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Q: You are sitting in London when you receive the below image over the internet from Armenia: a painting with a substantial price tag. You know the photographer may be an idiot; you know that half of Erevan is chasing the same picture. Do you get your money out? Or do you order a better photograph and, in the intervening hours, risk losing the work to a local buyer?
A: You get your money out, of course ;-) It's a superb 1930s work by Aleksandr Bazhbeuk-Melikyan.
The installation by artists Andrei Rudev and Sergei Bratkov of a flock of penguins atop a former church building, now the Museum of the Arctic and Antarctic, near the town of Vladimir has been taken down on the orders of the St P Culture Committee. LiveJournal user dkdent took the photo below (via vash_pasha). The installation seems unprovocative enough to my Western eyes: is Russia becoming more conservative about the boundaries of artistic expression?
The artist Dmitri Vrubel has started a blog at LiveJournal (in Russian), and at the time of writing he's posting energetically. Vrubel created the famous mural on the Berlin Wall that shows a kiss between Leonid Brezhnev and Eric Honecker (this work also exists in oil-on-canvas).
Vrubel's blog is another contribution to the expanding LiveJournal tusa (scene/party) that already features leading galerists, artists, critics and art historians.
We interrupt this post for a message to a scholar of the future:
"As someone who has trawled through the tomes in the Lenin Library and elsewhere while researching my books, and who has felt the particular scholarly anguish of having to leave unread potentially useful material because of time constraints, I sympathise with YOU, the art historian of the future, currently reading the IZO archive, because you have the impossible task of wading through the exploding amount of material available by and about today's artists."
What actually will be the result for art history of this unencompassable quantity of documentation? Perhaps we will get used to multiple competing histories of the the same artists, shows, periods, each history based on the analysis of completely different material.
The Polish writer of science fiction Stanislaw Lem died today at age 84. His aphorism "A dream will always triumph over reality, once it is given the chance" seems appropriate to the communist experience in Eastern Europe. Lem was very popular in the Soviet Union, and his 1961 novel Solaris inspired Andrei Tarkovsky's famous film of the same name (1972). Below is one of the designs for the movie Solaris by art director Mikhail Romadin (son of the great Soviet-era landscape painter Nikolai Romadin).
Zinovy Zinik, seen here with a delicious saucepan of borshch co-authored by his wife, Nina, has several works in the pipeline, including a phantasmagoric tale set in the streets of north London, where he and I both live. Zinik currently broadcasts a weekly analysis of the British arts' scene, entitled West-End, on the BBC Russian Service.
New Russians have ambitious taste. And lots of money to implement it. Yet sometimes the money runs out. A drive through the Russian countryside around Moscow reveals a multitude of half-built dachas. And in this case a half-built Ivan Bilibin-style factory:
The collector of non-contemporary Russian art encounters significant obstacles. Of prime concern is the problem of authenticity. The secondary market in Russian art is awash with fakes. However, this state of affairs is not limited to Russia, and in other markets the situation may be similar or even more challenging. On a trip to Cuba few years ago I discovered a superb 1940s abstract painting by a top artist of the time. I called Sotheby's in New York about it, only to discover that - whether or not the work I was looking at was authentic - the market itself had been ruined by fakes and the Havana asking price was more than it would fetch at auction. Money was tight and I didn't buy it, which of course I now regret (I did however acquire a gorgeous and rare piece of Cuban Socialist Realism, a scene in a fruit-juice bottling factory, painted in 1974 by Artists' Union head Adigio Benitez, seen below before conservation).
And the further back in history we go, the worse it gets, perhaps. In the Daily Telegraph, Richard Dorment explains that in fact only three out of 80-odd works in the British Museum's current show of Michelangelo drawings is indisputably authentic.
A further challenge to the collector is the question of the State's attitude to its heritage: strict rules make the export of older works a difficult matter. In Spiked, London professor David Lowenthal offers a trenchant extended opinion about why restrictions on the free flow of art are a bad, not to say pointless, exercise.
The Christian Science Monitor reports on the imminent razing of the vast Rossiya Hotel.
No-one has a good word to say about this place (not even MAPS), except, apparently, me. It provided cheap rooms and, in Soviet times, minimal surveillance, right in the middle of town. The endless miles of corridor were the location of several run-ins with dubious folk that had the lasting benefit, as far as I'm concerned, of improving my knowledge of Russian slang. It has a small place in dealer legend because it was from the Rossiya that Paris-based Russian art dealer Basmadjian set out on his last, apparently fatal car-trip. And the architecture doesn't look too bad to me, either; the danger is that Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov's planned replacement entertainment zone will fail to improve on the seedy subterranean catastrophe constructed recently on Manezh Square by the Kremlin.
Meanwhile, Norman Foster's spectacular Moscow City Tower has been approved.
It is planned to rise 600 metres, making it the tallest building in Europe, and descend 9 floors underground. It remains to be seen whether it will be built, but if it is it will be a plus mark in the Moscow architecture wars on the side of Luzhkov's raze-and-rebuild style (compare and contrast to the runaround New York is getting with the Twin Towers project). On the other hand, I have no idea what has to come down for this to go up.
Yesterday I visited the studio of a sculptor of the Soviet era, who shall be nameless because I have an interest in acquiring some of the work, and discovered some miraculous pieces crafted from stones and lumps of glass and crystal.
On the same visit I was shown some animal sculptures by Aleksandr Men, the principled and fearless orthodox priest who was assassinated in 1990 (the crime is still unsolved). Men was an amateur sculptor who took lessons from the great animaliste Vasili Vatagin.
The Central House of the Artist (TsDKh) is filled with the art fair TsDKh 2006 - Contemporaries. It's an uneasy event, in which the majority of space us given over to the artists' unions still existing in Russia and various former Soviet republics. In this context the old pre-1991 distinctions still apparently obtain: artists from the Baltic are funky and cutting-edge (a work called Compulsion, artist unknown, at the Estonian Artists' Union show, below), whereas those from Central Asia are acutely aware of national colour.
Meanwhile at the Artefakt mini-mall on Prechistenka an alliance of dealers calling themselves Sodruzhestvo (Alliance) held their first auction. The tendency for secondary-market dealers to stage auctions is increasing, but most such auctions, including this, suffer because most of the art on offer is not fresh to the market, having been hanging around on the dealers' walls for some time. However, good pieces can do well. Viktor Ivanov's small 1970s variation of a painting in the RUSSIA! show, depicting him and other Severe Style artists in Rome's famous Cafe Greco, recently fetched $39,000 at a SovCom sale in Moscow. Here at Sodruzhestvo a small Ilya Tabenkin still-life, good but not his best, did well.
I have completed the sale of a beautiful early work by Vladimir Weisberg to a Russian client. The painting will be returning to Russia, having been sold in the early 1990s to an Englishman in Moscow and subsequently exported to the UK. This is the direction everything is going: very few Western collectors can now match the prices being paid by Russians for the best Russian art.
Gorby, as he is affectionately known by the English tabloids, is 75 today. There was no big pictorial cult of Mikhail Gorbachev, although official photo-portraiture was idealised to the degree that the entrancing birthmark on his forehead was usually retouched away (see below). But this was not for want of enthusiasm from artists such as Dmitri Nalbandyan. I visited Nalbandyan in his vast studio on Soviet Square in the late 80. Having plied me with oranges flown from the Caucasus ("esh mandarin!") he showed me a big official portrait of Gorby, painted as soon as he came to power. To Nalbandyan's disgust, his attempts to sell it to the state were unsuccessful.
