Catherine — Katya — Phillips belonged to the kind of people without whom the artistic life of Petersburg would be impossible to imagine, even if they rarely stood in the official centre of the stage.
She moved through that world differently: through conversations, translations, catalogues, friends, kitchens, exhibitions, museum corridors, sudden introductions, and brief sentences after which somebody’s life could change direction. Petersburg in the late 1980s and 1990s was made not only of institutions, but of human conductors. Katya was one of them.
We first met in the summer of 1989 in Crimea, at Villa Ksenia. There was a pelmeni place there — the natural meeting point for everyone. Katya came up to me and my brother and said that she remembered one of us from Petersburg. Nothing ceremonial. Almost nothing at all. And yet now I understand that whole epochs sometimes begin exactly like this: not with a manifesto, but with somebody saying, simply, “I remember you.”
At first I was there with my brother and Petya Shvetsov. Katya was with Valery Katsuba. From that almost accidental constellation a whole chain began. First Petya, then our mutual friends, then friends of friends: people met, fell in love, married, separated, left, returned, and moved across countries. Some went to Russia, some to America, some to England. Everything began to spin. Petya Shvetsov would become a remarkable Russian artist; Valery Katsuba, a remarkable Russian-Spanish photographer. It was not a “scene” in the decorative sense. It was a living mechanism of friendship, accident, desire and history.
Catherine was never the kind of person who could be turned into a polished obituary. She was too alive for that — sharp, intelligent, vulnerable, sometimes difficult, but always absolutely real.
August 1991. I happened to be on the barricades by the Mariinsky Palace, on St Isaac’s Square. Katya lived very close by. It was she who said the simple thing: call the BBC, say you are there, say what you see, say that you can report. Today it sounds obvious. Then it did not. I did not yet understand that journalism sometimes begins not with a press card, but with presence. You are there. You saw it. So speak.
This was very much Katya: do not turn life into an impenetrable wall. Do not wait for ten permissions from the world. Call. Write. Say it. Go. In her English ease there was an extraordinary practical freedom.
But Katya was not only a private memory. She mattered in the artistic world of Petersburg. She was an art historian, editor, translator and researcher of the history of collecting and Old Master drawings. She was associated for many years with the Hermitage and with the international scholarly life around its collections. She studied at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, and later completed her PhD at the University of Glasgow, with a dissertation on Count Charles Cobenzl and his collection of drawings — a subject that led directly into the history of the Hermitage’s Cabinet of Drawings.
From the mid-1990s she worked with Hermitage-related research and publishing projects, helping to make Russian museum scholarship legible in English without flattening its complexity. This work is not glamorous from the outside. It is hard, exacting labour: names, dates, provenance, attributions, captions, tone, footnotes, trust.
Later, at the European University at St Petersburg, she became Vladimir Levinson-Lessing Professor of the History of Collecting. Her academic subject was also, in a sense, her life’s subject: how objects travel, how collections speak, how Europe is imagined from Petersburg, and how Petersburg is understood from Europe.
The last years were difficult. After 2022 she lost the university ground that had mattered so much to her, and friends remember how deeply it hurt her. For someone who had spent decades building bridges between Petersburg, the museum, Europe, students, catalogues, languages and living people, this was not merely an administrative episode. It was a wound.
Still, I do not want to end only in bitterness. Katya remains in books, catalogues, translations, lectures, the Hermitage, the European University, and the memory of Petersburg’s artistic world. But even more strongly, she remains in people whom she once pushed toward their own voice.
For me she will always remain the person who could come up in a Crimean pelmeni place, recognize you from Petersburg, and quietly open a door into another life. And two years later, from almost next door to the Mariinsky Palace, on St Isaac’s Square, say: call the BBC. You are there. You saw it. Speak.