IZO

Honestly, I'm worried about those readers who check IZO compulsively several times a day ;) Time is invaluable, and in order to give us all a little more of it (I need some for new projects), IZO is moving to a schedule of weekly publication. Henceforth a digest of Russian art and cultural news will appear on Mondays at or about 6 am (GMT when I'm in London, otherwise according to location). I realise the site may lose a bit of buzz, for which сори, but needs must. On the other hand, it may gain reflectiveness; and I don't rule out non-scheduled news when the occasion warrants. In any case, please keep the links, tips, comments and responses coming.

The miniscule/minuscule amount of art-related news today is probably a sign that IZO should take a break, and it's going to. I will be taking it easy until January 7 or thereabouts. A Merry Christmas, Happy New Year and fun celebrations of whatever kind to all who read the blog. Especial thanks to those who have sent in links, news, tips, confidential info, or just their comments.

Let's conclude on a cheerful note: Italy's poor to eat contraband caviar on [sic] Christmas (AP) (thanks, MK):

The Rev. Massimo Mapelli, who helps run a shelter for the homeless and recovering addicts, said his center will get 10 kilograms (22 pounds) of caviar for 82 diners. That's about 120 grams (4 1/2 ounces) per person — two to four times the amount chefs traditionally serve to wealthy diners.

French life models on strike (Guardian).

Kandinsky Prize antidote (full-size image at kava-bata).

 

School of Oprichniki. I'm filing this under "Russian culture abroad", although it's got nothing to do with Russians (AP).

Not so much stuff today, I'm in Berlin.

Excerpts from Alex Wengraf's end-of-year newsletter: 

Lord Black remains in jail, but his malign influence is still on the Daily Telegraph (Torygraph) – when I arranged the wedding announcement in the paper I was informed that the ‘house style’ demanded I write the illogical May 24 instead of British 24th May – “because we used to be owned by an American company”. Trivial but it proves that even the rabid conservatism of the Telegraph is phoney (and Conrad Black is Canadian). ...

Today everyone who likes old music is happy to listen to Verdi’s Requiem, or any of the above works or Mediaeval motets to the Virgin, and dozens of others, be they Catholic, Protestant, Jew, or indeed atheist. Yet many of those same people, like my mother’s plumber, as well as educated bourgeoisie, coming into my apartment in Lausanne will ‘comment’ that I have a Madonna and a crucifixion and a Moses striking the Rock (respectively Florentine, Flemish and Venetian all 16th), a Magdalen weeping and an Ivory corpus and other religious images. You can see them wondering and sometimes more than wondering, whether this does not belie my professed atheism (no, it doesn’t).

You can read the whole thing (click on 'annual report'), and browse Alex's stock here (wengraf.com).

Random Russian-connected shop-talk probably-funny-if-you-were-there kinda-cliche thing (Lloyds List):

WHILE Heidmar was the Baltic Cup winner, it took a Russian to secure the most laughs at the Baltic and North Sea Crude Oil seminar. Capt Surikov, the harbour master from the port of Primorsk gave a thoroughly Russian presentation about the port, its capacities, and future expansion plans.

Just over half of all oil exported from Primorsk is transported by tanker to Rotterdam, with 74 tonnes handled in 2007 alone. Brokers were keen to question Capt Surikov about whether larger tankers would ever call at Primorsk. Much has been made of the fact the port can handle suezmaxes but only a handful have been loaded.

When a diplomatic non-response followed, eventually questions turned to what took up Capt Surikov’s time as he went about organising the port’s daily operations. “Well, as you know I have a deputy to do that,” he responded, to great guffaws of laughter.

The Tokyo authorities have shut the city's early-morning fish auctions to tourists. They were beloved I believe of Russian artists: Boris Mikhailov visited them, and Alex Melamid, among others (BFM, in Russian).

English Humour (thanks, RA).

The obscure career of Bohumil Konečný, 1905-81 (Tony Ozuna/Prague Post):

Bohumil Konečný ... has been unjustly ignored, and ultimately forgotten by Czechs due to an unfortunate turn of events at the peak of his career.  ... In 1965, Konečný had made an acquaintance with an admirer of his work, Petr Sadecký. ... In 1967, Sadecký emigrated to the West, though he kept in touch with Konečný, sending him letters and postcards. What Konečný didn’t know was that Sadecký was busy trying to pass himself off as the author of Konečný’s works, first for Karel May Publishers in Germany, then more ambitiously as the discoverer of a group of disaffected Soviet dissidents who, he claimed, had created a heroine named Octobriana, a voluptuous woman with superhuman powers. In 1971, in London, Sadecký published and promoted a false samizdat book, Octobriana and the Russian Underground, which briefly became a media sensation. David Bowie was so inspired by Octobriana that he wrote songs about her intended for a film. In reality, however, Octobriana was the Amazona character originally drawn by Konečný, simply altered by the imposter Petr Sadecký.

Photo-report from Necropolis 2008, a trade show of funerary goods in Moscow, 28-30 October (drandrandr, in Russian).

Russian art is expensive (reflector.com)!

Sergei Sudev, 31-year-old inhabitant of a small town (pop. 25,000) in Moldova, modestly employed with a wage of €150 per month, has inherited €950,000 from a distant relative in Germany. Now the whole town doesn't know what to do with his money (Komsomolskaya Pravda, in Russian).

We were met by the deputy mayor, Fedor Gaidarzhi. 

"I had just got back from an official trip when I heard the astonishing news," said Fedor Petrovich excitedly. "Yesterday in this very office my co-workers and I were discussing professional matters, and of course the question arose, what will Sergei Sudev do with his money, will he come to the aid of his native town, his area?

A collection of Best Russian Websites (Jim Becker) (thanks, MK).

How does IZO make money? So much money. About £100 a month? Well it provides "tips" to Rupert Murdoch, that's how.

Last night I am sitting after the Saatchi opening in the Oriel brasserie in Sloane Square watching Nicholas Logsdail of the Lisson Gallery drift in and out with his beautiful young mixed-race companion etc and talking to a friend who is married to a Japanese lady and he tells me that some Japanese regard the British as unruly dangerous and frankly incomprehensible which strikes him and maybe even me as conceivably a wee bit unjustified but quite possibly not and then this morning I stumble across a photo of a Brit who decided to go for a swim in a Japanese imperial fountain... (drugoi). UPDATE: Youtube:

The graphic artist Boris Efimov (Yefimov) has died, aged 108 (Daily Telegraph). It's a strange business, thinking about the depths of time that extremely old people link to. About 1980, when working as a caretaker at a block of flats in the Marylebone Road, I got to know a gentleman, a Mr Solomon, who was very nearly one hundred years old. He came from a family of similarly long-lived people. One of his relatives - maybe a great-grandfather - had told him, way back circa 1885-90, about how he, as a child, had seen Napoleon in Trieste. I looked it up: that would have been in 1797, I think.

Top matryoshka-doll collector faces large bill (News of the World).

Off-top: high drama at UK auction house Lawrences of Crewkerne. A man consigns a rock crystal ewer. Lawrences describe it as French late 19th century and estimate it at £100-200. But the bidding takes off into the tens of thousands of pounds. The vendor, who is in the room, realises his piece has been grievously mis-catalogued. He jumps up and tries to stop the sale. The auctioneer carries on regardless and eventually knocks the ewer down for £220,000. It turns out to be an incredibly rare and desirable  Egyptian piece made for the Fatimid Caliphs, dating from ca. 1000 AD, value £3 million. But for the vendor, it seems, a happy ending (Antiques Trade Gazette).

Roger Took, art historian and Russia-based pedophile (Times).

I'll be on holiday in Sweden for a week, beginning today, so won't be posting news regularly.

Off-top: a while ago the Blue Noses caused a scandal by demonstrating many similarities between works by famous Russian contemporary artists and those of Western artists. Their thesis was that Russian contemporary art is essentially derivative. But I suggest that the appearance of strikingly similar works by different artists is not a Russian-related phenomenon: it's a kind of a zeitgeisty thing, or maybe these are Platonic Forms? Below, an example of close resemblance between the works of two non-Russian artists: Zoe Leonard's Tree (1997), consisting of a chopped-up tree imported into the white gallery space, bolted back together and held up by cables; and Anya Gallacio's that open space within (2008), consisting of a chopped-up tree imported into the white gallery space, bolted back together and held up by cables.

Reader CT wonders: why not add comments to IZO? Well, several people have suggested it, but I think, really, I'm too lazy to deal with the extra admin. I'm always happy to respond to emails.

Russian art student Katia Ivanov  "DOESN'T care about the huge age gap [between her and Rolling Stones guitarist Ronnie Wood] or that he's a rich, famous rock star" (The Sun).

In Belarus, after tens of sightings, the hunt is underway for a mysterious black-pelted monkey-like creature; it is suggested it may be a down-and-out who has "let himself go in a big way" (news.ru, in Russian) (thanks, RA).

61-year-old "Strolling Bone" Ronnie Wood's affair with 19-year-old artist's model Katia Ivanova is all over the British press, of course (Daily Mail). I read somewhere that she can expect a £250,000 book contract.

Nikolai Sazhin, from Russia, is the new World Chess Boxing Champion (news.com.au).

Beatle named after Russian artist shock! Listening to some radio programme, I discover that the tragic "fifth Beatle" Stuart Sutcliffe for a while circa 1960 took the stage name Stuart de Stael, after the Russian-born School of Paris painter Nicholas de Stael, aka Николай Владимирович Шталь фон Гольштейн.

Stalin’s Deranged Vision of a Human-Ape Super Race (Environmental Graffiti).

Well, sometimes the queues to immigration at Sheremetevo II airport are pretty long, but I don't think I've ever seen one as appalling as when I arrived at Heathrow on Sunday night: all the non-EU visitors on a plane from Russia, plus those from one or two other planes that arrived at the same time, being serviced by a single immigration agent. We're talking about one member of staff for a queue of 100+ people. Lord knows how long some of them had to wait. It can't do much for UK security, either: a single worker is going to feel pressured, and may make mistakes. An immigration officer told me the problem was that many of the staff have been siphoned off to the pretty rubbishy new Terminal 5 and not replaced, leaving Terminal 2 chronically understaffed. Crappy management, rudeness to foreign visitors, security complacency: Heathrow today :)

In December 2007 I gave the artist Katie Paterson her first show; soon after I sold her first major work, now in a Spanish museum; and now, less than six months later, she has been snaffled, snapped up, scrobbled  (as John Masefield wrote in The Box Of Delights) by the very rich Albion Gallery, which shows James Turrell, Ilya Kabakov and other stars. I'm extremely happy for Katie; and the Albion Gallery is on the ball; but what's a small gallerist to do when the big ones are cruising like great white sharks with an insatiable appetite for new talent?

MK emails to say that a friend left his valuable violin in a taxi (Buffalo News). I've done something similar and I think this may be a syndrome of sorts. In my case, I left a painting that cost, if I remember, $75,000, in the overhead locker of a plane when I disembarked at Heathrow. I think my switching-off was caused by euphoria after the stress of exporting the work.

I looked at a building for sale on Kastanienstrasse in Berlin today. It's a trendy avenue known colloquially as Kastingstrasse, because film directors source their beautiful people on it. I couldn't get into the building. A couple of young men were doing renovation work on a commercial space in the basement. I asked one of them them what business would be operating from there.
    "I'm gonna be shooting porn films," he replied, in English. "My cousin here will play the starring role," he said, indicating the other chap, who was up a ladder with a paintbrush.
    I didn't quite know what to say. He seized on my silence:
    "Is there anything wrong with that?"
    I detected a trace of aggression.
    "No," I said, "but you don't seem to have much room here."
    "Size doesn't matter," he said.
    "Well, some women say it does."
    "Aha! They just say that to make you feel insecure."
    "Quite the reverse," I said.
    He obviously wasn't German.
    "Where are you from?" I asked.
    "Naples."
    "Oh," I said, "I love Naples. The wonderful Capo di Monte museum... The late Caravaggios..."
    "Do you have an art gallery?" he asked me, with acute intuition (although maybe not - every second shop in Berlin seems to be turning into an art gallery).
    "Yes."
    "I have some art to sell."
    "What do you have?"
    "Oh, a Joseph Beuys, some other things," he said. "Email me..."

Update on the Mikhalchuk disappearance, first broken in English on IZO (Moscow Times).

MK writes: "A Gogol story for the 21st century".

Due to the demise of my favourite carrier, Moskeb (official explanation: "Moskeb? They closed last month. Their prices were too low."); the fall in the dollar; and the in any case murderous exchange rate offered in the Sheremetevo arrivals hall, I paid $100 equivalent for a taxi into town. You used to be able to buy a barrel of oil for that.

Apparently Russian Mountain (La Montaña Rusa) is the Spanish term for a roller-coaster. That to me is intriguing, but I haven't googled it.

Somewhere, I presume, in the post-Soviet space: what women do when left to their own devices. You have to watch up to the minute mark, or thereabouts, to get the full, er, impact.

Russian poster goes from £600 (estimate) to £36,500 final bid (Colin Gleadell/Telegraph). Let's hope the bidders weren't Czech pranksters.

Off-top: in 1835, JMW Turner completed a painting, a continental view, on commission for the printer John Pye. Pye was certainly the best engraver of Turner's works, maybe the best of the nineteenth century (pdf of a NY Times article from 1874). The painting currently hangs in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, on loan from a private collection. Pye worked on his engraving for ten years: who knows how many hundreds of thousands, or millions, of lines it contains? A first impression was drawn in 1845, the edition was published in 1846. Today's price in a UK antique shop  for this masterpiece of craftsmanship, for a good early impression on the smooth paper that shows all the details before they began to wear: £5.

A friend of mine is having a cup of tea in her local West London caff a couple of days ago when she hears some Russian language. It is being spoken by an elderly gentleman, with whom she gets into a conversation. This gentleman is 97 years old. He emigrated from Russia in 1922. "I left Russia because of Lenin. Did you leave Russia because of Putin?" he jokes. "What is your profession?" my friend asks. "My profession? I am a Jew," he says.

We-make-money-not-art investigates the abortive Soviet SETUN computer.

Only Russian art-related excuses for linking to this are (a) that I pinched it from Andrei Kovalev and (b) it has been suggested that NY top Russian dealer Ronald Feldman bought some of the dubious Pollocks. Actually, I'm not sure how funny it is, but the licking sequence at the end has a (possibly unintended) ring of truth: paintings are things, and one does want to touch them etc.

Martin Luther King Day. In London, I can't transfer money from a US$ to a UK£ account, because there is no exchange rate today. The girl in the bank said: "If they have a day for everybody there won't be any working days left in the year." Maybe she has a point. And while on the subject of Munnee: the heirs to the collectors Shchukin and Morozov are still hoping for a cut of the action (Bloomberg).

Russkie shtuchki

At the National Centre for Contemporary Art last night, the performance group Radek announced it was disbanding; a very good film documenting Radek's history was shown.

A Russian artist: the only honest caricaturist in New York?

The Moscow Times reports (no link, I just read it) that top collector Viktor Vekselberg has just paid himself a $657 million dividend from his wholly-owned offshore co. Renova Holding; I think that's more than the total Sotheby's plus Christies 2007 Russian art turnover.

An artist friend of mine (male) said to me recently that another artist friend of mine (female) was looking good, or words to that effect. I had a look at her: he was right. I asked her the secret of looking good. Apparently it's down to reading the Bible, and listening to it on audio-cassette while she drives between St P and Moscow.

The nostalgia for Stalin-era culture is so profound, even among Jewish intelligentsia, that all Russians are effectively Putinists. When they watch Stalin-era cinema, for example, all they can see is the love story; whereas all that Western commentators can see is a propaganda thing.

Linguistic synasthaesia. I am sensitized to the fairly complicated ty/vy distinction in addressing a person (even Russians don't even know which to use in all situations). Now, when a Russian friend writes (email, sms) and addresses me in English as "you", I see in the "ou" dipthong of that word an echo of the French "vous" (from which "you" derives), equivalent to Russian "vy", and my heart misses a beat at the thought that this friend has retreated from intimacy.

Sex-is-everywhere dept.: when you say goodbye to people now, esp. on the phone and esp. business acquaintances, you say "Do svyazi" – "Until our next connection".

Lazy day

At 04.45, lying in bed unable to sleep, I browse the New York Times from my mobile phone and read an article about the latest film by Julian Schnabel, which won first prize at Cannes. I am pleased Mr Schnabel's genius is being recognised, partly for his sake, partly for the sake of mankind, and partly because I own a couple of his paintings; I also read that the Museum of Modern Art in New York doesn't have a single work: shome mishtake, surely?

After breakfast I receive a text message from Moscow from perhaps the most brilliant woman in the Russian art world; it says simply "YOU'RE AN ANGEL". What did I do to achieve that? Well, all I can say is, it takes years of practice.

In the afternoon the superb young English artist Simon Cunningham calls to say that the Courbet exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris is the best show he has ever seen, period. I think about popping over tomorrow on the brand-new Eurostar line from St Pancras: 2 hours city-to-city; but then I remember that Paris museums are shut on Tuesdays.

This evening a friend of mine brings round two books by Nicholson Baker (The Mezzanine and The Size Of Thoughts) which I haven't read; they were being re-cycled by the Oscar-nominated writer Alan Bennett.

"Only connect", wrote E. M. Forster. Well, it's not too difficult these days: we're connecting all the time, whether we like it or not.

Lessing is moreish

Doris Lessing hears she's won the Nobel Prize. My step-mother, many years ago, wrote a PhD on Lessing, which, if translated into art-dealer terms, is I suppose like investing your life-savings in work by, say, Erik Bulatov decades before his prices shot up. When I took some Russian-language evening-classes, in 1986, before my first British Council-sponsored trip to Moscow, Lessing was there, at the same classes, which she had been attending for years.

Bits and pieces

Alisher Usmanov apparently paid $72.75 million for the Rostropovich-Vishnevskaya collection; I'm not sure even that advance over estimates undermines my theory of Sotheby's noblesse oblige when it comes to the Russian government. But maybe it does.

Plan of Putin, Victory of Russia: maybe it's working? Some friends of mine find it makes more financial sense to live in Moscow, rent an expensive flat and pay low income taxes, than to live in Paris in their own flat and pay high income taxes. Russia's net gain of these brilliant charming and successful folk, and their money.

(In Russian) an interesting discussion of D. A. Prigov and related matters (thanks, IW, or should that be IV?).

One of my nightmares

An art dealer in Moscow has lost an Aivazovsky she had on consignment: gave it to an intermediary, and he has disappeared. Value: $300-400,000.