Russian Avant Garde - Let the Collector and Appraiser Beware

Konstantin Akinsha and Sylvia Hochfield have an excellent article in Art News about the faking of Russian Avant Garde paintings. The first paragraph immediately sets the tone, mentioning a 6 month Art News investigation, and the conclusion that there are more fake Russian Avant Garde Painting on the market than authentic. Many dealers and collectors now refuse to purchase or consider art without an iron clad provenance, such as an exhibition during the lifetime of the artist. There is even skepticism with expert authentications as well as books and catalogs. Collectors and auction houses have been all been deceived, while even some art with expert authentication have proven to be fraudulent.

When appraising, be cautious and look for a strong provenance.

The article states A six-month ARTnews investigation and interviews with scholars, dealers, and other sources in the United States, Russia, Germany, France, and Spain reveals that the number of Russian avant-garde fakes on the market is so high that they far outnumber the authentic works. “There are more fakes than genuine pictures,” said Alla Rosenfeld, curator of the Norton Dodge Collection of Soviet Nonconformist Art at Rutgers University from 1992 to 2006 and former vice president of the Russian art department at Sotheby’s New York. It’s impossible to put a number on them, said Natalia Kournikova of Kournikova Gallery in Moscow, but “we can say that almost every artist whose prices have risen has become the victim of fake makers.”

Peter Aven, president of Alfa-Bank in Moscow and owner of one of the world’s best collections of Russian avant-garde art, called the quantity of fakes “colossal.” It affects the market, said Rosenfeld, “because people are becoming reluctant to acquire Russian works.” The situation has gotten worse since 1996, when ARTnews published its first article about Russian avant-garde fakes, according to Aleksandra Shatskikh, one of the world’s leading scholars on the Russian avant-garde. “Russian buyers have entered the market, and the new demand has provoked a wave of fakes that is many times greater than the production of forgeries in the first half of the 1990s,” she said.

The article continues Considering the number of fakes and the sparseness of documentation, experts say, buyers should be cautious. Aven said he buys only works with “a 100 percent provenance. When sellers say they can’t disclose the provenance of a work, I refuse to even discuss it.” Unless a work has an “ironclad provenance or was reproduced and exhibited during the lifetime of the artist,” Aven won’t touch it. Rosenfeld endorses that kind of caution. A good provenance, she said, means that a work can be traced back to the artist or the artist’s family. It was “published in an old catalogue—new catalogues are not really proof—and there is documentary evidence, for example, a photo of the artist with the work in the background. But the combination of all of these—family, early documentation, exhibition during the artist’s lifetime—that’s very important. Strong documentary evidence that the work existed during the artist’s lifetime.”

To read the full Art News article, click HERE.