Russian Art Week in London

The Telegraph ran an article by Colin Gleadell about the Russian art sales at the end of November. The article opens with a pre headline on the sales and the high level of confidence in the market. The high expectations were not fulfilled.

Blaming politics, falling oil prices, sanctions and state of the ruble, the sales raised only $63.3 million against a pre sale estimate of $134 million, and perhaps worse, sold only 50% of the offered lots.  Christie's sold only 41% of the art sold (meaning 59% failed to sell), Sotheby's 56% failed to sell and at Bonhams a meager 62% of the lots failed to sell.

The Telegraph reports

“Confidence is high for Russian Art Week in London,” ran a headline on one of the leading art news websites on November 20. “Russian art collectors will probably ignore their worries about the rouble losing 40 per cent of its value this year, and a fragile truce in Ukraine,” a dealer in Russian art was quoted as saying.

Such optimism was probably founded on the last Russian sales in June, which emerged unscathed by political unrest as they realised £64 million, the third-highest total for the series and the highest since the summer of 2008.

But by this autumn, the situation had worsened. The economic sanctions placed on Russia by the West, a tumbling rouble, the falling price of oil and rising inflation had all combined to damage confidence. Many of the usual participants from Russia did not come to London, and the sales, which were estimated to fetch as much as £86 million, realised only £40.5 million. More than 50 per cent of the lots offered were unsold.

That the sales made as much as they did was attributable to two paintings at Christie’s. Valentin Serov’s 1910 portrait of the society beauty Maria Zetlin was being sold by the Municipality of Ramat Gan in Tel Aviv. It was part of a collection of modern Russian art that was given to Ramat Gan by Zetlin and her husband, the poet Mikhail Osipovich, and formed the core of the Ramat Gan Museum of Russian art.

As Serov’s work is rare and sought after, this was very much a trophy picture, and four bidders pursued it beyond its £1.5 million estimate until it sold for £9.3 million – a record for any painting in a Russian art sale. One was a dealer from Cologne, who buys for the Russian Jewish billionaire banker Petr Aven. But the eventual buyer, it is believed, was Viatcheslav Kantor, a billionaire industrialist who owns the Museum of Avant Garde Mastery in Moscow, which focuses on 20th-century Russian artists of Jewish origin and promotes tolerance and reconciliation through art. When asked in 2010 if he often overpaid for art, he replied: “My mother said you can never buy what you want without paying too much”.

The other big seller was a 1922 Cubist-inspired portrait of the writer Aleksandr Tikhonov by Yuri Annenkov. The remarkable thing about this portrait was that it sold during the height of the Russian art market boom in 2007 for £2.3 million. When it came back on to the market, the previously defeated bidder was determined to buy it, and, bidding through Moscow dealer Natalia Kournikova, bought it for £4 million.

But this did not mean that prices were going up. A 19th-century river landscape by Isaac Levitan that sold four years ago for £690,000 was back with a £1 million estimate and didn’t sell. By the end, 59 per cent of the paintings and sculptures at Christie’s had not sold. At Sotheby’s, the top lot was a 1917 market scene at sunset in the Crimea by Boris Kustodiev, which sold to art consultant Ivan Samarine below the estimate for £1.2 million. With only about four big buyers active, there were bargains to be had, he said, and this was one of them. Another buyer with those thoughts perhaps was a large burly man known to dealers as Boris from Gazprom, who bought several lots without competition including a reclining nude by Zinaida Serebriakova below estimate for £698,500. Eight years ago this had sold for £780,000.

One of the few lots to rise above estimates was a surreal portrait of a woman by Pavel Tchelitchew that was bought for £362,500 by Alexander Kuznetsov, the author of a recent book on the artist. But otherwise, 56 per cent of paintings and sculptures were unsold.

At Bonhams, only 38 per cent of lots sold. Last year, Bonhams set a record for a painting in a Russian sale when it sold Nikolai Roerich’s mystical Madonna Laboris for £7.9 million. A few months later, a Russian art collector in New York spent almost $2 million buying six early works by Roerich at auction and then consigned them for sale at Bonhams. The timing could hardly have been worse, and not one of them sold.

Of the numerous works by Roerich at auction last week, the best price was realised at MacDougall’s, where a moonlit fishing scene sold at the low estimate for £1.2 million. It was one of only 80, or 35 per cent of 226 paintings to find a buyer at MacDougall’s, but at least the seller – who bought it in New York three years ago for $1.4 million – got their money back.

Source: The Telegraph