IZO

Brezhnev Kiss (via LJ dmitrivrubel).

Every week I must fill the Russian boys rubric. Why? Because I like getting people here from Google under false pretences ;) So here are three lonely hearts (from lavrentij).

   

More adventures of R. boys: Russian-born porno-magnate Michael Lucas organises gay tours to Israel (newsru.com, in Russian).

Soviet leader sizes up Jill St. John (via LJ postaless).

Brezhnev still top of the Russian war-heroes list (from Geroi strany).

Brezhnev's grandson, also called Leonid, is being sued for child-support by his ex-wife Svetlana (Rosbalt, in Russian).

A dramatised life of Brezhnev's daughter Galina is the most popular programme on Russian TV (Russia-IC).

Brezhnev defends Kenny in the South Park affair (IZO, earlier).

An image from the book The Gensec and the Photographer (Генсек и Фотограф), a collection of photographs by Vladimir Musaelyan, who spent 14 years photographing Brezhnev (buy from moscowbooks.ru; via dmitrivrubel). Someone somewhere comments that his swimsuit (I think it is) looks Armenian but I would guess, from the 70s-style modernist patterning, East German.

Today I visited the very good indeed Boris Orlov retrospective at the Moscow Museum of Contemporary Art. Intriguing were the pre-sotsart works: tableaux that evoke paintings by Dali, cast in resin. The influence of Dali on Brezhnev-era art is an interesting thesis topic, maybe. I bought a catalogue, which they told me was "the last one". Then I bought a book on AES+F, also "the last one". Then a book on Russian video art: also "the last one". Then a book on Moscow conceptualism: also... Do they say that to all the boys?

News round-up

The Royal Academy Russian show is on again (John Varoli/Bloomberg).

Artmers (halfway down page; in Russian) on the rise of AES + F in 2007 and the role of Triumph Gallery. Some useful info on the range of achieved prices. The article is entitled Why AES + F Didn't Get The Kandinsky Prize, but doesn't actually seem to provide said info. As I understand it, AES + F actually came out winners after the first vote, thanks in part to enthusiastic lobbying by, among others, juror Petr Aven; at which point competition-organiser Shalva Breus explained the importance of Anatoli Osmolovsky's work and persuaded the jurors to vote again. Osmolovsky fits a new paradigm with which art-oriented oligarchs are toying: a turning away from Western contemporary influence back towards varieties of Russian spirituality and the old Russian avant-garde.

Dmitrivrubel has a good selection of New Year's greetings by Russian leaders; Putin, Yeltsin, Gorbachev, Brezhnev.

Happy New Year! May 2008 be an excellent one. Below: fireworks in Moscow last night. UPDATE: at Robert Amsterdam, Time on New Year's Eve in Moscow, 1965.

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Inappropriate?

Artist Dmitri Vrubel has had a very good year: successful shows in Moscow and at FIAC, and shortlisting for the Kandinsky Prize (UPDATE: and his blog is to come out as a book). But he seems agitated that his well-known work, an image of Brezhnev and Honecker in a kiss, first painted on the Berlin Wall and later embodied I believe in oil-on-canvas, is the subject of repeated acts of appropriation, as they say. Here for example he compains Once again they've pinched my picture and sold it (in Russian). But... didn't he himself appropriate the image from some press photographer or other?

Phillips de Pury

As expected, Erik Bulatov set the pace tonight with prices of £860,000 (for Brezhnev: Soviet Cosmos [below, top]), £557,600 and £412,000. His closest rival was Semyon Faibisovich, whose sun-drenched Soldiers ([below, bottom] hard not to compare and contrast with Alexander Laktionov's diploma work of the late 30s) reached £311,000, and whose two other works here reached £90,000 and £84,000. This was Faibisovich's first outing at auction in recent times; until a few months ago you could buy Soviet-era works for low tens of thousands of dollars, although nothing of the quality of Soldiers was available. Boris Mikhailov's early works sold steadily but unspectacularly; Vinogradov and Dubossarsky did well (prices ranging up to £108,000). Igor Kopystyansky's paintings went unsold one after the other.

Memories of the Brezhnev administration

New York gears up for the Sotheby's and Christies Russian sales, but a different kind of Sotheby's auction in Moscow tonight as limousines used by Brezhnev, Gorbachev and Yeltsin go under the hammer. The latter two were driven around in a ZIL (Zavod imeni Lenina, i.e. Lenin Factory) limousine built around a bomb-proof bubble. Brezhnev apparently drove his own Japanese-made Nissan President:

The former Communist party general secretary, who ruled the Soviet Union between 1964 and 1982, once lost control and scratched the car, the Sotheby's material said. A buyer will still be able to smell Brezhnev's tobacco in the car, Boris Kakhmetkin, 58, the current owner, said in an interview.

Which reminds me: my flat in Moscow was re-decorated a few years ago by a builder who used to work in Brezhnev's Kremlin. He told me that he was once given the task of reshaping the leader's wooden lavatory seat more comfortably to accommodate his considerable posterior.

Dmitri Vrubel blog

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.