Beyond The Wildest Expectations

By Patricia Blake

Stalin despised it as "decadent bourgeois formalism" and had it locked away. Khrushchev called it excrement and branded its creators "pederasts." Brezhnev ordered bulldozers to smash it into the ground at an outdoor exhibit. Such has been the fate of Russia's modernist art at the hands of dictators bent on enforcing their philistine tastes with the whole armamentarium of the totalitarian state. Even Mikhail Gorbachev has found that the tradition of putting down avant-garde art dies hard among cultural bureaucrats. As a result, the visual arts have been far slower than literature and music to benefit from glasnost.

Until last week. Then, in Moscow, the London-based auction house Sotheby's staged the first international art auction ever held in the Soviet Union. An eager crowd of 2,000 packed the ballroom of the Sovincenter, a lavish hotel and conference complex usually off limits to Soviet citizens, to gaze on an array of works that in many cases had rarely been exhibited before, much less sold openly. Bidding was restricted to foreigners who could pay with British pounds.

More than 90 collectors, dealers and museum curators had been flown in from the U.S. and Europe by Sotheby's; others had submitted written offers or were plugged in by telephone. When the final gavel fell after two frantic hours, the take for the 120 works was the equivalent of $3.6 million. The figure "exceeded our wildest expectations," said Sotheby's Auctioneer Simon de Pury, who organized the sale under the sponsorship of the Soviet Ministry of Culture.

The hottest bidding was for Line, a 1920 minimalist masterwork in black and white by Alexander Rodchenko (1891-1956). It went for $567,000 to David Juda of London's Annely Juda Gallery, one of a growing number of Western dealers specializing in Russian art. Several other Rodchenko works drew high bids, including the cubist-inspired Composition, 1916. The second highest price of $ the sale, however, was fetched by a contemporary Soviet artist, Grisha Bruskin, 43, who has been harassed by the KGB for displaying his paintings to foreigners. An anonymous buyer paid $416,000 for his Fundamental Lexicon, a witty but inconsequential series of 32 panels depicting statues of ordinary citizens in heroic poses.

The sale was a stupendous windfall for Bruskin and other living artists, some of whom could scarcely show their work two years ago and still have to scrounge for materials and studio space. They will receive 60% of the auction prices -- 10% in pounds that they can use abroad and the rest in so-called gold rubles, which have up to five times the purchasing power of ordinary rubles. (The Soviet state will get 32%, and Sotheby's the remaining 8%.) Two relative unknowns, Svetlana Kopystiansky and her husband Igor, were stunned as Pop Singer Elton John put in a winning bid of $75,000 by telephone for a tempera landscape by Svetlana and another bid of $75,000 for a portrait in oils by Igor.

So electrifying was the commercial success of the sale that its dark subtext remained submerged. Rodchenko and other gifted early modernists had conceived of radical forms that would reflect Russia's new revolutionary ethos. In the 1930s, however, these avant-gardists were reviled and their talent and idealism laid waste by the Stalinist juggernaut. Alexander Drevin, two of whose lyrical paintings were included by Sotheby's, was arrested during the Great Terror and died in the Gulag in 1938. His wife Nadezhda Udaltsova, one of the most prominent modernists, was so frightened by his arrest that she destroyed most of her work. The five compelling Udaltsova abstractions that were in the sale are among the rare survivors of that debacle. Most of the contemporary artists chosen by Sotheby's are veterans of the post-Stalin campaigns against experimental art. Vladimir Yankilevsky, 50, a painter of mechanical-looking, large-scale canvases, was a target of Khrushchev's famous scatological outburst at a contemporary art show in 1962.

The Sotheby's auction reflected Gorbachev's new policy of exploiting Soviet cultural strengths and sent a clear signal that the Soviets now want to become serious, long-term contenders in the international art market. One immediate effect will be to accelerate the flow of works from the Soviet Union to the West. Galleries in the U.S. are already commanding phenomenal prices for Soviet artists. America's leading dealer in Russian art, Eduard Nakhamkin, this year sold a five-part Yankilevsky multimedia work to a collector for $140,000. Dealer Ronald Feldman exhibited the brilliant conceptual artist Ilya Kabakov at his New York City gallery this spring. Before the show closed last month, collectors bought four of the ten rooms created and festooned by Kabakov with cryptic signs and objects.

This week in Washington an exhibit of 90 early-20th century Russian paintings will open at the Hirshhorn Museum. Works by Chagall, Malevich, Kandinsky, Rodchenko and other artists, once locked away, have been dispatched from the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow and the State Museum in Leningrad. Unlike the Sotheby's offerings, these are for display, not for sale. But like so much of this radiantly emergent art, they are well worth contemplating.

With reporting by Kanta Stanchina/Moscow