RA C Russian Week Auction Preview June 2015

Sanctioning The Market? Russian Auctions Downsize, But Hold Much To Fascinate

Preview Of June 2015 Russian Week By Simon Hewitt

LONDON, 28 MAY 2015 – The effect on the Russian economy of sanctions and the collapse of the ruble were evident in last November’s Russian Week total of £40.5 million – down 37% on Summer 2014.

Despite a tentative regain in the value of the ruble over recent weeks, the Russian economy remains deep in trouble and it will be a huge surprise if the sale aggregate this June comes anywhere close to £40m.

Vendors are only selling if they have to. The number of lots is down 30%, to just over 900, with the sharpest fall at Christie’s – offering 246 lots this June, compared to 424 last November. Will this enable Sotheby’s – whose offer is down just 10%, to 310 lots – to regain the market lead? And will MacDougall’s, who have some interesting market-fresh material, close the gap on the Big Two?

Five works cleared £1m last November. This June six works come with seven-figure estimates. But will they all get to £1m? And will they all sell? The two soaraway prices of last November (both at Christie’s) – £4m for Annenkov and £9.2m for a Serov that became the most expensive painting ever sold in a Russian art sale – look unlikely to be repeated.

Last November’s 47% sold rate was the lowest for a Russian Week since Winter 2008. Are consignors being more reasonable this time round, in terms of the reserve prices they set?

The answers to all these questions will emerge over the next few days. And, although it is not a good time to sell, it may be a very good time to buy.

As this survey reveals, there will be outstanding works in offer, in all sectors of the Russian art market, in London this June. AUCTIONS PREVIEW

As is traditional, CHRISTIE’S kick off proceedings on the Monday morning (June 1) with Russian Pictures. This sale – relatively short at 80 lots – begins with several blueblood watercolours by Grand Duchess Olga, youngest sister of Tsar Nicholas II. Her landscapes are twee, but the still lifes she painted at Knudsminde, her rural estate near Copenhagen, look good value at around £3,000. The Grand Duchess fled Denmark for Canada in 1948 because she feared a possible Soviet invasion. Sounds fanciful? Hold on. Russian troops occupied Danish soil – the Baltic island of Bornholm, halfway between Sweden and Poland – at the end of World War II.

Six scenes from the southern Caucasus by Richard Zommer catch the eye less for their subject matter – although the views of Mount Ararat and Mount Kazbek will delight Armenians and Georgians – than for their provenance: they were acquired from the artist by a British officer stationed in the region in 1919 (estimates £8,000-£15,000).

Provenance should also boost two very different Roerichs, consigned by the Roerich Museum in New York: a violet-toned, semi-abstract White and Heavenly view of the Himalayas (c.1924); and a 1931 Host of Gesar Khan mountainscape with Oriental warriors (est. £500-700,000 each).

Three interesting works by idiosyncratic early 20th century artists come with steep estimates: Volkov’s dynamic but small 1921 watercolour Musicians (est. £50-70,000); an early Charchoune, his 1917 Dada Oiseau Mécanique, with what looks like cracked paintwork (est. £60-80,000); and a Bogomazov Composition with Toys (c.1914) once owned by San Francisco’s Modernism Gallery, but not seen on the market since 1988 (est. £100,000-150,000). Bogomazov was beautifully showcased by James Butterwick at the TEFAF Maastricht Fair in March, but this painting belongs to a period when the great Ukrainian Cubo-Futurist was still searching his way.

The sale’s two potential seven-figure-sellers lurk in mid-session: the undated Arsenal Hill at Night (est. £800-1.2m) by the Georgian naïve artist Pirosmani, formerly owned by Kirill Zdanevich and Louis Aragon; and Ayvazovsky’s 1873 American Shipping off Gibraltar (est. £2-2.5m). Neither work is unfamiliar: the Pirosmani sold at MacDougall’s for £1.075m in June 2010; the Ayvazovsky for £2.7m at Christies in 2007. Are some collectors so keen to sell in today’s troubled times that they are prepared to take a loss?

Another work bought at auction not so long ago is a 1929 Yacovlev Bath-House full of steamy nudes (est. £350-450,000): it fetched $360,000 at Sotheby’s New York in 2007.

Wrapped (1979), an attractive, scarlet-toned Tselkov from his best period, resembles an upright Egyptian mummy with a living face (est. £100-150,000). I admired it at Aktis Gallery a few years ago, when – if my memory serves me correctly – it had a £120,000 price-tag (although gallery prices are, of course, negotiable). The work is being consigned by Kensington-based Irina Stolyarova, and is illustrated in the magnificent catalogue of her collection, Flying In The Wake Of Light, published last year. Irina tells me she is parting with her Tselkov to help finance plans to expand her collection with ‘eight great paintings’ by other Non-Conformist artists.

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Christie’s afternoon session is devoted to Works Of Art and, reflecting their traditional strength in the field, will be twice as long at 166 lots.

The showstopper here is a 1938 Lomonosov porcelain group by Natalya Danko, featuring members of the Papanin Expedition (husky included) that purportedly spent 234 days roaming the Arctic in 1937. They are a brandishing a red flag embellished – as Christie’s carefully refrain from admitting – with Stalin’s profile (est. £40-60,000).

A 1921 Vkhumetas porcelain plate, painted by Oganes Tatevosian and ringed with a pink- on-blue Arabic inscription inciting workers to unite, comes with an £8-12,000 estimate. The same plate, coincidentally, will be offered by Sotheby’s next day, with an estimate of just £5-7,000; perhaps there is a difference in condition not apparent in the catalogues. The medallions around the rim vary slightly, as does the size and position of the central ear of corn.

The session is long on porcelain but unusually short of Fabergé. A silver dish marked (in Cyrillic) War 1914, and featuring a chunky repoussé double-headed eagle, epitomizes Fabergé’s struggle to downsize their élitist style to suit spartan wartime aesthetics. This period of the firm’s history is overdue scholarly analysis, and perhaps waiting to come into its commercial own: the £800-1200 estimate will surely be left for dead.

Another potential bargain is a quirky, unmarked cigar-case in Karelian birch, dated 1908 and smothered in enamel pins which the catalogue fails to analyse (est. £3-5,000).

Silver highlights include an imperial presentation kovsh (Moscow 1763) with a chased dedication revealing it to have been a gift from Catherine the Great (est. £40-60,000). Much simpler, but supremely elegant, is a coffee-pot made in St Petersburg in 1779, engraved with an imperial eagle. Its £2-3,000 estimate looks mouth-watering.

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Sign of the times: SOTHEBY’S have ditched their time-honoured Evening Picture Sale. In the current blockbusterless climate, all their 190 pictures will, instead, be offered on the morning of June 2 – led by Ayvazovsky’s 1870 Evening in Cairo (est. £1.5-2m), with a glowing sunset and pyramids on the horizon.

Sotheby’s have such high hopes of Vladimir Borovikovsky’s fine but hardly sensational 1807 Portrait of Ardalion Novosiltsev that they have put it on the catalogue cover. But will this, and the patriotic appeal of Napoleonic-era portraits of Tsarist aristocracy, be enough to propel it to the hoped-for £800,000-£1.2m? Especially as Sotheby’s have little to say about the sitter, and twice refer in error to the artist’s presence in St Petersburg during the 1890s (sic)?

Alexei Savrasov’s The Volga near Yurevets (1870/1), north of Nizhny-Novogord, comes fresh to the market, and shows barge-haulers toiling beneath a glowering sky – although that may have something to do with the canvas needing a good clean. The catalogue dutifully digs out all the barge-hauler-paintings it can find, starting with Repin’s; intriguingly, it is unable to conclude whose came first. Will the understated pathos of Savrosov’s work, and the epic sweep of this vast 4 x 7ft canvas, be enough to justify a £1.4-1.8m estimate?

Another highlight is an ensemble of nine lots (all ex-Georges Bemberg Collection) by Pavel Tchelitchew, one of the most extraordinary artists – Sotheby’s dub him ‘the Russian Surrealist,’ but that is over-restrictive – of the 20th century. Tchelitchew is in plentiful saleroom supply, but his very versatility appears to disconcert collectors and mitigate against his achieving the prices his talent deserves. Here, two magnificent gouaches from his 1934 Bullfight series, painted on a trip to Spain with his lover Charles Henri Ford, are both expected to bring around £200,000. Tchelitchew’s unique approach to perspective, which owes something to Degas (and Mantegna), can also be admired in two 1935 works entitled Bathers.

I like the look of Roerich’s Before the Rain (c.1917), whose lurid clash of pinks and yellows reeks of Vallotton (est. €200-300,000). Insofar as its brushwork anticipates Gerhard Richter’s smudged-paint technique by several decades, Grigoriev’s 1927 Landscape in Haute Savoie is potentially the week’s biggest giveaway: to think it has the same £40- 60,000 estimate as the saccharine 1927 On the Riverbank by the dying Kustodiev beggars belief.

Of almost as much importance as the Grigoriev is Nikolai Tarkhov’s Threshing Wheat (1907) – a seminal work in the history of Fauvism, in which – so to speak – Vlaminck collides with Van Gogh. What on earth is it doing with an estimate of £30-50,000?

A powerful, late Fechin Seated Nude (est. £250-350,000), and Survage’s 1939 Beauty and the Beast (est. £80-120,000), are other fine works. A 1923 Serebriakova oil Study of a Sleeping Girl, on the other hand, looks over-rated at £400-600,000.

Three market-fresh works from around 1960 will intrigue alert perusers of the Sotheby’s catalogue. Anna Cherednichenko’s 1959 Young Dreamers nods to Deneika and Nissky and, with its sweeping, watery horizontals, anticipates Pavel Pepperstein: the £5-7,000 estimate is surely a misprint. Evgeni Shirkov’s large, soot-covered, 1961 Worker on a Cigarette Break is the Severest work on offer all week: its £30-50,000 estimate is optimistic. Piotr Krokhonyatkin’s 1963 Ice Hockey is not up to much but, if a restorer discreetly granted one of its players the facial features of VVP, you could probably add a couple of zeros to the £8-12,000 estimate.

Oleg Vasiliev leads the Contemporary section with two fine works: his 1992 Where Are You? (est. £80-120,000); and his big, historically important Artists in New York (1991), consigned by James Butterwick with an almost insultingly low £120-180,000 estimate. Presumably Russia’s favourite Old Etonian feels in generous mood after Arsenal’s late- season spurt to a 217th consecutive season in the Champions’ League.

Indian Market (c.1957) is the most bizarre Bulatov I have seen – the £30-50,000 estimate can be only guesswork – but if you want reassurance there’s a 1958 Weisberg still life (est. £60-80,000) and a further clutch of Sotheby’s burgeoning supply of immaculate Gurianovs. There’s also a lot of nonsense from Arsen Savadov, and it’s sad to see as powerful an artist as Osmolovsky churning out 2014 spin-offs (est. £4-6,000) of his masterful 2007 wooden icon, Bread.

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Sotheby’s continue at 14:30 with their Works Of Art and, unlike Christie’s, have a separate catalogue for them. The stand-out lot is a pair of six-armed Ovchinnikov silver candelabra presented to Count Stenbock-Fermor in 1892 (est. £150-200,000). Sotheby’s have also assigned the same estimate to a Gambs rosewood and porcelain cabinet (c.1842) – one of the vulgarest bits of furniture I have seen. Good luck.

Give me, instead, any of three anonymous items dating from around 1900: a Moscow Fabergé silver and glass ewer (c.1900) that has a Jugendstil/Macintosh feel to it (est. £6- 8000); a funky St Petersburg silver and ivory samovar (est. £30-50,000); or a mother-of- pearl Last Supper of uncertain origin and dazzling intricacy (est. £3-5,000).

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The deadpan-humoured MAXIM BOXER is back on the evening of June 2 with the third of his cute little auctions of Contemporary Art at Erarta on Berkeley Street. Cartoon-Like is the title this time out, with 78 moderately-estimated lots. Many of the usual suspects – Ostretsov, Shutov, Zvezdochetov – are to the fore, along with the up-and-coming Olga Kroytor, and I’m pleased Maxim is bringing the anarchic Pakhom to Western attention. But where, pray, is Moscow’s top cartoonist, Alexei Iorsh? Or, come to that, St Petersburg’s nihilistically irreverent Mr Evil?

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MACDOUGALL’S take the stage on June 3 with a 225-lot sale and a 10:30 start. Their market-fresh Fechin Peasant Woman (c.1915) comes from the artist’s early (and to my mind strongest) Kazan period, shot through with sombre unsentimentality. Most Fechin fans crave something more decorative, but hopefully the cognoscenti will push this into seven figures (est. £800,000-1.2m).

From Ayvazovsky comes a Calm, Misty Morning (est. £450-700,000) and a Ukrainian Landscape at Night (est. £300-500,000), both dated 1870. A succulent 1892 Shishkin captures a moist glade on St Petersburg’s Krestovsky Island after an Autumn shower (est. £600-900,000).

Polenov’s 1897 Barge on the River Oka casts a chewy tutti frutti reflection that might help it match its £200-300,000 estimate. A vibrant, grey-toned, market-fresh portrait of The Artist’s Mother & Sister (1905) by a young Brodsky is one the week’s revelations (est. £500-700,000), along with an early Lentulov Bath House (c.1908) painted on the River Sura near Penza, 400 miles south-east of Moscow (est. £80-120,000).

David Kakabadze does not enjoy quite the reputation of his Georgian compatriot Pirosmani, although the extensive array of his paintings in the Tbilisi Arts Museum suggests he had almost comparable talent. His small Landscape in Imereti (1918) will parade his quilt-like idiom under Western eyes (est. £40-60,000).

Roerich’s pencil and tempera Banner of Peace (est. £100-150,000) was designed in 1931 to be flown over culturally important buildings to protect them in times of war; it was showcased in an imaginative MacDougall’s exhibition three months ago, devoted to the 80th anniversary of the Roerich Pact.

MacDougall’s also have the week’s best Maliavin – a haunting, undated male portrait with a moderate £70-90,000 estimate – but they may struggle to get £400-500,000 for a 1939 Tchelitschew landscape entitled (with Dadaist humour) Portrait of My Father, that sold for $181,500 at Sotheby’s New York in 2010.

Several atypical works catch the eye: a Kuznetsov view of Old Moscow – the slopes of Kitai Gorod, perhaps? – painted, almost crudely, in the mid-1920s (est. £160-200,000); an equally vigorous Spring in the Village by Korovin (est. £250-300,000); an early Saryan, By the Pomegranate Tree, in a restrained palette he would later eschew (est. £300-500,000); Anisfeld’s 1942 Rhapsody (est. £80-120,000); and an appealingly gauche Vera Rokhlina Portrait of a Woman in a Pink Dress, whose stylistic links with Marie Laurencin the catalogue neglects to explore (est. £30-40,000).

For Larionov fans there is a 1920s sketchbook with 37 drawings (est. £150-200,000) and a later floral still life (est. £200-300,000). The candy colours of Somov’s 1925 watercolour/ gouache Masquerade may nudge it towards its £500-700,000 estimate (it rated £400,000 at Sotheby’s in 2007). A senile Chagall, The Dream (c.1965), expected to bring £150- 200,000, is worth about a thousandth of that.

A small, undated Nissky Bike Ride is a poor man’s take on Deneika’s 1935 Collective Farm Worker on a Bicycle in the Russian Museum (est. £25-40,000), but a 1981 Zhilinsky Still Life with Peaches looks a snip at £2-3,000.

MacDougall’s recently staged another innovative exhibition, entitled Severity of Style, devoted to works – mainly from the Soviet ’60s – in the so-called Severe Style of which Viktor Popkov was an arch-exponent. Some of these Popkovs are now offered for sale, and a couple are very good, but it is two of his less severe (in fact raving bonkers) works that leap off the wall: his 1967 ink and gouache Moravian Forest (est. £6-9,000), and his Surrealistic 1972 Floating in a Dream (est. £25-30,000).

On the contemporary front – which MacDougall’s continue to champion with admirable enthusiasm – there is a haunting 1961 Weisberg Portrait of Two Children (est. £50- 70,000); a challenging Plavinsky 1966 Butterfly (est. £35-40,000); and two experimental Rabins conceived for the Moscow 1957 World Youth Festival, and based on drawings by his young daughter (est. £7-9,000 each).

There is also a fine 1987 Timur Novikov, full of robotic figures from The USSR (est. £20- 30,000); and three Koshlyakovs consigned from the same German collection. These may not be masterworks, but anything by Koshlyakov merits attention. His sticky-tape Tower from 2002, with its shards of grey and streaks of gleaming yellow, is better than most things in London this week (est. £5-7,000).

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MacDougall’s are keen to beef up their Works Of Art department, a long-term process. Even so, they have one of the week’s top Fabergé offerings: a joyous enamel and silver- gilt punch-set (est. £160-180,000) that sold for $240,000 at Christie’s New York in 2009.

MacDougall’s are also establishing a reputation in Russian Porcelain. Hot on the heels of their impressive 158-lot themed sale on March 25, they will offer an imposing, 15-inch 1913 Imperial Porcelain figurine of a Peasant Girl from Tula (est. £8-12,000).

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BONHAMS kick on at 14:00 with a short, 120-lot sale. Roerich, their regular hero, is tipped to lead the way with a journeyman 1940 view of the Himalayas (est. £250-300,000).

Neither this, nor a mundane 1930s Exter catalogue-cover Sailboat (£200-300,000), has the clout of Repin’s market-fresh view of the actor Grigory Ge as Mephistopheles (c.1900), touted at £150-180,000. There is also a Moroccan Serebriakova, a late Gudiashvili, another nice Timur Novikov and a French edition of Alexander III’s coronation album (est. £40-60,000).

Bonham’s can, however, boast the week’s top story: that of Norwich-born Joseph Wiggins (1832-1905) – no relation to Bradley, but every bit as doughty – who spent his life proving that, whatever the ice, a shipping route could be established between the North Sea and Central Siberia. Wiggo’s crowning achievement came in 1893, when he sailed around Norway, past Nova Zemlya, through the Kara Sea and up the Yenisei River to deliver 1,600 tons of rails from England to Yeniseysk, whence they were boated another 150 miles upstream to the nearest Trans-Siberian station in Krasnoyarsk. Bonhams are offering the splendiferous silver punch-service (made by Sazikov of St Petersburg in 1875) that was offered to Wiggins by the Russian Naval Ministry on the orders of a grateful Tsar (est. £250-350,000).

Oh, and there’s a punch-line. Wiggins was teetotal. 