Russian art – can it fight back?
One of the fastest-growing art markets has fallen to the most contracted. Colin Gleadell looks at the auction houses’ response
‘Can the Russian art market go any lower?” asked the ever-watchful website Art Market Monitor, after last winter’s once-mighty Russian art sales in London sank from £40 million to just £17 million in a year.
There is something strangely fascinating about the way the fortunes of Russian art have imploded, going from the fastest-growing market in the world to the most contracted in just over a decade. And now it is conceivable that there is farther to fall. The pre-sale estimates for the next round of London sales of Russian paintings and works of art at Sotheby’s, Christie’s, Bonhams and MacDougall’s in June are between £17.7 million and £25.5 million between them – the lowest for more than a decade.
“There is no doubt we are in a buyer’s market,” says Sarah Mansfield of Christie’s. Her strategy for getting business has been to focus on consignments where the asking price is realistic in today’s market. “We need to bring people back as buyers who got priced out during the boom,” she says.
Estimates in some cases, she says, have fallen dramatically. Her opening lot, for instance, is a 1920s watercolour by Konstantin Somov of a couple in a rainbow landscape. An oil painting of this subject sold for more than £3 million during the boom, but this smaller watercolour is priced at £15,000 to £25,000. “Five years ago, that would have made £150,000,” says the London dealer James Butterwick.
Another property she is pleased with is a group of costume designs by Léon Bakst for a Ballets Russes production of The Sleeping Princess. The collection was bought originally through the art dealer Emilio Bertonati, who championed Bakst in the Sixties. With Moscow and St Petersburg holding major exhibitions in celebration of the 150th anniversary of Bakst’s birth this year, the relatively modest estimates – from £10,000 to £60,000 for these drawings – should tempt buyers out of the woodwork.
Otherwise, prices will range from the lower six figures for paintings by the 19th-century marine painter Ivan Aivazovsky, one of the most heavily traded of Russian artists, down to rare, erotic drawings by the great filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, at about £1,000 a drawing. Christie’s cautious attitude to this market, though, is characterised by its limited selection of nonconformist art, and the absence of anything contemporary. “We are waiting to see how the season goes,” says Mansfield.
Sotheby’s, in contrast, has a threeyear commitment to contemporary Russian-art sales, and has expanded its sale (Contemporary East) to include a broader range of eastern European countries. Judit Reigl’s post-war abstractions are well known in Paris and her native Hungary, where the £100,000 expected for the large example in her first London sale is not unheard of.
The Czech artist Běla Kolářová and the Hungarian Dora Maurer are both recent older-generation additions to the London art exhibition circuit through Alex Sainsbury’s Raven Row, the Whitechapel, and White Cube, where Maurer’s work is selling for between €35,000 and €175,000. At Sotheby’s, her prints are estimated at £4,000 to £8,000. With younger artists, such as Pavel Brala from Moldova, Sotheby’s is taking a risk as Brala has never sold at auction before.
At Sotheby’s more traditional Russian art sale, there is further evidence of vastly reduced estimates. A monumental canvas by Konstantin Makovsky, unsold 18 months ago at £1.5 million, is back, looking for £500,000. A painting of a roe deer by the highly rated 19th-century artist Niko Pirosmani sold in 2011 for £360,000 and is now estimated at £150,000.
MacDougall’s offers a different take on the situation. It is putting faith in the newer markets for socialist realism and non-conformism, and more valuable six-figure works by Korovin, Polenov and Pimenov, which have been on the market in the past 10 years, return with significantly higher estimates. Catherine MacDougall believes that, while the crisis of 2009 was based on objective economic factors, the Russian market now “is not flat. It is just suffering from negative psychology, which affects confidence.”