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General
Marion Maneker0June 04, 2012

Russian Market Cools

We’re feeling a little guilty about having overlooked last month’s Russian art week in London. The lack of action—and our own distraction with other non-art matters—made it hard to generate enthusiasm. Luckily, Georgina Adam is indefatigable. She sums up the sales in the Financial Times:

Last month’s sales of Russian art also showed some cooling. Sotheby’s May 28 session made £10m, with an anaemic sell-through rate of 65.8 per cent; last year the equivalent sale totalled more than £14m. Christie’s on the same day made £8.3m – down from the £10m it earned in 2011. Specialist auctioneer MacDougall’s had an even tougher time, only selling 44 per cent of its Important Russian Art sale, garnering £9.3m. But William MacDougall was upbeat. “It was not our strongest week but, none the less, it was reasonable; works on paper did well and we achieved three world records,” he said.

The art market: Cool winds blowing

Emerging Markets
Marion Maneker0May 07, 2012

Why There Is No Contemporary Art Market in Russia

Repression, says Reuters. That’s the simple answer given by some of the pioneers of Russia’s Contemporary art market to the question why a recession-plagued West has a vibrant art market and a commodity-rich country like Russia cannot support its own. Russia’s political climate has caused 1.25m persons to emigrate. Many of those are the wealthiest and continue to collect art but in London and they buy Western, not Russian, artists’ work:

“These collectors who left en masse, they are people who saw that not only is there a suffocating situation but that it will continue for a minimum of six years,” gallery owner Marat Gelman said, referring to Putin’s return to the Kremlin for a third term. “They are not seeing their future in Russia.”

Gelman was at the forefront of a movement to pioneer Moscow’s first contemporary galleries in the 1990s, setting up his Gelman gallery alongside the Aidan and XL galleries to cater to the rich and famous seeking trophies of their wealth.

But those trailblazers now say their regulars have largely left Russia, leaving their luxury market in the hands of rich bureaucrats, who neither want to draw attention to their wealth or spend on art that is often critical of the Kremlin.

“When the richest people are bureaucrats – deputy ministers, the children of governors, the wives of mayors – then these people are ashamed of their wealth,” Gelman said. “They would rather buy some expensive yacht far from everyone.”

Fearful of Putin, rich flee Russian art market (Reuters)

Emerging Markets
Marion Maneker2May 01, 2012

Sotheby’s Halts Russian Art Sales in New York

In a bow to the inevitable, Sotheby’s will no longer hold its Russian paintings sales in New York due to fading market interest. After all, the majority of Russian expatriates live in London or Continental Europe and few Americans have shown interest in Russia’s compelling history of painting.

Sotheby’s auction house has decided to stop selling paintings by Russian artists in New York due to fading interest in Russian painters in the States. From now on, Russian paintings will only be auctioned in London twice a year.

The decision was announced Thursday by Sonya Bekkerman, the head of Sotheby’s Russian Paintings department at the opening of the auction house’s Moscow display. The US branch will focus only on applied art from Russia, as this genre still interests not only Russian but American art collectors.

The failure of Russian collectors to become interested in Contemporary art may also have had an effect here too. Unlike China, Russian art is both connected to and distinct from Europe’s art history. These works should have a global appeal. Yet they don’t.

No more Russian painters for America: Sotheby’s leaves US market (RT)

Auction Results
Marion Maneker0November 28, 2011

Christie’s London Russian Sales = £13.6m

Auction Results
Marion Maneker0November 02, 2011

Sotheby’s Russian Art = $17.6m

Fraud, Theft & Restitution
Marion Maneker0July 01, 2011

Buyer Claims Conspiracy in Buying Russian Paintings

A gallery from Luxembourg made a bad deal paying $9.6m for 18 Russian paintings to a New York Gallery, ABA, and now claims a vast conspiracy involving a large cast of characters including the daughter of the gallery owner who is a senior specialist at a global auction house, according to the Courthouse News Service. The gallery says four of the paintings were fakes too and wants $2.4m back for the fakes and $4.1m for overpaying :

Arthur Properties claims that Bekkerman schemed with others, including his own daughter, to defraud Arthur’s buying agent, Oleksandr Savchuk, for the “series of paintings purported to be by famous Russian artists.”

None of Bekkerman’s alleged cohorts are named as defendants, nor is Savchuk a party to the lawsuit. The 18 works at issue include an oil by Ivan Aivazovsky, “Seascape with Peter the Great,” for which Arthur says it paid $4 million; Ivan Shishkin‘s oil “In the Woods,” for $1 million; and two oils by Aleksandr Archipenko, “Portrait of Wife” ($300,000) and “Nude Blonde,” ($350,000).

Arthur says the value of the Aivazovsky “was overstated by approximately 80 percent;” the Shishkin was a forgery; and the values of the Archipenkos were overstated by 66 percent. Three other paintings, for which Arthur paid $1.4 million, were also forgeries, Arthur says. According to the complaint: “Commencing in the fall of 2006 and continuing through the first half of 2007, defendant Bekkerman, assisted by other persons, engaged in a multi-pronged and multi-faceted intensive campaign to defraud plaintiff. The goal of the scheme was to persuade Savchuk, who resides in the Ukraine, to purchase from Bekkerman what Bekkerman represented to be valuable artworks located in his gallery in New York – paintings of which several were forgeries and others of substantially lesser value than Bekkerman had represented.

Manhattan Gallery Sued for $6.5m (Courthouse News Service)

Auction Results
Marion Maneker0June 08, 2011

MacDougall's Classical Russian = £9.1m ($14.9)

Auction Results
Marion Maneker0June 07, 2011

Sotheby's Russian Art = £14m ($23m)

Led by this painting of the Taj Mahal by Vasily Veraschagin which sold for £2.28m against an estimate range that was 25% of that final price. The top lots were almost exclusively bought by Russian privates.

Auction Results, Featured
Marion Maneker0June 06, 2011

Christie's London Russian = £11.5m ($18.9m)

 

Ilya Repin’s A Parisian Café sets a record price at Christie’s with £4.5m sale

Artists
Marion Maneker0January 10, 2011

The Russian Who Wasn't So Valuable as an American

Howard Rehs had an excellent item in his report last week that probably got buried within his comments on the overall Victorian, Old Master and American painting markets. He pointed out that Nikolai Fechin’s The Little Cowboy was sold in London by MacDougall, the Russian specialist auction house, for a stunning £6.9m which was 10x the estimate.

What was so striking about the story wasn’t the bidding war that seemed to erupt out of nowhere. There were two phone bidders, one who bid in steady, small increments and another who tried to knock the work free. It was bought by the more measured bidder.

The shock came from the fact that it was the second bidding war to break out over the painting in 2010. The first was in New York where Fechin is also considered an American artist because of the quarter century he spent in the country. There his work sold for twice the high estimate. But it was only upon being included in MacDougall’s Russian sale in London seven months later did the price jump so dramatically.

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