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. * 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. * * * 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.