“The impact on the contemporary art market will be minimal. The Russian art market “will undoubtedly experience a transformational period of change, the extent of which will depend on how isolated Russia remains in the future,” Vickery said. This week, Putin called for “self-cleansing” from traitors who earn money in Russia but live in the West and are poisoned by Western values. “Who can think about art?”įear of repression is widespread among elites as Vladimir Putin’s regime becomes ever more authoritarian, shutting down independent media, making the word “war” illegal, and banning social media platforms like Instagram. “People are dying,” said a Russian-born, U.S.-based art collector. Annual sales at Vladey, a Moscow-based auction house cultivating this audience, rose from 500,000 euros in 2013 to 6 million euros in 2021. Things started to turn around in 2018 as a new generation of collectors turned their attention to contemporary Russian art. Russian collectors’ influence waned after the financial crisis and the first round of sanctions stemming from Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. While he’s since sold many of the works at a loss, one of them exceeded all expectations in 2017: Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi, which fetched $450 million, the most expensive artwork of all time. ![]() Photo: Tolga Akmena/AFP/Getty Images.ĭmitry Rybolovlev, a Russian billionaire who hasn’t been sanctioned, spent about $2 billion on blue-chip art between 20, paying outrageous amounts for works by Gauguin, Klimt, and Rodin. Ĭhristie’s employees pose in front of Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi ahead of its sale at Christie’s New York on November 15, 2017. ![]() ![]() “For now, everything is on hold,” said Jo Vickery, co-founder of Vickery Art, a London-based advisory, and former international director of Russian art at Sotheby’s.Ī major force in the market in the early 2000s, Russian millionaires and billionaires set records for everything from Fabergé to Freud, traveled in droves to Art Basel Miami Beach, and joined the boards of major museums such as Guggenheim and Tate. Sotheby’s, Christie’s, and Bonhams cancelled their upcoming Russian art auctions in London, the sector’s epicenter. The trade of Russian art has also become much more difficult. They can’t officially buy or sell any art, and auction houses have said they aren’t doing business with sanctioned individuals. include several of the world’s top collectors: Roman Abramovich, Petr Aven, and Andrey Melnichenko. Russian billionaires sanctioned by the U.S. Some of Tsukanov’s compatriots are in a much tougher spot. A significant promoter of Russian art, he won’t be staging exhibitions in London anytime soon, Tsukanov told a group of art-market executives at an offsite “brainstorming” event organized by Christie’s Russian art department last week. and Russian citizenship, he saw his European bank accounts restricted overnight even though he hasn’t been sanctioned. A New RealityĪs the war in Ukraine entered its fourth week, Tsukanov was processing a new reality. “People understood that it would be the last opening for a while,” Tsukanov told me this week from his home in London.Ĭollector Igor Tsukanov at the opening of “Oleg Tselkov: Stranger” at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art. (They ended up agreeing to keep the paintings but removed their names.) Some guests cried. A U.S.-based couple with Ukrainian roots, who lent two paintings to the show, asked to withdraw them as a protest against the war. While well-attended, the opening didn’t feel celebratory, Tsukanov said. In December, his Boy with Balloons (1957) fetched a record $ 760,612 at Sotheby’s. Tselkov, a pioneer of Soviet unofficial art, has a large following in Russia and abroad. Many cultural elites fled abroad, fearing persecution.ĭespite Russia’s deepening isolation, “Oleg Tselkov: Stranger” opened, with 100 paintings from 25 private international collections, arriving by air from New York and Florida and by truck from Europe. In Moscow, private museums closed their doors. In the weeks that followed, bombs rained down on Kyiv and the world came together to cut off Russia, its financial institutions, and its oligarchs. Six days before the debut, Russia invaded Ukraine. After a pandemic-induced delay and the artist’s death, at 87, in July, the opening was finally set for March 1 at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art. The Art Detective is a weekly column by Katya Kazakina for Artnet News Pro that lifts the curtain on what’s really going on in the art market.Īrt collector Igor Tsukanov’s foundation has been working on a retrospective of Russian nonconformist artist Oleg Tselkov in Moscow for three years.
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