By John Wurdeman
“British auction houses are gladly summing up the results as the annual Russian Art Week in London closed on Thursday. [...] Each year searching for rare art pieces is becoming a more difficult task. However, the game is worth the candle. Lots released this week by McDougall’s fetched $15 million, while paintings auctioned by Christie`s and Sotheby`s earned them $18 million and $23 million respectively.”
Link to full article at Voice of Russia
“Sotheby’s is exhibiting highlights from its forthcoming June Sales in London of Russian Art, and Important Czech Art from the Hascoe Family Collection, at the State Historical Museum on Red Square in Moscow through Friday, May 20th, 2011. The exhibition features 24 important and rare paintings by some of Russia’s preeminent artists from the 19th century to the present, including Vasily Vasilievich Vereschagin, Alexander Evgenievich Yakovlev, Ilya Efimovich Repin and Erik Bulatov, as well as two artworks by František Kupka from the Hascoe Collection of Czech Modern Art, a collection that offers a remarkably complete survey of Czech painting and sculpture of the first half of the 20th century.”
Link to full article at Art Daily
"Sunny Day" by Vyacheslav Zabelin was one of the paintings featured at the concert.
Lazare Gallery was mentioned in an article about young Russian pianist Philipp Kopachevsky. He performed in Naples, Florida on May 16. The show was part of the lead-up to Art Naples, an annual arts festival expected to begin in May 2012. More work from Lazare Gallery should be on display at the festival in May. Link
View of St. Petersburg - Petr Petrovich Vereshchagin (Source: Sotheby's via Washington Post)
Christie’s and Sotheby’s Spring auctions of Russian art exceeded everyone’s expectations. Sotheby’s sold $16.1 million, above even their high estimate for the sale, and their most profitable sale since 2008. Christie’s sold 5 million. Top lots included a view of St. Petersburg by Petr Petrovich Vereshchagin sold by Mikhail Baryshnikov to benefit his art center in New York, a soviet space capsule, and a painting by Henryk Siemiradzki which doubled its high estimate and sold for $2.1 million, a record for the artist.
The sales demonstrate that the market for Russian art is strong and growing.
For more details see coverage by the Epoch Times and Bloomberg.
A new exhibition of Soviet artist Alexander Aleksandrovich Deineka is on display in Rome. Deineka is best known for his monumental pieces, such as The Defense of Sevastopol but his work is very diverse; you can read about his life and browse some of his work here. The show will run through May 1 at the Palazzo Delle Esposizioni in Rome. You can visit the exhibition’s website here.
The Moscow Times has done an excellent write-up on the Moscow River School’s current exhibition in Moscow. The organization of Realist painters often takes a backseat to more flashy and controversial groups in the Moscow art scene. Journalist Joy Neumeyer takes note, however, of the uniqueness of plein air painting, “where rustic landscape painting competes with newer forms of digital, urban-influenced art.”
The article only falls short in its failure to grasp just how unusual the Moscow River School’s approach and history are in 21st century art. There are not many centuries old traditions of “rustic landscape painting” competing with newer forms of “digital, urban influenced art.” The word “competition” represents a gross overestimation of the strength of academic traditions like Russian Realism. There is no Barbizon school still meeting in the countryside of modern France; there is no Ashcan School still struggling along in New York City. There is, however, against all the odds still a group of realist painters working in the Russian countryside who can trace their teachers and their teachers’ teachers back to the 19th century in a few long steps. What is more, the Academic Dacha where they meet today was founded by Ilya Repin, perhaps the most famous artist of the 19th century Realist school. I was there over the summer and it is not the bustling hive of activity we can see depicted in Repin’s At the Academic Dacha.It is still alive, however, and that makes the Moscow River School much more than “somewhat unique.”
Here’s an excerpt from the article:
“A floor below the sprawling Soviet-themed exhibits at the State Museum of Contemporary History, a group of landscape painters is offering glimpses of a Russia seemingly untouched by the 20th century. With loose brushstrokes and brilliant colors, the Moscow River collective presents paintings that eschew cities’ steel and smoke for the soft light and open expanses of the countryside.
“Moscow is a chaotic city,” said artist Ilya Yatsenko, whose view of Moscow’s Pyatnitskaya Ulitsa is the exhibition’s sole urban scene. “Nature, on the other hand, is closer to a person.” “
You can read the full article here.
“Moscow River” is on display through Feb. 20 at the State Central Museum of the Contemporary History of Russia, 21 Tverskaya Ulitsa.
2010 was not a good year for most business, but it was a great year for Russian art. Sotheby’s alone sold $82 million. Christies sales – in all categories – shot up 53% in 2010. William MacDougall, of MacDougall Auctions told The Epoch Times, “Like most markets, Russian art suffered in the economic crisis, but it has been in recovery since April 2009. Over 90 percent of the buyers are based in Moscow and Kiev, where the economies are growing. Good works attract buyers, and new world records have been set since the crisis.”
Upcoming sales include Sotheby’s sale on April 21 and 22, and Christie’s sale on April 13 in New York.
Lazare Gallery’s Moscow River School exhibition is just wrapping up in Sarasota, FL. A new show of Vyacheslav Zabelin will be up from February 4 to March 11.
Frederick Andresen wrote a nice article on his introduction to Russian art in his weekly column for Ria Novosti, Musings of a Russophile . He describes the sort of revelation many of us fascinated with Russian art at some time experienced. Here is an excerpt:
“When I first arrived, I was totally astonished to find a world of art in Russia that, in my unlettered opinion, was the equal of anything seen in the museums of the Western world. It had all been kept a secret behind the Iron Curtain. I thought all Russian art was either religious icons, or Socialist Realism (and that being propagandistic). [...]
Andresen goes on to provide an excellent summary of the different eras of Russian art history – from the beginnings of secular art in the 18th century, to 19th century realism, the 20th century Avant-garde, socialist realism and the present. It is an excellent primer for anyone just discovering Russian art. You can read the full article here.
A new exhibition of 19th Century Russian Realism went up at the Pera Museum in Istanbul yesterday.
from the exhibition website:
“ The masterpieces from the rich collection of the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg reflect every aspect of life including labor and poverty, the world of children, public festivals, war and death, scenes from bourgeois life, and revolution. [...] The exhibition, which includes artists from Repin to Makovsky, Yaroshenko to Shishkin and many others, [...] with its themes and characters offers audiences a unique experience, one similar to reading the works of the great Russian writers such as Nikolai Gogol and Fyodor Dostoevsky.”
