Auction of Soviet art puts market on guard
Moscow: The sale of nine Soviet-era masterpieces that fetched $3 million at a London auction in 2014 is causing uproar in Moscow’s art community, where it was largely perceived as a theft of the family jewels.
The sale of the paintings, one of which now has a place of pride in a Moscow oligarch’s private museum, has triggered a criminal investigation.
There also has been a push to re-nationalise the collection that once belonged to a Soviet artists’ trade union. The dispute has also made it much more difficult to move Russian art across the border for sales or exhibitions.
In recent months, several ministry of culture officials were fired, rules were tightened on the sale of Russian art abroad, and the Russian man who sold the artworks in London is under pressure to return a huge Soviet-era art collection to the government.
The Soviet Union had no private property, with everything from factories and mansions to bakeries and schools owned by the state. After the regime collapsed in 1991, most of the property ended up in private hands in the chaotic and often crime-ridden privatisation drive. Art was no exception. “For decades, Soviet art was worth nothing,” says Milena Orlova, editor-inchief of the Art Newspaper Russia, explaining that works by top Soviet artists like Alexander Deineka and Georgy Nissky could be bought for close to nothing in the 1990s. “Collections were sold off for a dime. They were sold off like junk.”
While bigger Russian institutions such as the Hermitage in St. Petersburg and major museums retained their state ownership, smaller collections ended up with obscure private organisations.
Twenty-five years later, the government seems to be using the 2014 auction as a pretext to demand the return of some of what it considers to be the family jewels.
The Soviet Artists’ Union was a powerful lobbying group that owned a rich collection donated by member artists. But as the Soviet Union broke apart, the collection of more than 46,000 items was transferred to a nonprofit group of artists, the International Confederation of Artists’ Unions, or ICAU.
The Art Newspaper Russia, the country’s top art publication, has written about the government’s impending plans to reclaim the ownership of the ICAU’s massive collection. The Culture Ministry wouldn’t comment on these reports, but told the Associated Press — in an about-face from an earlier stance — that it now had “reasonable doubts” that the artists’ group ever had the legal right to sell the masterpieces at Sotheby’s.
Yet a pre-auction exhibition of the ICAU’s works in London was held with the culture ministry’s support and the ministry a year later sponsored an exhibit of some of these works in Italy.
Alexei Ananyev, a Russian billionaire who bought Georgy Nissky’s “Under the Snowy Fields” for 1.8 million pounds ($2.2 million), the most expensive item of the ICAU’s collection, is baffled why anyone would question the legality of the sale. “We think we bought it legally,” he told the AP.
Ananyev is proud of his purchase and feels it’s “part of the mission” of the Institute of Russian Realist Art.
The auction, which was widely covered in the media, attracted the ire of many in the Russian art community who thought selling these masterpieces abroad was akin to disposing of family heirlooms.