“It is the end of a life spent officially as a ceramicist, making boring ashtrays and the like to keep within the law.” Thus did Soviet unofficial artist Igor Kopystyansky describe the personal impact of the July 1988 Sotheby’s auction in Moscow, where 12 works by him and his wife, Svetlana Kopystyanskaya, brought in a combined total of $338,246. The works included Kopystyansky’s Restored Painting No. 5 (1987), sold to British rocker Elton John for $75,592 – an incredible sum for an artist who up until that point was, as he described it in ARTNews, “absolutely unknown,” even in his native Lvov. Although it was not fully grasped at the time, the windfall on a painting by a “ceramicist from Lvov” was the beginning of a boom in Russian art that has spanned the past 20 years.
The historic Sotheby’s auction – the first of its kind in the Soviet Union – would have been unthinkable in the years before glasnost. Organized by Sotheby’s London with the sponsorship of the Soviet Ministry of Culture, the sale was largely devoted to contemporary Soviet art created outside official channels: what is referred to as “unofficial” or “nonconformist art.” Opened to great fanfare and conducted in British pounds sterling, the sale attracted some 2,000 people, including fashionably dressed collectors, curators, and dealers flown in from the U.S. and Europe. Sales totalled $3.4 million, with prices surpassing the wildest of expectations – some works sold for more than 15 times their starting price. The undisputed star of the event was Grisha Bruskin – an artist previously threatened by the KGB for showing his work to foreigners. Bruskin’s multi-panel painting Fundamental Lexicon (1986) sold for $416,000: the highest amount ever paid for the work of a living Soviet artist.
The sale’s extraordinary success meant that Kopystyansky, Bruskin, and their fellow unofficial artists could devote themselves full-time and “publicly” to the kind of art they had formerly done in the privacy of their homes or studios. The sale also marked the end of Soviet artists’ long-standing isolation from Western audiences and demonstrated there was a real market for Russian art – one that today, 20 years on, is the fourth highest-grossing sector of the art market. As Bruskin wrote in his recently published memoirs, Past Imperfect: 318 Episodes from the Life of a Russian Artist, “The West suddenly discovered that this far-off, incomprehensible northern country boasted, in addition to its bears and red commissars, a free and original art. Which was distinguished not only from profane socialist realism but also from contemporary European and American art. And that this art, like the art of the early Russian avant-garde, could enrich the cultural history of western civilization.”
The Ministry of Culture enjoyed a windfall of its own from the Sotheby’s sale, retaining 30 percent of all revenues generated by the auction. In need of cash and wishing to capitalize on unofficial art’s market appeal, the Soviet government – which in 1974 famously sent in bulldozers to raze an unofficial exhibition organized in the Moscow suburb of Belyayevo – now began promoting this art to Western collectors and dealers. Developing the U.S. market was a particular priority. In an arrangement described by Soviet officials as an “art bridge” between the former Cold War enemies, the Ministry of Culture appointed New York émigré-art dealer Eduard Nakhamkin to act as wholesaler for contemporary Soviet artists in the U.S., selling their work to U.S. galleries throughout the country.
Although Bruskin was the star of the 1988 Sotheby’s auction, the highest-grossing lot was a work by Aleksandr Rodchenko, one of the leading members of the Russian avant-garde movement of the 1910s and 1920s, which transformed the face of twentieth-century art and was initially embraced – but later brutally suppressed – by the new Soviet regime. His abstract painting Line (1920) was purchased by London dealer Annely Juda for $556,632.
Westerners’ avid interest in collecting Russian avant-garde work – and their willingness to pay very high prices for it – remains unabated. Just last year, another avant-garde painter, Natalia Goncharova, became the world’s most expensive woman artist when her painting Picking Apples (1909) was sold to a European collector for $9.8 million at a Christie’s London auction.
Indeed, the extraordinary popularity of Russian art has much to do with the West’s love of the avant-garde. Close as it is to Western modernism, the avant-garde is the Russian art movement that still appeals most to Western audiences, and exhibitions have been organized in virtually every corner of the U.S. and Europe over the past 20 years, attracting tens and hundreds of thousands of visitors.
Although the Khrushchev thaw prompted calls to rehabilitate and display the work of Russia’s avant-garde masters, for the most part this had to wait another 30 years. The “truth telling” of the glasnost era was vividly demonstrated in 1988, when two of the avant-garde’s leading lights – Pavel Filonov and Kazimir Malevich – had retrospectives at St. Petersburg’s State Russian Museum. The Malevich retrospective was the artist’s first in 60 years, while the Filonov retrospective was his most comprehensive to date – his 1929 solo exhibition at that same institution never opened.
The retrospective of the idiosyncratic, outspoken Filonov was, in the words of the eminent art historian John Bowlt, writing in ARTNews, “a symbolic as well as an aesthetic event… identified by many intellectuals as a true expression and test of glasnost.” The Malevich retrospective – which traveled to the Tretyakov, where it was met with long lines and arguments in front of the abstract paintings – showed the Soviets’ commitment to engaging all aspects of Russia’s avant-garde legacy: even the art formerly seen as harmful “bourgeois escapism.” For the famous art critic Robert Hughes, writing in TIME Magazine, the show, more than any other event, “symbolized Russia’s thawed relations to its own modernist past.” The exhibition also traveled to Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum, marking Soviet museums’ newfound willingness to cooperate with their Western counterparts.
Central to these developments was the artist Kazimir Malevich. He had major retrospectives in the U.S. and Europe in 1990–91 and then again in 2003–04, both of which attracted huge crowds. The National Gallery of Art’s presentation of Kazimir Malevich 1878–1935, which gave American audiences their first complete picture of the artist, was seen by 128,373, while a record 70,000 visitors flocked to the Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin, to see Kazimir Malevich: Suprematism.
These figures were dwarfed by the 250,000+ who came to see the largest avant-garde exhibition ever organized: The Great Utopia, held at New York’s Guggenheim Museum in 1992-93. Comprising roughly 800 works in every conceivable medium – painting, sculpture, ceramics, photography, architecture, and theater, book, and textile design – The Great Utopia exhibited works by all the major figures of the avant-garde: Malevich, Vassily Kandinsky, Vladimir Tatlin, Aleksandr Rodchenko, and Liubov Popova. The show drew heavily on the collections of the Tretyakov and Russian Museums, and the catalogue, like the exhibition itself, was massive: 732 pages and a hefty eight pounds.
Thousands more visited the show at its European and Russian stops: Frankfurt, Amsterdam, Moscow, and St. Petersburg. The Great Utopia even became a New York City-wide phenomenon, spawning, in the words of John Bowlt, “little utopias”: smaller avant-garde exhibitions at private galleries throughout Manhattan, organized to coincide with the show.
American interest in the avant-garde was not limited to New York. Some years later, the exhibition Painting Revolution (2000–01) toured five U.S. cities, borrowing from 13 institutions in the former Soviet Union. Interestingly, although Malevich and Kandinsky received top billing in the show (which was subtitled Kandinsky, Malevich, and the Russian Avant-Garde), they were not the main attraction for Chicago Sun-Times critic Kevin Williams. For Williams, most exciting was the opportunity to encounter the work of the “awe-inspiring” Pavel Filonov, along with works by lesser-known artists like Alexander Kuprin and Pavel Mansurov.
Unofficial art, long appreciated in the West for aesthetic and political reasons, has also been widely exhibited in the U.S. and Europe. Unofficial artists’ greatly publicized success at the 1988 Sotheby’s auction was like a Cinderella story: economic vindication for years of struggle against a hostile regime. Two top Sotheby’s officials themselves bought three of the unofficial works on offer: two paintings by Vadim Zakharov were sold to the Earl of Gowrie, Sotheby’s chairman in Britain, while Ilya Kabakov’s painting, The Answers of the Experimental Group (1970–71), was purchased by Sotheby’s chairman and majority owner A. Alfred Taubman for a future museum of Soviet contemporary art.
Then there is the amazing tale of the American economics professor Norton Dodge. During many trips to the Soviet Union in the 1960s and 1970s, Dodge spirited out what would eventually become the world’s largest collection of Soviet nonconformist art (his story is thrillingly recounted in John McPhee’s 1994 book, The Ransom of Russian Art). The still-growing Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union, which currently numbers more than 25,000 works, was donated to the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University in 1991. Initially exhibited in 1995 at the Zimmerli, it later became a permanent, rotating exhibition.
The popularity of several unofficial artists was aided by their emigration to the West between the 1970s and the 1990s. These artists include Grisha Bruskin, the star of the Sotheby’s auction, who emigrated to the West shortly after the sale and has had huge commercial success.
Ilya Kabakov, one of the best-known unofficial artists in the West, did not emigrate per se, but has lived in the West since 1987. Named by ARTNews in 1999 as one of the “10 best living artists,” Kabakov has been widely exhibited in prestigious venues like the Centre Pompidou in Paris (which held a retrospective of his work in 1995), the Whitney Biennial (1997), and the Guggenheim, where his installation The Man Who Flew into Space (1981–88) was the finale to the museum’s RUSSIA! exhibition. He also had top billing in the major German exhibition From Malevich to Kabakov (1993–94), held at the Köln Kunsthalle, which positioned unofficial art – sometimes referred to as “the second avant-garde” – in relation to its avant-garde predecessor.
Certain aspects of unofficial art have had particular resonance with Western audiences: Sots Art, for one. Sots Art, whose leading figures, Komar & Melamid and Eric Bulatov, also live in the West, mocks official Soviet propaganda and art to hilarious effect. The moniker “Sots Art” comes from the Russian for “Socialist Realism,” while echoing the term “Pop Art.” With its ironic humor and deliberate kitschiness, Sots Art has sometimes been exhibited alongside Western art movements like Pop Art or conceptual art, as in the massive show Berlin-Moscow, Moscow-Berlin, 1950–2000, presented at the Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, and the Moscow Historical Museum in 2003–04.
Sots Art has also been displayed alongside Socialist Realism – as in the major exhibition Dream Factory Communism (2003–04), curated by Boris Groys and held at the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt – often appearing more interesting than its source material. Most recently, it caused quite a stir with the exhibition Sots Art: Political Art in Russia from 1972 to Today, held at the Paris gallery La Maison Rouge in 2007–08. Seventeen works from the show were banned for export by the Putin government, including Alexander Shaburov and Viacheslav Mizin’s Kissing Policemen (An Epoch of Clemency), an image of two policemen kissing and fondling each other’s buttocks. Before the show opened, then-Russian Minister of Culture Alexander Sokolov was quoted in The Guardian as saying, “If this exhibition appears [in Paris] it will bring shame on Russia. In this case, all of us will bear full responsibility. It is inadmissible… to take all this pornography, kissing policemen and erotic pictures to Paris.” Of course, the huge scandal surrounding the show only enhanced its popularity.
Ironically, Sots Art’s resonance with Western audiences helped pave the way for a true reappraisal of Socialist Realism. Often dismissed as mere propaganda and viewed as devoid of artistic value, Socialist Realism is now seen to have encompassed both a wide range of styles as well as a surprising degree of individual interpretation and personal expression. Even the noted New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman, reviewing the well-attended exhibition Stalin’s Choice, held at the P.S. 1 Museum in 1993–94, observed in The New York Times that the best Socialist Realist artists “generated an energy and expressiveness that went beyond the rightness or wrongness of their messages.”
One form of Socialist Realism really captured the imagination – the Severe Style. It expanded the boundaries of Socialist Realism by giving voice to the grimmer aspects of Soviet existence. In his series Drawn from the War, Geli Korzhev, one of the leading exponents of the style, captured the devastating realities of his subject matter more accurately than the glorified treatments of most of his Socialist Realist colleagues. A prominent artist in Russia who was not known in the West until recently, Korzhev had a retrospective at The Museum of Russian Art, Minneapolis, titled Raising the Banner, in 2007–08 (see box, page 40), and was prominently featured in major exhibitions like RUSSIA! and Berlin-Moscow/Moscow-Berlin, 1950–2000. “Contemporary Russian art historians consistently refer to Mr. Korzhev as one of the most influential artists of the second half of 20th century Russian painting,” said Judi Dutcher, director and president of The Museum of Russian Art. “TMORA’s presentation of Raising the Banner provided American art viewers with a body of work that defies the formulaic expectations of heroic laborer art that has traditionally been applied to much of the Soviet era realist painting.”
Berlin-Moscow was the centerpiece of “German-Russian Cultural Encounters 2003/2004,” a massive government-sponsored cultural initiative underscoring the two countries’ political and economic ties. It, along with Dream Factory Communism, was among 250 Russian-themed exhibitions and events in Germany in 2003 organized in honor of “The Year of Russia.”
That 2003 was “The Year of Russia” in Germany was not coincidental. Since 2003 was St. Petersburg’s tercentennial, it was “the year of Russia” in other places as well. Baltimore hosted Vivat!, a city-wide festival involving nearly 75 of its museums, galleries, and art institutions. The University of Michigan Museum of Art organized a campus-wide festival centered on The Romanovs Collect – a major exhibition of fine and decorative art borrowed from the Hermitage Museum that brought in 46,000 visitors, or about one-third of the museum’s total for the year.
Prior to this collaboration, the Hermitage had partnered with other Western institutions, most famously the Guggenheim. In June of 2000, the two museums signed a far-reaching pact, agreeing to organize joint exhibitions, share collections, and develop a worldwide network of museums. Shortly thereafter, other Russian-Western partnerships followed, among them the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts’ long-term arrangement with the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and the Russian Museum’s protocol with the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C.
Through its collaborative efforts with the Hermitage, its three exhibitions The Great Utopia, Amazons of the Avant-Garde (2000–01), Kazimir Malevich: Suprematism (2003–04), and RUSSIA! (2005–06), the Guggenheim has done more to promote Russian art than any other Western art institution. RUSSIA!, reportedly the largest exhibition of Russian art ever to travel abroad, featured 289 works, largely paintings, spanning nine centuries. Despite this chronological breadth, the exhibition was heavily weighted toward the 19th century, which accounted for about one-third of the works. The show was enormously popular – its 405,780 visitors made it one of the best-attended exhibitions in Guggenheim history.
The Putin government was heavily invested in RUSSIA! The idea for the show was put forward by then-Minister of Culture Mikhail Shvydkoy, who, as quoted in a review appearing in Burlington Magazine, explained: “exhibitions like this one are the best way to create the correct notion of Russia. The exhibition is more convincing than many propaganda projects aimed at improving the image of our country.” The exhibition catalogue acknowledged “the patronage of Vladimir Putin, President of the Russian Federation,” and the opening of the show was timed to coincide with Putin’s visit to the U.S. for a meeting of the UN General Assembly. Indeed, Putin – who also attended the opening of Amazons of the Avant-Garde, where he announced, “the only form of expansion that Russia can afford nowadays is cultural” – was apparently invested in the fine arts in general, seeing it as a means of restoring Russia’s world standing and renewing its ties to Europe.
Soon after 2000, as the Russian economy began its oil-fueled rebound, Russia’s nouveau riche – known for their free-wheeling spending on yachts, Porsches, Gulfstreams, and London real estate – began to take an acquisitory interest in Russian art.
This new class of Russian art collectors was thrust into the spotlight in 2004, following Viktor Vekselberg’s purchase of the entire Malcolm Forbes collection of Fabergé eggs before it could be auctioned off at Sotheby’s, for an estimated $100 million. Three years later, steel magnate Alisher Usmanov purchased the late cellist Mstislav Rostropovich’s art collection for $72 million, three days before its Sotheby’s auction. Usmanov bought the collection to, in his words, “return it to the country to whose art it belongs, Russia.”
These new collectors – who have made purchases in all areas of Russian art, from painting to vertu, and who especially favor long-established market darlings like Nicholas Roerich and Ivan Aivazovsky – have largely accounted for the phenomenal 2000 percent growth in the Russian art market since 2000. To cater to this thriving market, in 2004 the London-based auction house MacDougall’s was established to focus exclusively on Russian art. Another London-based house, Bonhams, began holding its first Russian art auctions the following year. Sotheby’s opened a Moscow office in 2007.
In this exuberant market, sales records are no sooner set than they are re-broken. The 2007 record for Goncharova’s work was surpassed a year later at a Christie’s London auction, when Goncharova’s The Flowers (1912) fetched $10.8 million. Sotheby’s first Russian art sale, held in London in 1985, netted close to $1 million; its sale in November 2007, also held in London, yielded $53 million, with 19 lots exceeding the $1 million mark, including Goncharova’s painting Bluebells (ca. 1909), which was the top-selling lot. Sotheby’s June 9, 2008, auction yielded several record-setting prices, including one for the artist Konstantin Korovin, whose View from the Terrace, Gurzuf (1912), sold for more than $2.95 million – a record for the artist at auction. On February 28, 2008, Kabakov’s Beetle (1982) went for $5.84 million at a Phillips de Pury auction in London—an auction record for a work of Russian postwar art that broke the earlier record, also set by Kabakov, for his two-panel painting La Chambre de luxe (1981).
Indeed, Russian art is in such great demand that counterfeiters have tried to horn in on the action, particularly the avant-garde market, which has seen a proliferation of fakes.
Much of what is driving the boom in Russian art can be ascribed to two factors: prestige and excessive wealth. The new Russian collectors – two of whom, Vladimir Semenikhin and Igor Markin, have founded their own private museums – may be consciously assuming the mantle of pre-Revolutionary industrialist/collectors like Ivan Morozov (a Moscow merchant-industrialist who amassed a major collection of modern French painting) or Pavel Tretyakov. However, as far as the public accessibility of their artworks, Semenikhin and Markin are largely the exception. “The issue of prestige is more private than public,” said art journalist John Varoli. “The vast majority of collectors buy anonymously, and they show their art works to a small circle of friends and business partners. They like to be able to say, ‘And I bought this Korovin at Sotheby’s.’ Few have a desire for their collections to be known publicly.”
The combined wealth and prestige factors account for these collectors’ significant purchases of non-Russian art. Referring to a series of London auctions held within a span of two weeks this past summer, Marc Porter, president of Christie’s in the U.S., was quoted in The New York Times as saying, “Fourteen of the top Impressionist and Modern works of art were sold to collectors from the former Soviet Union.”
The collectors, as Usmanov’s quote revealed, also seem to be motivated by cultural nationalism – a sense of pride in their national heritage and a desire to repatriate and return to Russia works long held outside the country. Such moves have been supported by the Kremlin, which played a role in the Usmanov purchase, as well as, more recently, the 2008 purchase of Nikita Lobanov-Rostovsky’s vast collection of costume and stage designs by the St. Petersburg-based International Konstantinovsky Charitable Fund, a private foundation with close ties to the Kremlin. Reportedly, the collection will be put on permanent display in the Konstantin Palace in St. Petersburg, an official residence of the Russian President. Another significant government move was the 2004 lifting of taxes and customs duties for those importing art into Russia. The law reportedly brought $250 million worth of art into Russia by mid-February of that year alone.
While for Russia’s newly rich, Russian art may be largely an investment (the Russian art investment fund Aurora Fine Art Investments, founded by Vekselberg and Andre Ruzhnikov, was incorporated in 2005 with $100 million) and an expression of national pride, the exhibitions are still mainly about the art (notwithstanding, of course, museums’ healthy receipts from successful showings). For the hundreds of thousands who braved the crowds and lines at major shows like RUSSIA! and The Great Utopia, the art market is something they only encounter on the news or in the art section of the newspaper. Just as curious Muscovites waited on long lines at the Tretyakov to see the Malevich retrospective in 1988, the Westerners who have flocked to these and other Russian art exhibitions over the last 20 years have been drawn by a sense of curiosity about the art produced in a country long held to be the Evil Empire.
Mega-shows like RUSSIA! invariably draw huge crowds, but even shows in smaller venues and outside major metropolitan areas, like the University of Michigan Museum of Art’s exhibition The Romanovs Collect, held in Ann Arbor, Michigan, attracted considerable audiences. This summer, the Oshkosh Public Museum, in Oshkosh, Wisconsin (population roughly 65,000), opened an exhibition called The Tsar and the President, which includes 150 artifacts borrowed from three Russian institutions, and explores the diplomatic ties between Tsar Alexander II and President Abraham Lincoln. “The exhibition includes incredible pieces that convey the richness and grandeur of the Imperial court,” said Brad Larson, the museum’s director. “The art appeals to and amplifies people’s idea of the majesty of Tsarist Russia.”
And that majesty is a hook even back in Moscow, where this summer 300,000 are expected to attend Crown of the Tsar, an exhibition on Tsarist Russia on view at the capital’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior. Devoted to the reign of Nicholas II, Crown of the Tsar reveals an aspect of Russian history virtually unknown to those who grew up in the Soviet era. As 66-year-old Vera Milkhina told The New York Times, “We know very little about this period. I didn’t study this kind of history – only political science and the history of the Communist Party.” RL
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