IZO

Hu Ming: Robert Crumb, meet Chinese Art, er, Socialist Realism, er... (hu-ming).

Contemporary North Korean art (several images at tttkkk, via dmitrivrubel).

Cai Guo-Qiang, whose retrospective I Want to Believe is at the Guggenheim Museum now, is obsessed with Konstantin Maximov (Brooklyn Rail):

The exhibition I organized in Shanghai, and Beijing and Canton Province was on Konstantin Maximov (1913-94), who came to China as a teacher in the mid-1950s (for only two years). I collect his paintings. Maximov influenced the Chinese in art and in painting and his approach to art influenced an entire generation of artists and art historians. So I am examining from Maximov from the social aspect, that part of history, how it was significant and what kind of influence and effect it had on society and that entire art generation. I have about 260 pieces of work by Maximov in my collection, including his easel and the pallets of his studio.

I visited Konstantin Mefodevich several times in the eighties, and I made the first purchases of his Chinese paintings. (They'd remained in his studio for 30 years because, soon after his return from China, relations between the USSR and China cooled and suddenly there was no call to show them or place them in Russian museums.) It was winter, it was dark and icy; Maximov was about 75 and inevitably under the influence; as he put on his coat to take me across the yard to his studio, his wife Galina (equally pixillated) used to implore him, "Don't go, Kostya, don't go, you'll fall over, you'll be killed!" I sold most of the Chinese paintings in a single lot to Evert Douwes Jr. in Amsterdam, keeping back one. I also bought the small first version of the famous Sashka the Tractor Driver, which used to hang in the hallway of Maximov's flat (it's now in the Ray Johnson collection). Strange now to think not only that Cai Guo-Qiang has developed a fascination with the author of these actually quite lovely works (aha, but does he have a Chinese one?) but also that circa 1988 they could be sold for as much as the paintings of, say, Ilya Kabakov and Erik Bulatov.

New Russian Realism at the show marking the 50th anniversary of the Russian Artists' Union. Below: E. N. Zaitsev, Prayer on Borodino Field. Other images below the cut.

The re-making of Socialist Realism (ARTnews) (thanks, VG).

Yi Chol Ryung, Railway Builder, 2004

Recent North Korean art for sale in Paris. My guess: the painting below is pretty much a straight copy from a reproduction of a Soviet original.

It's the same the whole world over...

A collection of Korean War propaganda leaflets (via rjkoehler Korea blog).

Think Pieces

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.