auction houses, such as Bonhams, MacDougall’s, Bukowskis, and others, as well as the Russian auction houses like GELOS, Znak, the Auction House of the Russian Federation (since 2009), and others.
Over the past 25 years, the Fabergé researches have progressed to discussing new approaches to studying Fabergé’s legacy. The greatest increase in knowledge has occurred through studying the documents from the Russian archives, as well as the private archive belonging to Carl Fabergé’s great-granddaughter Tatiana Fabergé (Switzerland). At the conferences devoted to the studies of the Russian art at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, the “Fabergé” theme is actively discussed not only at the universities and museums in St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Yekaterinburg, but also at Russia’s large university centers outside of large cities, as well as in the post-Soviet countries. Numerous Fabergé exhibitions held in Russia and abroad also help maintain interest in Fabergé’s legacy and scientific developments. According to our estimates, the company produced a total of 250,000 to 300,000 jewelry items, of which about 40 percent remain in stock, which equals to at least 100,000 jewelry items. The Fabergé researches are devoted to the content, origins, and influence of the personality and creative work of Fabergé and the jewelry artists of the ‘Fabergé Circle’ in the 19th and 20th centuries and in the modern world, and are aimed at determining Fabergé’s legacy in culture, art, and society.
This is the situation in the scientific world. Is Fabergé’s legacy of practical significance now? To what extent does it influence the Russian jewelry art and the jewelry industry as a whole?
In 2013, the Fabergé Museum of the Link of Times Foundation was opened in St. Petersburg, and a year later, the Fabergé Memorial Rooms were opened at the St. Petersburg’s State Hermitage Museum, gold vaults at the museums of St. Petersburg, the collection of masterpieces by Fabergé at the State Historical Museum of Russia, as well as at the Tsaritsyno Museum-Reserve and the All-Russian Decorative Art Museum, as well as at private museums of the SOBRANIE Foundation (Moscow) and the New Era Foundation (Museum of Christian Art in St. Petersburg). I’d like to mention the jewelry collections of the suburban museums in St. Petersburg and the Museum of the History of Religion. The Museum of the History of Stone-Cutting and Jewelry Art in the Urals is successfully operating, as well as the ‘gold vault’ at the Museums in Omsk and Irkutsk.
Thus, Fabergé is more alive than the departed. For obvious political reasons, the topic of Fabergé’s influence on art and public life has not been practically discussed for the last three years because “in times of war” the jewelry art “is silent”.
I have always believed that Russia owns the “Fabergé brand” absolutely, and the brand name is associated with Russia. And yet, I should say that I cannot name a single jewelry company in Russia now that would reflect Russia’s jewelry art as vividly as the jewelry by Fabergé. There are worthy jewelry companies such as SOKOLOV, Almaz-Holding, Brillianty ALROSA (ALROSA Diamonds), Russkiye Samotsvety (Russian Gems) ... But they have not yet become iconic, and they just survive in the conditions of the sanctions imposed and stagnation.
The state is not interested in the development of domestic jewelry brands, and the best jewelry companies come under colossal financial pressure from the government.
Nevertheless, jewelers keep on working, because art and thought cannot be stopped. Moreover, as Chancellor Golitsyn said, “Russia is concentrating.” Jewelers keep on thinking, working and developing new ideas in the spirit and traditions created by Fabergé.
Galina Semyonova, Editor in Chief of the Russian Bureau, Rough&Polished
