I am in the mother of Moscow traffic jams and my driver is getting increasingly vexed trying to find Mari Vanna, the restaurant chosen for our lunch by Daria Zhukova, the city’s newest art patron, but better known throughout the world for her romantic relationship with the billionaire oligarch Roman Abramovich. The driver keeps stopping to ask the way and we are driving round in circles. There is much cursing and muttering.When we find the address, I step inside and almost turn straight around again, thinking I have accidentally stepped into someone’s front room. There is a television on the wall and family photographs of stern-faced grandmothers all around. But a couple of young waitresses in pea-green polka-dot dresses prevent me from leaving. They don’t speak a word of English. Not without some relish, I give them the name of my guest for lunch.
“Daria Zhukova? Daria Zhukova?” one of them asks incredulously. Either they have never heard of her, or they can’t believe she is coming to their front room, or they can’t believe she is having lunch with me. “Da,” I say firmly. The waitress takes me to the table. There is a cat sitting on one of the chairs, which is unceremoniously dumped on to the floor.
Zhukova, known to all as Dasha, has warned me she is running late, caught in the same traffic jam. No matter. I am being serenaded by Elvis Presley ballads, of all things. There is a 1960s Russian variety show on the television. I visit the bathroom, which is plastered with Pravda front pages featuring assorted dictators, cosmonauts and film stars. There is also a Salvador Dalí calendar, which is by far the least surreal thing in the room.
I half-expect Zhukova to arrive with bodyguards who will sit on either side of me and proceed to turn me into a Russian salad if I ask any untoward questions. But she slips in without fuss and takes the cat’s chair. She is, as has been frequently noted, strikingly beautiful, and elegantly dressed. She has her hair up in a style that I would label near-unkempt but that fashion experts assure me takes hours to achieve.
I thank her for her interesting choice of restaurant. “Do you understand the concept?” she asks, concerned. Not entirely, but it’s always nice to hear “Love Me Tender”. “It is like an old Soviet apartment from the 1960s or 1970s. See those circular frames?” She points to the grandmothers. “They are very popular in Russia.”
We agree to have a range of starters, which she will choose, and then some borsch, the traditional Russian beetroot soup, and then take it from there. “We are going to need a bigger table,” says Zhukova solemnly, reminding me of the line from Jaws, and we decamp to the opposite corner of the restaurant. She tells me that the original Mari Vanna is in St Petersburg and the owners are now thinking of opening in New York, “which would be quite a funny idea”. She agrees that the Elvis soundtrack is “really weird”.
Zhukova, 27-year-old daughter of an oil magnate father and molecular biologist mother, was born in Moscow and brought up from the age of 10 in California, accounting for a characteristic lifeless drawl when she speaks in English that, combined with her air of guardedness, gives an impression of diffidence.
She is far from reticent, however, when discussing her latest project. Across the city, the finishing touches are being applied for the following day’s opening of a new exhibition at the Garage Centre for Contemporary Culture, a spectacular constructivist building, designed by Konstantin Melnikov and Vladimir Shukhov in the 1920s, that used to be a bus garage, now turned into a contemporary art space by Zhukova.
The new show presents highlights from the collection of the luxury goods entrepreneur François Pinault. He is one of the world’s leading collectors of contemporary art and the show is an ideal introduction for anyone seeking to dip a toe into that most challenging of art forms, ranging from a gorgeous neon-tube gallery by Dan Flavin, to a harrowing anti-war installation by Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley.
Zhukova says she fell in love with the space when she first saw it at the end of 2007, even though it was in an advanced state of disrepair. “There was something breathtaking about it when I walked in,” she says. The garage was owned by a Russian-Jewish organisation, which, says Zhukova, was not entirely sure what to do with it. “I said to them, ‘Why don’t you guys let me do it?’ And the more I investigated, the more excited I got.”
The financial details of the deal have not been revealed but Zhukova says the “informal” arrangement suits all parties. Her enthusiasm for the project is palpable. She takes my napkin to show how the parallelogram structure of the building has been adapted over the past 12 months to form a versatile home for future exhibitions. She says she only ever thought about the Garage as a space for hosting “6,000 square metres of amazing contemporary art”.
When I ask how she first became engaged with art, she hastens to deny any specialist knowledge. “I liked it, I liked going to Tate Modern in London and then other galleries but I was never directly involved and I didn’t take any art classes.” (Her degree, from the University of California Santa Barbara, is in Slavic studies and literature). She has assembled a formidable team of advisers for the Garage, including Tate director Sir Nicholas Serota and Serpentine Gallery director Julia Peyton-Jones.
Zhukova says the introductory element of the Pinault show, curated by Caroline Bourgeois, is deliberately conceived. Moscow is a reluctant embracer of novel art forms and she wanted to show a panorama of contemporary art to what may be a grudging public. “I am sure a lot of people won’t understand it. A lot of people will be confused and sceptical. The most popular art movement here is Impressionism, that’s what we were taught was beautiful.” She knows it’s a long way from Renoir to the hyper-polished hearts of Jeff Koons or the raw visual jokes of Maurizio Cattelan.
The food comes. It is hearty and plentiful, and Zhukova describes each dish in detail. I’ll never remember it, I say. “Shall I take a picture of it and e-mail it to you, or is that weird?” she asks. Not weird at all, I say, but why don’t I take the picture? I can’t resist putting her into the top corner of the frame. Daria Zhukova surrounded by pickled foodstuffs. Perhaps Hello! magazine – or Tate Modern – might be interested?
“I am not expecting a big revolution,” she says of the Garage exhibition. I wonder if she sees contemporary art as an extension of the fashion world, which she is already involved with, in the form of her Kova & T label, formed with her childhood friend Christina Tang. (She has also, in the preceding days, been appointed the new editor of style magazine Pop; see panel, right.)
Again, she is cautious not to appear immodest in her reply. “My involvement in fashion is not at the highest artistic level. The label is quite a simple line that does basics. But do I think that the great designers are artists? Absolutely. I know there is a lack of acceptance from the art world towards fashion but I absolutely think that.”
I say one of my worries about contemporary art is that it can appear over-decorative, and shows little sign of engagement with social and political issues. “That can be true but maybe people are tired of political art and want something beautiful.” She changes course abruptly. “Is it true that people don’t buy papers when they see news about the financial crisis on the front page?” That would be alarming for our paper, I say.
Zhukova offers me an entire clove of pickled garlic and crunches on one herself. I hesitate, explaining that I am going to the Bolshoi later, and don’t want to be stared at by fearsome women in fur coats. “Is that what you are expecting? There is a very strong theatre-going tradition in Moscow. It has stayed strong.” She assures me that the garlic will leaves no noxious traces. (It doesn’t, to my knowledge).
I ask if her constant commuting leaves her feeling rootless. “I feel rootless but also rooted everywhere. I feel very comfortable in LA, New York, London, Moscow, Paris. It’s a nice feeling going to a city that you are familiar with.” But was the city of her birth beginning to pull her in its direction? “The Garage is a big, big anchor for me,” she confesses.
Zhukova has always declined to talk about Abramovich or her relationship with him. Art world gossip has it that he bought two British masterpieces, by Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, for a combined £60m last year as a present to her, or to her gallery. I ask if that is accurate. “If I answered that question, I would be commenting on matters which he wishes to remain private,” she answers with impeccable logic and not without charm. “Sorry.”
She says she is gradually building her own collection. “I have just started, and I am learning a lot about myself. I am very drawn to humorous work.” She says she bought a piece on impulse at Frieze last year, an old-fashioned computer from the 1980s that sings forlorn pop songs in a computerised voice and has a cup in front of it for change. “I love the idea of a homeless computer,” she says. “Nobody wants it.” (The work is in a quiet corner of the cloakroom when I visit the Pinault exhibition the next day, where its pathos is yet more pronounced.)
It is time for the highlight of the meal, the borsch. One of the pea-green waitresses serves mine, walks behind me, and clips a napkin around my neck. She leaves Zhukova alone. Why doesn’t she do that to you, I ask? “Maybe because I look neater,” says Zhukova, with considerable understatement. She has a scattergun conversation with the waitress. “She says men dirty themselves much more than women. I look a bit more together.” I feel like a schoolboy.
The soup is delicious. Presumably this was not what Zhukova was brought up with in California? “My grandmother used to cook it a lot. And I remember one Thanksgiving, I had some friends over and my mom cooked the Thanksgiving meal, and it was all things like this, and I thought, ‘Couldn’t we just have had some normal Thanksgiving food, some turkey and mashed potato?’” A rare note of dislocation.
We get into a discussion about pop music and I put my theory to her that contemporary art has replaced music as the art form that most energises young people. She demurs. “My teenage sister doesn’t know much about art but is absolutely passionate about pop music, and all its subdivisions – emo, indie, hipster.” “Emo indie hipster?”
“No, they are all different.” She chuckles indulgently. “She’ll kill me if I go any further.” But it is young people, above all else, that she wants to attract to the Garage. “I am really interested in that energy. I want young people wandering around the gallery, in the café.” She makes a list of galleries I should check out in Moscow, to get a sense of the scene myself. By the end of the borsch, she is slightly panicking about all she has to do for tomorrow’s opening. She asks politely if she can leave me with the waitresses and the cat, trying to decipher the menu.
Later that evening, at the Bolshoi, I am struck by two thoughts. The first is that the opera I am watching, Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, is a reminder of the power that art can have when confronting politics: the composer was famously denounced by the Soviet authorities for the work’s “immorality” and went on to suffer for his indiscretion. Is there that type of courage and commitment in the playful arena of contemporary art today?
The second thought is inspired by the production itself, which is dull, stiff, and bloodless. The arts in Russia are, according to this account, about 50 years behind the times. Zhukova’s experiment in bringing fresh voices and forms to her native country is not just a vanity project. Moscow, a city so rich in the culture of the past, needs the Garage.
That view is reinforced at the gallery the next day by the Italian artist Francesco Vezzoli, whose satirical takes on fame and celebrity form part of the Pinault exhibition. “It is fantastic what she has done,” he says when I ask him about Zhukova. “To have that vision, and not be afraid to fail. It is Diaghilevian. She is the new Diaghilev.”
That Jumpsuit.
Oh my. 
