The chronicle

As New York’s autumn auctions ignite, the spotlight falls on stellar provenances, from the fabled holdings of Leonard A. Lauder and Cindy and Jay Pritzker to Surrealist treasures long hidden in private hands. These sales, unfolding as Sotheby’s settles into the history-rich Breuer building, show how an artwork’s past owners and journeys can be as decisive as the work itself. Independent art expert in Impressionist and Modern art, Aleksandra Todorovic writes about the role of provenance in appraising value. 

By Aleksandra Todorovic

 As the first chills and storms of winter 2025 are fast upon us, November is turning out to be a scorcher of a month on the New York auction block. This week Sotheby’s, Christie’s, Phillips and Bonhams will, between them, offer for sale hundreds of major works of Impressionist, Modern and Contemporary Art. Aside from the sheer volume, this season promises to be exceptional, for the most part, due to one factor: the number of high-profile art collections with an astounding quality of art works. It is a story of provenance, pedigree and unparalleled calibre and, in spite of the global insecurity, it is expected that new auction records will be reached. The auction executives are boldly banking on it with already record-breaking pre-sale estimates.

 Turning on its head the artworld gloom that has been setting in over the past year, Sotheby’s announcements of major private collections consigned for the autumn season came in one on the heels of another. The fabled Leonard A. Lauder art trove, described by the auction house as ‘a one-in-a-generation collection of 20th century masterpieces’, not only opens Sotheby's auction week, it launches its new headquarters in the historical Breuer building on Madison Avenue. Billionaire businessman and philanthropist Leonard A. Lauder, who died in June this year, was the son of Estée Lauder and brother of Ronald Lauder, co-founder and president of the Neue Galerie, which showcases his own major art collection and is situated just a few blocks up on 5th Avenue. Led by the monumental and exquisite portrait of Elisabeth Lederer by Gustav Klimt, the group also includes two beautiful landscapes by Klimt as well as notable works by Picasso, Matisse, Munch, Calder and Agnes Martin, among others.

 An exceptionally rare still-life of books by Van Gogh, first exhibited at the 1888 Salon des Indépendants, and Matisse’s strikingly modern painting ‘Leda and the Swan’ are the highlights of the collection of Cindy and Jay Pritzker, also going under the hammer this season. Known for their philanthropy and public engagement, the Pritzkers’ name is heavily emblazoned across Chicago’s civic institutions: the Jay A. Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park, the Pritzker School of Medicine at the University of Chicago, the Pritzker Garden at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Pritzker Family Children’s Zoo, to name a few.

 So why is it that the name Lauder or Pritzker adds to the value or desirability of these exquisite works of art, and what makes the collections worth more than the sum of their parts? Instinct might tell us that offering so many masterpieces in a single auction week bears the risk of ‘flooding’ the market, but while the intrinsic value of each of these works without doubt lies in a complex web of qualities and their unique historical, cultural, aesthetic, intellectual and emotional significance, a distinguished provenance adds to a work’s desirability in multiple ways.

In recent years, the significance of provenance has been discussed primarily in the context of its role of establishing authenticity, as well as ascertaining that a work has not been subject to looting or a coerced sale in the Nazi era. If we look beyond these essential practical aspects of provenance, we will see that there are other, more subtle elements at play. For one thing, if a work comes from a major collection that took decades if not half a century to assemble, it is likely that it has not been on the market for a considerable amount of time. This implies both rarity and freshness, qualities increasingly valued by buyers.

In 2013, it was announced that Leonard Lauder had pledged his unparalleled Cubist art collection to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and it is now part of the museum’s permanent holdings. Purchasing a work of art from the same distinguished trove brings an opportunity to fortify one’s own standing among the world’s rarest and most prestigious art collections, and creates valuable new connections and meanings.

By its nature, a work of art is firmly rooted in the historical and cultural moment of its creation. However, with time, as it passes through various hands or is included in exhibitions, new threads are woven into the fabric of its unique aura. With the passing of a collector, their ownership of a work of art becomes part of cultural history; a potential new owner now gets a chance not only to become a temporary custodian of the work, but also to weave their own name into that historical context, into the artwork’s story.

Another distinguished private collection, this one comprising many masterpieces of Surrealist art, will be offered at Sotheby’s under the title ‘Exquisite Corpus’, a pun on the Surrealists’ collaborative game cadavre exquis (‘exquisite corpse’). Seminal works by major artists including Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, Frida Kahlo, Dorothea Tanning, René Magritte, Yves Tanguy and many others are the backbone of the collection that was lovingly assembled some fifty years ago and last publicly exhibited over a quarter of a century ago. Whilst this collection is sold anonymously, it illustrates the key importance of a different aspect of provenance - the earliest ownership of a work of art, after it left the artist’s studio.

Whilst works of modern and Surrealist art often went straight to the artists’ dealers such as the now-legendary Alexander Iolas or Pierre Matisse, both of whom were instrumental in promoting European avant-garde artists in America, there are many works here with diverse and colourful provenance. Dorothea Tanning’s ‘Interior with Sudden Joy’ was first owned by William N. Copley, one of the early patrons of the Surrealists who supported them both through collecting their art and exhibiting it at his eponymous Beverly Hills gallery, and who himself was a painter of erotic imagery. The first owner of Max Ernst’s ‘J’ai bu du tabourin, j’ai mangé du cimbal’ was Gypsy Rose Lee, one of Ernst’s first significant American clients best known as a popular burlesque entertainer, an often-arrested striptease dancer and one of the most flamboyant and decadent personalities of her time. She was not only painted by Ernst in a stunning oil ‘Gypsy Rose Lee’ of 1943, but was also photographed for Paris Match surrounded by her art collection, including the Ernst that now hangs at Sotheby’s - an auction cataloguer’s dream find!

Another art patron painted by a Surrealist friend was the French architect and interior designer Emilio Terry, the first owner of Dalí’s ‘Symbiose de la tête aux coquillages’, one of the collection’s highlights. Magritte’s ‘La Révélation du présent’ was first in the collection of E.L.T. Mesens, a Belgian artist and writer who was one of Magritte’s closest friends and associates and who came up with titles for many of his compositions. The list could go on, providing a ‘Who’s Who’ of intellectuals and patrons gathered around Surrealist circles, but let’s finish with Giorgio de Chirico’s ‘Le Muse inquietanti’, which was commissioned from the artist by none other than the movement’s leader and theorist André Breton, arguably the holy grail of provenance for a Surrealist work of art.

It’s an autumn of coveted provenances, and not only for the art: there is Sotheby’s newly launched headquarters, the famous historical Breuer building on Madison Avenue. Built by Marcel Breuer & Associates and known to this day by the name of its avant-garde creator, the Breuer was originally designed for the Whitney Museum of American Art, which occupied the building from its inauguration in 1966 until 2014. It was Marcel Breuer’s first museum commission, and is today his only remaining work in Manhattan. The Bauhaus-trained architect designed the Whitney building in Brutalist style, defined by its simple geometric shapes, its top-heavy form that defies traditional rules of architecture, and its use of exposed raw concrete.

By the time of its relocation from considerably smaller and inadequate premises to the monumental and ground-breaking Breuer building in 1966, the Whitney Museum had accumulated an impressive and ever-growing art collection. Jacqueline Kennedy, who was among its board members, was in attendance at the opening ceremony. Almost half a century later, as Whitney outgrew the building and moved to its current premises in the Meatpacking District, the Breuer building became known as Met Breuer, housing the Metropolitan Museum’s contemporary art collection between 2016 and 2020. In 2021 the building reopened as Frick Madison, temporary home of the Frick Collection during the renovation of its own historic premises a few blocks away.

The Frick vacated the Breuer building last year and moved back into its newly renovated home. By relocating to the Breuer - at the heart of the Museum Mile - Sotheby’s is not only moving its international headquarters into the epicentre of the art world, at a short distance from many of New York’s major museums as well as commercial galleries. It is also positioning itself within a unique lineage of distinguished art institutions that have occupied the Breuer building over the nearly sixty years of its existence - a provenance of giants. Renovations completed and pictures hung, on 8th November Sotheby’s opened the doors to its new galleries. The rest shall become history.

ANATOLY OSMOLOVSKY’S TOXIC SWEETS IN PARIS

Anatoly Osmolovsky’s ‘Bonbons Toxiques’, on view at Galerie Vallois in Paris, examines how ideology, memory, and desire crystallize into objects that both attract and unsettle. Through bronze, paper, and bread, he exposes the lingering toxins of belief systems that refuse to fade.

By Angie Afifi

Memory, ideology, and commodity take on material presence in Anatoly Osmolovsky’s Bonbons Toxiques, at Galerie Vallois this October. The exhibition reads less as a display of objects than as history compacted into form, tracing how sweetness can mask a latent edge. For more than three decades, Osmolovsky has examined this tension between allure and threat, between the seductions of belief and the toxins that ideology may carry. To consider his work today is to engage a still-unfolding conversation about symbols that resist disappearance. Osmolovsky stands as an artist, a thinker, a theorist, and an unrelenting interlocutor with the twentieth century.

At the heart of Osmolovsky’s practice is the idea that objects themselves can be witnesses of their time. The exhibition brings together five different series the artist has created over many years and in various techniques, unified here into a precise visual architecture: bronze casts polished until they mirror the viewer; idiosyncratic office folders in a 1930s style; somber pages once white, with darkening patterns reminiscent of the imprint of tank tracks; bronze busts of Marx, Lenin, Mao, and Stalin; and, finally, a monumental wall (rather iconostasis) of greatly enlarged bronze replicas of black bread created for this show. Bread, that simplest component of Soviet mythology, has become monumental and unsettling. The bronze did not rot, but history has, and the tension between permanence and decay is everywhere.

Displayed together, these works form a choreography of repression, devotion, and a strangely persistent aesthetic seduction. Power relies not only on violence, but also on the beauty of its images: polished uniforms, “heroic” portraits, the visual grammar of obedience. Osmolovsky asks us to examine that allure, it is not comfortable. One installation, featuring heads of famous revolutionaries set onto poles in the manner of ancient public executions, provocatively asks whether ideology has failed us, or whether we have failed ourselves. For some, this symbolic beheading represents liberation from political cults; for others, it is vandalism against cultural heritage. That ambiguity is Osmolovsky’s core method, a refusal to stabilize or fix meaning.

Material becomes a kind of language. The bronze casts—architectural in spirit—evoke the structure of tanks stripped of their wheels and weaponry, aggressive forms neutralized, emptied of instruments of harm. They glitter like luxury goods, but their polished surfaces conceal the ghost of war machinery. The seemingly simple cardboard folders, tied with string like any office file, reveal another story: they have been unfolded and flattened like patterns of tank turrets, reimagined as fragile origami. Bureaucracy has become armor; paper has become a weapon; perhaps banality has turned into mobilization. This gesture is subtle but unmistakable. Meanwhile, blank calendars from the 1930s appear as archival artifacts, their pages were sealed shut, refusing access to time. This gesture recalls what the historian François Hartog describes as “regimes of historicity”: systems that determine who may enter the past and who must remain outside. Here, time has become property. The sealed pages whispered of stories withheld, dates lost, futures denied—an allegory for lives suspended in ideological suspense.

Bread, enlarged and rendered in bronze, is for me the most haunting element of this thought-provoking exhibition. It is grotesque, swollen, covered with the memory of mold. Enlarged to the scale of monuments, it carries hunger’s intimacy into the public space. In Soviet mythology, bread represented nourishment and sacrifice; in the famine years, it meant survival. By monumentalizing this fragment of private misery, Osmolovsky points to the ways the state aestheticized privation. His artistic trajectory has always placed him at the intersection of form and politics. His performances in 1990s Moscow—often staged on the Arbat—intervened directly in public space, forcing the city to recognize the presence of bodies that refused ideological choreography. He once described himself as “primus in proxímo,” the first inside the next moment, suggesting that each generation must invent its own temporal metabolism.

If the early twentieth-century avant-garde pursued rupture and progress, and late postmodernism dissolved originality, Osmolovsky has interrogated the persistence of old symbols that have survived change and continue to hypnotize. In this regard, his work shares a distant kinship with the sculptural ambivalence of Thomas Schütte or the institutional psychologies of Pierre Huyghe. But where Schütte leans toward melancholy architecture and Huyghe towards biological systems, Osmolovsky sits closer to the rusting edge of ideology. His objects feel like relics that did not complete their journey into museum vitrines. They still carry the scent of the storeroom.

Curator Andrey Erofeev describes Osmolovsky as a “modest recording apparatus of his own time,” and this modesty is where his force resides. The claim sounds paradoxical—how could bronze monuments be modest?—yet in his logic, humility is procedural. The artist avoids expressive brushstrokes; he leaves almost no trace of his hand. The works appear industrial, as if made by someone else. This refusal of authorship is pedagogical: younger artists can study them as exercises. They reveal that contemporary art does not need to exhibit craft, but has to exhibit thought. They echo the avant-garde tradition—Bauhaus, productivism, design, architecture—in which the artist imagined themselves as capable of changing the shape of civilization. Osmolovsky’s objects are not entirely new; they belong to a lineage. Their novelty lies in how they occupy the gap between past and present.

These objects are rare. Across his long career, Osmolovsky has in fact produced comparatively few works, preferring economy to abundance, concept to volume. As Erofeev notes, they form a kind of canon for younger artists entering contemporary practice: lessons in how to use found forms, how to respect the plastic language of the twentieth century, how to feel continuity without mimicry. Like folded tank-patterns, contemporary art must work with “other people’s things”—with inherited structures, charged objects. Creativity begins not with invention, but with recognition.

The gallery space in Paris has temporarily turned into a diagnostic theater in which symptoms of history are being examined. The viewer moves slowly, as though inside a confectionery of contradictions. Everything gleams; everything looks edible; everything burns. Boris Groys once remarked that post-Soviet culture was suspended between museum and supermarket, simultaneously archived and consumed. Osmolovsky visualizes that condition. His forms appear ready for packaging, for display, for circulation. Toxicity arrives not through discipline, but through desire. The most dangerous sweets are the ones voluntarily chosen.

Osmolovsky’s exhibition asks a simple question: what are we willing to swallow, as long as it tastes sweet? The show refuses any clear answers. Instead, it offers the slow discomfort of recognizing oneself reflected in polished metal. This game, as always, continues. Not on the streets of Arbat, but across galleries, institutions, and private museums. Ideology as décor; belief as collectible. The question is no longer whether objects are beautiful, but whether we recognize the hunger they represent. Osmolovsky teaches us to look slowly, attentively, without the comfort of distance. In doing so, he reminds us that the sweetest things can carry the sharpest aftertaste—and that toxicity, in culture as in history, often arrives disguised in shine.

London based art historian Aleks Todorovic reflects on the ´Theatre Picasso´ exhibition at Tate Modern, questioning the curators´ elusive concept of ´performativity´ at its centre and recalling Picasso´s radical collaboration with the Ballets Russes, starting with the scandalous ´Parade´ in 1917 produced by Jean Cocteau with music by Eric Satie.

By Aleks Todorovic

‘When I was a child my mother said to me, “If you become a soldier, you’ll be a general. If you become a monk, you'll be the pope.” Instead, I became a painter and wound up as Picasso.”

Almost everything in Picasso’s art is about Picasso or, rather, about creating his own public persona. Tate Modern’s exhibition Theatre Picasso offers a unique opportunity to see, in one place, its entire collection of the artist’s work including paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures and design, supplemented with a few loans. Doing away with chronology and hierarchy, the curators Wu Tsang and Enrique Fuenteblanca have sought instead to turn the museum space into awunderkammer - a theatre of ideas, inviting the viewer to glimpse some of the threads that are woven throughout his rich œuvre. 

The exhibition catalogue tells us that ‘Picasso’s construction of the persona “Picasso, the Artist” emphasised the idea of an individual artistic genius and has influenced our imagination regarding what an artist is and consequently shaped the history of modern collecting, display and exhibition-making’. Theatre Picasso is a case in point. The exhibition starts with a short video shot by Man Ray, showing Picasso dressed as Carmen, lighting up a cigarette. In a space of only 29 seconds, the video sets the stage for what we are about to experience and summarises the multi-faceted nature of both Picasso’s art and theatre: artistic collaboration, role play, costume, playfulness and ‘performativity’ - a term central to the curators’ vision of Theatre Picasso. An elusive concept that can have a variety of meanings, ‘performativity’ is here in the exhibition catalogue is described as ‘most elementally, [the way] it refers to how words and actions can effect change’. And change is certainly something Picasso did par excellence - changing styles every so often he has, more than once, changed the course of art history. 

Among various manifestations of ‘performativity’ in relation to Picasso’s work, the most obvious one is his involvement with dramatic arts including theatre, ballet and cinema. The main exhibition space of Theatre Picasso echoes the artist’s set design for Igor Stravinsky’s ballet Pulcinella from 1920. At first glance, this composition is a simple depiction of a stage; our eye moves past the receding wings on both sides, and rests in the distance on the stage design depicting a nocturnal setting. At a closer look, however, the device that frames the composition on the left and right is not the wings from which actors appear; it is, instead, the auditorium - two rows of boxes, each framed by a red curtain, populated with audience members depicted in black and white. 

In conceiving of Theatre Picasso, the curators are, in their own words from the catalogue, ‘stealing a few tricks from the master himself’. In his depiction of the set of Pulcinella, Picasso combines the audience’s view towards the stage and the backdrop with the inverted point of view, whereby we as viewers observe the audience within the composition. The construction of the central room of Theatre Picasso as an actual stage plays a similar trick on the Tate visitors. We pass through narrow, dimly lit corridors, looking at Picasso’s artwork hung along each ‘wing’. Once we reach the final, brightly lit room, we turn around to take in the monumental ´The Three Dancers´ from 1925. It is at this point that we realise we are facing a stage set, complete with curtains and a proscenium, and that, a moment ago, we were observed by others while walking along the stage and looking at the exhibited works. The duality of our role as the observer as the observed brings to life the very theme Picasso explores in his drawing. 

Seen as a way in which ‘identity can be constructed or transformed through words and actions’, ‘performativity’ is a concept that applies both to Picasso’s creation of his own persona - or rather a multitude of personas - and to construction of identities in his work for the Ballets Russes. A highly influential dance troupe that operated between 1909 and 1929, the Ballets Russes was the brainchild of Russian-born impresario Sergei Diaghilev. Uniting some of the most creative spirits working in Europe at the time, he commissioned work from composers including Igor Stravinsky, Claude Debussy, Sergei Prokofiev and Maurice Ravel, artists as diverse as Matisse, Kandinsky, Balla, Miró and de Chirico, alongside Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov, and costume designers Léon Bakst, Ivan Bilibin and Coco Chanel.

Picasso was introduced to Diaghilev by fellow artist Jean Cocteau in 1916, and his collaboration with the Ballets Russesstarted with set and costume designs for Erik Satie’s Parade which premiered in Paris the following year. Revolving around the theme of a travelling circus troupe, the story of Parade took Picasso back to a milieu with which he was very familiar: a conjurer, a young girl and acrobats with a horse belong to a world of social outcasts, the demi-monde in which Picasso had dwelled during the early years of the twentieth century when, as a young artist, he moved to Paris. His Blue and Rose period paintings are populated with solitary figures including beggars, prostitutes and circus performers, a panoply of characters on the margins of society with whom Picasso identified. 

The short-lived nature of a ballet performance was perhaps seen by artists as an opportunity to create work that was bolder and highly experimental. Natalia Goncharova, for example, pioneered a combination of Byzantine religious iconography with neo-Primitivism in her designs for Le Coq d’Or (1914), whilst Matisse made his first use of paper cut-outs in his work on Le Chant du Rossignol (1920). Picasso’s further contributions to the Ballets Russes were set and costume designs for Manuel de Falla’s El sombrero de tres picos (1919), Stravinsky’s Pulcinella (1920), traditional Andalusian Cuadro flamenco (1921) and Satie’s Mercure (1927). Throughout these collaborative works, Picasso reached into the past, present and future of his own repertoire, combining elements of Cubism and neo-Classicism with the nascent Surrealism. His work was instrumental in transforming ballet into a starkly modern interdisciplinary art form that combines music, choreography and art into ‘total theatre’. 

Pablo Picasso may have adored the stage, but Tate Modern’s Theatre Picasso too often leaves his pictures standing still. Independent British writer and art curator Alistair Hicks argues that curators drown vitality in concept—summoning “performativity” and Carmen while sidelining the Ballets Russes—and that the show’s joy evaporates under its own thesis. Haunting it all is Olga Khokhlova: the Ukrainian dancer who stopped dancing, and whose shadow, for Hicks, exposes a museum production that mistakes staging for life.

by Alistair Hicks

What a dance! What a performance! Sorry, that is too clear cut. In their introduction, Tate’s in-house directors congratulate the guest curators. They declare that ‘With Theatre Picasso they have created a stage for our collection of works to dance.’ The show is about Picasso’s love of theatre, mythmaking and dance, yet it is hardly a celebration, as Picasso was a misogynist, who bullied a succession of women. So just like Picasso’s love for his first wife, the dancing Olga Khokhlova, soured, the Tate have produced an exhibition that has sadly sucked the joy off the stage that Picasso shared with Sergei Diaghilev. Without joy the pictures refuse to dance. The memory of Olga haunts the show: she hurt her leg just before she was married to the great artist and never danced again, except in his pictures.

The curators conjure up Carmen. They even show Man Ray’s images of Picasso dressed as Carmen – and let’s be honest these images record one of the most satirically hammed Carmens of all time! Where’s the vitality? Where’s the Bizet beat? Where’s the joy? The filmmaker guest curator, Wu Tsang, and her partner-in-crime, Enrique Fuenteblanca, seem to be claiming that they have found the Carmen in Picasso. They write: ‘Just as we had tried to stage Carmen in order to understand the ways in which myth had been constructed, it was now a question of staging nothing more and nothing less than the myth of Picasso.’ If only they had delivered!

The crux of the problem with this show may stem in part with the Tate’s relationship with Russia. The Tate appointed two Russian curators in recent years, ostensibly to appeal to wealthy Russian donors, and hopefully a genuine desire for us all to learn more about Russian art. Most people when they think of theatre and Picasso think of the Ballet Russes. There are photographs and sketches referring to this, but it is far from a central theme.

Picasso was a myth maker on a par with the worst dictators and best storytellers, so it is totally understandable that there should be a warning shot across our bows so we can understand Picasso in context. The curators write that ‘approaching Picasso from our times – informed by the perspectives of feminism, decoloniality, ecologies and so on – it may not be possible to critique Picasso without inevitably ‘redeeming’ him simply by updating the discourse. However, we find the concept of performativity to be valuable here …’ They decided to judge him by an ugly word that is already outdated. They go on to ‘explain’ that ‘The word ‘performativity’ can mean a lot of things and is often misunderstood. Perhaps most elementally, it refers to how words and actions can effect change, transform or undo states of being. We find performativity in many aspects of Picasso’s work: as theatricality; as situating gestures in time and space; as ‘doing things with words’, as ‘staging’; to cultivate persona; and as an attention to the performativity of marginalised or ‘marked’ bodies.’  Please! What are they talking about?

But let’s try and forget for a moment the curators and their cramped factory-farming approach to staging. The paintings and photographs do dance when they are given the space in our minds. The exhibition is a success even if it only makes us celebrate the centenary of the Tate’s own ´The Three Dancers´, 1925, which can be read as a monument to the male artist’s infidelity. It was painted as the relationship with Olga was curdling. He had once fallen in love with this ‘beauty’ watching her dance. The naked dancer performs like a central pole around which the others weave their ‘sinful’ ways. Is it Picasso’s hand reaching out to his next lover behind her back? The fleshiest carnal painting in the show is certainly of the next main lover, Marie-Therese, ´Nude Woman in an Armchair´, 1932. The Tate itself had already connived with his promiscuity when they had acquired this picture in 1953. They did not obtain ´The Three Dancers´ until 1965. One of the highpoints of the exhibition catalogue is a photograph recording the culmination of the five-year acquisition process. It shows Lee Miller and Jacqueline Roque playfully hiding behind the canvas, while Roland Penrose, the Trustee who negotiated the deal, and Picasso stand at the side, giving the nudes their respective male gazes.

Of course, an essential part of mythmaking is encouraging others to spread the myth.  As Françoise Gilot recounts in ´Life with Picasso´, he sowed his own seeds of pretension. ‘You see, for me a painting is a dramatic action in the course of which reality finds itself split apart. For me, that dramatic action takes precedence over all other considerations … What counts is the drama of that plastic act, the moment at which the universe comes out of itself and meets its own destruction.’

Let’s conclude with a drawing that Picasso gave to Joanna Drew, who worked for the British Arts Council for forty years and became the Director of the Art Hayward. She was a trailblazing powerful woman in the British art world. She was extremely good looking when Picasso gave her the drawing in the Swinging Sixties. It hardly needs its title, The Kiss, as it is graphic as well as in graphite. The woman´s head is thrown back with her eyes looking up to heaven, just bypassing the massive male Picasso nose. 

The catalogue, complete with its expensive shiny gold cover, informs us that ‘Mercedes Comaposada – co-founder of the libertarian feminist association ´Mujeres Libres´ that campaigned against brothels in the midst of the Spanish Civil War and who worked as Picasso’s secretary to make ends meet while she was in exile – once described Picasso as a feminist.’ Certainly, Picasso helped radically change attitudes. To their credit, through the confusion, the organisers reveal the contradictions in Picasso’s character, but then they make ridiculous claims talking of ‘our own position as legitimisers or de-legitimisers of that which we see.’ If we were to continue in this purely judgemental vein, we could ask why as late as 2006 did Tate accept Picasso’s rapacious kiss? Earlier was it appropriate for an extremely attractive State-appointed young curator to accept this from an 88-year-old lothario? But then the organisers of this show have done enough agonising for all of us, so shall we just toss back our heads and think of the background music, As Time Goes By, in the closing scene of Casablanca.

‘You must remember this
A kiss is just a kiss …’

ver the past few years, a quiet but decisive shift has been unfolding in the geography of the global art market. As traditional centres of cultural power in Europe and the United States contend with saturation, new regions are emerging with confidence, vision and funding. Among them, Central Asia and the Caucasus have become unlikely but potent frontiers. Here, the forces of history, private wealth, and cultural diplomacy are converging to create a new kind of art ecosystem—one that blends heritage with ambition, and local traditions with international reach. Collectors, curators, and institutions are reimagining what it means to participate in the global conversation from places once considered the periphery.

The inaugural Bukhara Biennial, running this autumn under the poetic title Recipes for Broken Hearts, captures this transformation vividly. Spread across restored madrasas and courtyards, the biennial brings together international artists and Uzbek craftspeople, blurring the distinction between art, architecture, and ritual. The city itself becomes a medium—its tiled domes and narrow lanes framing contemporary installations that speak to continuity rather than rupture. For Uzbekistan, the biennial is more than a cultural event: it is a statement of belonging on the global stage, and of pride in the local imagination. Visitors encounter not a polished export of “Central Asian art,” but a living, breathing sense of place.

If Bukhara represents a state-backed gesture of soft power, Almaty exemplifies the private initiative driving much of the region’s artistic renewal. Two major new museums have just opened there, both privately funded yet publicly minded. The Almaty Museum of Arts (AMA), founded by collector Nurlan Smagulov, houses hundreds of works from Kazakhstan and its neighbours, presented in a gleaming building that gestures toward the mountains beyond. Across town, the Tselinny Center of Contemporary Culture occupies a restored Soviet cinema, redesigned by British architect Asif Khan. Its dynamic programme of exhibitions, performances, and talks gives Almaty the kind of contemporary platform long missing from the region. For a generation of Kazakh artists, this represents not just space but legitimacy—a sign that their work belongs within an international conversation.

Further west, in Tbilisi, Shalva Breus is building a museum to house a growing collection of Georgian and international modern and contemporary art. Still under construction, it already carries symbolic weight: a statement of confidence from a country whose cultural scene has often thrived in the shadows of larger neighbours. Breus’s project joins a broader wave of private patronage across the region, where collectors are stepping into roles once reserved for the state. Together, these new museums form an emerging network that could, in time, reshape the cultural map of the post-Soviet world.

This renewal is not limited to new buildings—it is also a rediscovery of art history itself. The extraordinary collection of Russian avant-garde art at the Nukus Museum in Karakalpakstan—long a legend among specialists in the subject —has returned to international prominence. Following its celebrated showing at the 2024 Venice Biennale, discussions are underway to send further parts of the collection abroad. The story of Nukus, where banned or neglected art works found sanctury in the Uzbek desert, feels almost mythical today. It repositions Central Asia not as a backdrop to Russian modernism, but as one of its vital sources—a place where the greatest examples of artistic experimentation survived political repression and geographic isolation.

That rediscovery finds an uncanny echo in the historical literature that once shaped the Western imagination of the region. In the 19th century many intrepid travellers from Europe ventured East to Russia and beyond, publishing their accounts in books which piqued the public’s curiosity in other cultures like Leitch Ritchie’s Voyage Pittoresque, Curieux et Intéressant en Russie a richly illustrated travelogue published in 1846 that delighted nineteenth-century European readers with visions of Russia’s “Oriental” frontier. Ritchie’s descriptions of Samarkand and the steppes—filtered through equal parts wonder and misunderstanding—offer a revealing mirror to today’s global curiosity. Where Ritchie’s travellers approached Central Asia as an exotic landscape to be decoded, the artists of the Bukhara Biennial invite viewers to see it from within.

Russian artist Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin’s own writings on Samarkand, published in the Soviet period, form a poetic bridge between historical eras. His 1921 journey to Central Asia transformed not only his palette but his philosophy of art. The resulting works—most notably his Samarkand series—are steeped in the city’s light and geometry, turning the blue domes and ochre courtyards of Uzbekistan into modern icons. Petrov-Vodkin’s reflections, when placed alongside the ancient manuscripts and travel diaries in your collection, reveal how art and travel have long been intertwined in this part of the world: the eye of the traveller and the eye of the artist as two halves of the same curiosity.

The renewed interest in such cross-cultural histories has market consequences. With Russian collectors constrained by sanctions, attention and capital have shifted naturally toward the Caucasus and Central Asia. Wealthy patrons in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, and Georgia are busy on the international stage, networking, acquiring works and building institutions. As a result, art associated with these regions has become increasingly sought after—whether by Armenian and Georgian masters like Martiros Saryan and Lado Gudiashvili, by Uzbek avant-garde painter Alexander Volkov, or by Russian artists such as Alexander Yakovlev, who travelled through the region in the early twentieth century. What was once considered marginal or ethnographic now stands as an important chapter in the story of 20th century modernism.

This evolution is mixed in with initiatives in London with a substantial diaspora and international collector base which has long attracted contemporary artists from the region, and sold historical works by artists from Central Asia and the Caucasus in the Russian auctions. Sotheby’s “At the Crossroads” exhibitions a decade ago introduced many Western audiences to this art for the first time, while the Saatchi Gallery gave prominence to Russian- Azeri artist Aidan Salakhova and Georgian Zurab Tsereteli. Yet what distinguishes the current moment is that the energy is flowing homeward. The collectors who once may have staged exhibitions in London are now building museums in Almaty and Tbilisi; the curators who once looked westwards are now engaging with the local scene with biennials and residencies.

Meanwhile, in Uzbekistan, state policy has recognised the strategic value of culture. New public funds are supporting contemporary artists, while international exhibitions are reintroducing Uzbek collections to global audiences. In Russia, the “Light Between Worlds” exhibition in Istra—bringing together works from two major Uzbek museums—serves as both historical bridge and symbolic gesture. The state’s backing of the Bukhara Biennial further underscores how art and diplomacy now move in tandem.

For the global art market, this convergence of cultural rediscovery and financial freedom represents both promise and complexity. There is genuine curiosity about the art histories of these regions, but also the temptation to simplify—to turn the depth of their traditions into marketable narratives of “rediscovery.” The challenge for new institutions will be to balance international visibility with local resonance, to ensure that art serves as a bridge rather than an export.

Still, it is hard not to feel excitement. After decades in which the art of Central Asia and the Caucasus was subsumed under the Soviet label or ignored altogether, the region is asserting its own voice. The biennial in Bukhara, the museums in Almaty and (in future) Tbilisi, the renewed fascination with Nukus—all signal a tectonic cultural awakening. The same roads that once carried merchants and manuscripts across the steppe are alive again—only now, they carry art.

With the rapid global rise of private museums—more than eighty percent of which have been founded since the turn of the millennium—these privately funded yet publicly oriented institutions have become powerful agents in shaping how we encounter and interpret art. They also serve as platforms for broader sociopolitical messaging, often reflecting the personal values of their founders. Whereas major state museums once stood as the sole arbiters of cultural taste, today the guardianship of heritage and influence has been, in many ways, democratized by individual voices.

When we think of museums, we usually imagine something monumental and enduring, as if carved in stone. White walls, labels under exhibits, silence, and academic distance. It often seems as though the museum defines the canon and shapes public taste, while collectors merely align their collections to these standards, checking their choices against an established benchmark. But in reality, things are not so clear-cut. Very often, the opposite happens: private collections become a source of new life, and museums look at them as in a mirror, borrowing themes, names, and ideas for the future.

In this sense, the collector becomes a kind of invisible curator. His or her choices are driven not only by logic and academic knowledge but also by personal passion, intuition, and sometimes even whim. Private collectors can afford to take risks: to purchase a work by an artist whose name has not yet appeared in catalogues, to assemble a series that may seem random or overly subjective, to favor trends that are not yet considered mainstream. And it is precisely this freedom that becomes a kind of laboratory in which new perspectives on art are developed. The museum, by virtue of its institutional nature, is more cautious and slow-moving, but by observing private collectors, it often adopts their boldness.

History provides many examples where private collections changed the rules of the game. In Russia, one only needs to recall Sergei Shchukin (1854–1936) and Ivan Morozov (1871–1921). Their collections of French modernism initially provoked scandal, ridicule, and confusion. But thanks to their personal passion, artists like Henri Matisse (1869–1954), Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), and the Impressionists entered Russian cultural space — artists whose works today seem like official symbols of twentieth-century art. It is hard to imagine that there was once a time when the public rejected them as "incomprehensible experiments." But it all started with private risk, with intuition, and a willingness to go against public opinion.

The same story played out in the West. Peggy Guggenheim (1898–1979), with her passionate interest in the avant-garde, or Gertrude Stein (1874–1946), surrounded by the Parisian artistic circle, made choices that official museums did not dare to support. In their salons, works were first shown that would later enter the history of world art. Only afterwards did institutions catch up, institutionalizing what had already been discovered and tested by collectors.

Other examples can be found in more recent history. In the 1960s, George Costakis (1913–1990) collected Russian avant-garde works that were practically banned in the USSR. His apartment in Moscow became a real unofficial museum, home to works by Kazimir Malevich (1879–1935), Alexander Rodchenko (1891–1956), and Lyubov Popova (1889–1924). Later, a significant portion of this collection went to the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, and it was precisely this that enabled us to see the avant-garde as a key part of Russian art history. Again, the same pattern played out: the collector took the risk, invested time and money into something considered "dangerous" and unpromising, and the museum later preserved and legitimized that choice for society.

Our greatest museums owe a great deal to private collections for the emergence of new themes and fresh subjects for exhibitions. In recent decades, exhibitions based on temporary loans from private collections have become common practice. This is not just an addition to museum holdings, but an opportunity to tell stories from a different perspective. Sometimes it is about “second-tier” artists, those who did not make it into major textbooks but caught the collector’s eye because they saw intrinsic value in them. This happened, for instance, with the renewed interest in the Russian diaspora: collectors were the first to begin assembling works by artists who emigrated after the Revolution, and through those collections, we are now rediscovering whole layers of art — from Alexander Benois (1870–1960) to Nikolai Fechin (1881–1955).

It is important to remember that a collector’s choices are never neutral. They are always coloured by individual passion and subjectivity. Sometimes it is a love for a particular artist, sometimes — an obsession with an entire era or even a detail, such as works on paper, rare publications, or the decorative arts. For years, such areas were considered secondary by museums and remained on the periphery of attention. But collectors showed that these held tremendous energy. One only has to recall how, in the early twentieth century, philanthropists became fascinated by Russian icons at a time when the Church was stepping away from them, and museum curators were still hesitant to undertake serious studies. Or how Western collectors in the mid-twentieth century were collecting Russian avant-garde works when they were banned in Russia itself. These private efforts preserved threads that museums would later pick up and turn into recognized exhibitions.

Museums not only acquire works from collectors but also adopt their tone, their approach. This influence can even be seen in how institutions now present exhibitions. Today, it is increasingly common to build exhibitions as personal narratives, where the focus shifts from chronology and “schools” to the story of a single collection. This subjective, “alive” approach clearly comes from the world of private collections. It allows the viewer to see not “art history as a whole” but a history of vision, a history of choice. And that is what makes exhibitions warmer and closer to human experience.

At a certain point, we start to ask: is the museum a mirror of the collector, or a co-author of their vision? The answer is likely that it is always a dialogue. Museums find in private collections a fresh perspective that allows them to step outside the confines of the established canon. They fill gaps with what collectors have preserved and valued — things the institution may have overlooked or underestimated. They gain the opportunity to tell a new story — one that is less official and more alive. And this makes the collector not just a donor whose works adorn museum halls, but a full-fledged participant in the creation of cultural narrative.

This interaction is not a competition. On the contrary, it is more of a partnership, where each side plays its own role. The collector takes risks and chooses with his or her heart. The museum, with its authority, solidifies and institutionalizes this choice, turning it into part of the grand history of art. Without the collector, the museum risks becoming frozen in the canon. And without the museum, the private collection remains just a personal story, lacking public recognition. Together, they form a system in which the personal gradually becomes universal.

There is also a subtle psychological dimension. The collector often acts as someone who wants to “preserve” something for the future — sometimes not even for a museum, but simply for the sake of its continued existence. The museum becomes the place where this personal effort meets the public. It is at this intersection that the living history of art is born — not an abstract canon, but a history of choices, risks, and passions. That is why in museum halls, we often feel the presence of a personality: even if the label says “gift” or “collection of so-and-so,” behind that is always a living hand, a human choice.

So, when we leave a museum, it is worth asking: whose mirror did we just look into? Perhaps we encountered not just the canon but the reflection of one person — a collector whose choice influenced an entire layer of culture. And maybe that is why a museum is never just a stone monument — in its halls, there always echoes the quiet but persistent voice of private passion.

Shakespeare famously said all the world is a stage, but perhaps this was a stroke of great artisic licence and what he could have said was that all the world is a market place. And we are all not players but traders or marketeers. Some of the greatest artists have been talented marketeers, knowing how to shock and stir our emotions, and behind this ability a subtle calculation—the desire not only to show a work, but to make sure it would be talked about, to ensure that the public or viewers would not remain indifferent. Today we might call this a marketing technique, though the artists of the past would mostly not have used such a phrase. And yet, if one looks closely at the history of art, it becomes clear that many great artists consciously built communication with their audience, created a special atmosphere around their works, and even turned them into events. This in no way diminishes their artistic value, but rather adds another layer—the ability to work with attention, emotions, and the expectations of the public.

In 19th century Russia, an example of such an approach can be found in Pavel Fedotov (1815–1852). His paintings were filled with satire and social observations, but the artist went further: he accompanied them with ratseya (from the Russian «рацея») — short rhymed verses that at once explained and ridiculed what was depicted. These texts served as a kind of verbal commentary to the paintings, as in the case of his famous ´The Major’s Courtship´. There Fedotov wrote ironically about poverty, about the futile chase after fashion, about ruined aristocrats and the new but no less superficial merchant class. Thus the viewer not only looked at the image but also immediately received keys to its interpretation. The painting and the poem together created a multilayered picture of the epoch, while the artist himself became something like a stage director, uniting painting and poetry to amplify the effect. It was, in a way, a marketing device that allowed the audience to immerse more deeply in the context, to empathize more strongly, and therefore to remember the work.

Another Russian artist, Konstantin Makovsky (1839–1915), chose a completely different path. He understood that female sitters wanted not merely a portrait, but a special status—a sense of belonging to something greater than a simple likeness. So Makovsky began collecting old Russian costumes and ornaments, integrating them into his artistic practice. Ladies who posed for him dressed in kokoshniks and luxurious garments, and the sitting became a ritual. The resulting portrait was not just beautiful—it acquired an aura of historicity and cultural depth, as if each model had become part of a legend about the greatness of Russian culture. For his clients it was akin to purchasing symbolic capital, and for the artist—a brilliant way to strengthen his name and forge a unique style that set him apart from colleagues. Makovsky was attuned to the moment: society’s interest in national themes was growing, and he offered a ready-made form in which both artist and patron benefited. This was an exemplary case of how a marketing device could be organically woven into art and serve both sides.

Of course such strategies were not new and art history is full of precedents – in the 17th century Rembrandt (1606–1669) collected costumes and accessories from different cultures and dressed his sitters in them. Turkish turbans, exotic fabrics, weapons—all gave his paintings a distinctive atmosphere. The viewer saw not simply a portrait but a whole world, full of allusions to distant lands, wealth, and power. Here marketing was built into the very foundation of artistic intention: Rembrandt understood that viewers wanted to see in a painting not only themselves, but also a dream of something larger than their own lives.

In the twentieth century artists’ marketing strategies became far more intentional. Andy Warhol (1928–1987) was perhaps the first to state openly that art is business, and that there is nothing shameful in it. He consciously turned his own name into a brand and everyday objects into works of art. His famous Campbell’s soup cans became the symbol of an entire era. Warhol displayed them in a gallery as though it were a grocery store, and viewers realized for the first time that art could be not lofty but utterly commonplace. It was both a provocation and a clever calculation. He took what was familiar to everyone and transformed it into an image impossible to forget. For him, the soups were not only a memory of childhood and of a daily staple, but also a symbol of democracy: a can of Campbell’s could be bought by both a president and a homeless vagabond. Warhol made art both mass and elite, and in this lay his brilliant marketing strategy.

Working in a similar vein is Jeff Koons (b. 1955), who began as a ticket seller at MoMA and then as a stockbroker. The experience of financial trading taught him an essential lesson: one must create not only for oneself but also for the public. Koons realized that the strongest emotions are tied to childhood, to toys, to the feeling of joy and simplicity. That is how his metallic puppies, rabbits, and other “toys for adults” appeared. Their glossy surfaces reflect the viewers themselves, and each person saw in them his or her own face, memory, or feeling. It was a calculated device: Koons’s works required no special preparation, they spoke immediately to everyone, from a billionaire to a casual museum visitor. In this way he showed that art could be accessible and comprehensible without complex interpretations, and that the power of a work lies in its ability to instantly evoke emotions and create a sense of celebration.

If Warhol turned banalities into art and Koons brought us back to childhood, René Magritte (1898–1967) pursued philosophy. His famous phrase “Ceci n'est pas une pipe” was a marketing lesson long before the term itself existed. Magritte demonstrated that we consume not objects but ideas. We do not buy a pipe—we buy the representation of it. In contemporary marketing this has become a rule: what is sold is not the product, but meaning, image, lifestyle. Magritte anticipated his time and turned a painting into an advertising slogan, an aphorism easy to quote and impossible to forget. At the same time, in his own life he was quite pragmatic: although he openly expressed disdain for commerce, when it came to his own livelihood he accepted various jobs—copying his works for collectors, painting interiors, and during the war even producing forgeries of Titian and Picasso. This is precisely what distinguishes a good entrepreneur—the ability to adapt, to negotiate, to find ways of remaining in demand under any circumstances.

All these examples show that art has never existed in a vacuum. Artists have always understood that what matters is not only what you create, but also how you present it, how you draw the viewer into your game. Some did it through poetry and social satire, others through costumes and rituals, others through everyday objects or reflective surfaces. In each case, the viewer was invited not simply to look, but to become part of the story, to feel included in the process. This feeling of participation is the central marketing device common to all great artists.

The art world today often contrasts pure creativity with commerce, but in reality these spheres have always been closely intertwined. An artist who could attract attention and generate intrigue around him or herself has most often remained in history, because his or her works not only have amazed the public of the day but have also been remembered. In this sense, marketing is not the enemy of art but its ally. It helps the artist speak to the viewer, find a common language, and create the very atmosphere in which the work becomes more than an object.

One might say that artists’ marketing devices are not so much crafty tricks as expressions of their human need to be heard. Fedotov wrote verses for his paintings because he wanted to be understood. Makovsky dressed his models in costumes because they themselves longed for a special image. Warhol and Koons spoke in the language of everyday life and memory because it was close to everyone. Magritte asked philosophical questions because he understood that behind simple objects lie entire worlds of ideas. And all of them, each in his own way, proved that art is always a dialogue. And for that dialogue to happen, one needs not only brush and paint, but also the ability to find a path into people’s hearts.

When the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca (1898-1936) wrote of “the troubled air” in his 1928 surrealist collection of poetry ‘Gypsy Ballads’, he was speaking of an atmosphere heavy with foreboding, but also of something that trembles, quivers, and carries emotion. It is precisely this fragile, vibrating space that French philosopher and art historian Georges Didi-Huberman takes as his starting point in the exhibition ‘In the Troubled Air…’, currently on view at the CCCB in Barcelona. The show arrives at a moment when turbulence feels global: wars, authoritarianism, and deepening political divides. Yet it also arrives at a time when museums in many parts of the world —those institutions designed to hold, reflect, and console—are increasingly struggling to attract visitors. This paradox is worth dwelling on. Just when art’s capacity to sustain hope and reflection feels most necessary, either audiences are drifting away or governements are cutting funding that keeps them truly alive.

This exhibition dares to place utopia at the heart of its inquiry. But this is not utopia as a perfect, distant ideal, more utopia as persistence: a fragile space of imagination and breath that endures even in the midst of ruin. Didi-Huberman structures the show like a grammar of emotions, each gallery a new register inspired by Lorca’s poetry: Childhoods, Thoughts, Faces, Gestures, Places, Politics. The result is less a linear narrative than a poetic atlas—a collection of images, films, and fragments that together chart the ways people confront despair, endure violence, and yet keep imagining.

In the opening and closing sections, ‘Childhoods’, children’s drawings from the Spanish Civil War, photographs of gypsy children near Barcelona in 1937, and images from the Warsaw Ghetto remind us that innocence is never untouched by history. And yet, as Lorca knew, children retain the capacity for play, for imagining something different. Waad al-Kateab’s film from Aleppo, capturing a mother coaxing a smile from her daughter Sama under bombardment, closes the exhibition with a devastating tenderness. This is utopia stripped bare: hope not as fantasy but as survival. Other works reinforce this tension. Rossellini’s ‘Germany Year Zero’ follows Edmund, a child wandering through Berlin’s ruins, while Picasso’s grieving mothers and Bertolt Brecht’s ‘Kriegsfibel’ distill catastrophe into images and words that nonetheless insist on testimony. These works do not console by erasing pain; they console by keeping pain visible, and therefore open to transformation.

The exhibition is also a dialogue across centuries of thought. Lorca’s duende—the dark, tragic energy of art—sits beside Nietzsche’s masks of tragedy, Brecht’s dictionaries of war, Pasolini’s cries of rage, and the gestures of flamenco singers captured in photographic detail. Didi-Huberman elevates Lorca to the rank of Kant or Goethe, not to canonize but to insist that poetry can stand as a philosophy of its own. In this way, the exhibition links past upheavals with present ones. The Spanish Civil War speaks to Syria; May ’68 rhymes with today’s protests; images of lamentation bleed into images of resistance. “They fought, they fought… forever,” Lorca wrote. The lesson here is not despair, but continuity: each generation must rediscover how to breathe within troubled air, and how to wrest from it forms of imagination that point toward justice. This is what makes ‘In the Troubled Air…’ more than an anthology. It is an argument about the political necessity of art in times of crisis. Art, it insists, can still carve out utopian spaces—places of shared mourning, fragile solidarity, and the stubborn survival of imagination.

Why does this matter now? Because as exhibitions like this affirm the role of art as a form of hope, museums themselves are facing profound challenges. Everywhere, attendance has not fully recovered since the pandemic. In the United States, nearly half of museums still report visitor numbers as being below pre-pandemic levels, and audiences are coming less frequently than before. In the UK, Tate galleries have lost 27% of their visitors since 2019, a decline attributed to both Covid and Brexit for while domestic attendance has recovered to about 95%, international visitors remain down at around 61%. Funding cuts compound the problem, with many institutions tightening budgets just as costs are rising. It is a double bind creating a crisis.

Thankfully it is not bad news everywhere. The picture in continental Europe looks more resilient. The Louvre, Vatican Museums, Prado, and Uffizi have all reported attendance near or above pre-pandemic numbers. Spain’s state museums had their best year of the century in 2024, with a tally of over 3.1 million visits. 

Meanwhile, the Middle East is rapidly becoming a hub for cultural growth. In 2025, the Zayed National Museum opened in Abu Dhabi, while the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi is set to open in 2026. Egypt’s Grand Egyptian Museum is scheduled for full opening in November 2025, showcasing the complete Tutankhamun collection. Qatar is advancing major projects like the Lusail Museum and the Art Mill, and Kuwait’s National Cultural District is becoming one of the largest museum complexes in the world.

Although Russia’s cultural landscape has become more fragile amid political and economic pressures, with several independent museums closing, major institutions like the Garage Museum and GES-2 in Moscow remain active. Over the past few years the State Tretyakov Gallery has also been expanding, with new branches in Samara (2023), Kaliningrad (2025), and a planned site in Vladivostok by 2027.

This uneven map suggests that audiences are not simply turning away from culture but are divided by geography, politics, and perhaps shifting expectations of what museums should be. Yet the paradox remains: just when art’s role as a space of reflection feels most needed, many institutions face contraction.

What ‘In the Troubled Air…’ shows is that museums are not simply about preservation; they are also about atmosphere. Moving through CCCB’s galleries feels like passing through different airs: the fearful gaze of children, the silence of masks, the swirl of gestures, the roar of protest. The design is immersive, not encyclopedic. Air itself is a recurring motif. Óscar Muñoz’s mirrors reveal the faces of the dead only when visitors breathe on them. Clouds float in works by Richter and Tàpies. The exhibition is not about “objects in display cases” but about the air we share—its fragility, its turbulence, and its capacity to carry song, lament, and hope. In this sense, the exhibition itself becomes a kind of utopian act. It constructs a space where viewers can confront painful images without turning away, where they can grieve and also imagine, where they can breathe together in troubled air.

Lorca once wrote that children see death everywhere, but do not yet believe it is irreversible. That strange coexistence of fear and possibility is the essence of ‘In the Troubled Air….’ It does not ask us to ignore catastrophe. It asks us to live through it, and still find a way to dream. This matters because museums are precisely the spaces where such collective dreaming can occur. They are not luxuries but necessities: places where societies rehearse empathy, preserve fragile truths, and allow imagination to flicker against despair. And yet, as attendance falters in parts of the world and funding is slashed, the very possibility of such utopian breathing is under threat. That is the paradox the exhibition also underscores. In a moment of planetary turbulence, museums are not ornaments to civic life—they are its lungs.

‘In the Troubled Air…’ insists that a book, a painting, a film, a child’s drawing can still sustain hope in the ruins. To walk through its rooms is to be reminded that a museum, too, can be more than a repository: it can be a space where utopia is not deferred, but lived—fragile, trembling, but shared.

AI is transforming the world of art. A host of new tools has rapidly outpaced traditional methods of valuing and assessing artworks, and the field of technical expertise is evolving with innovative techniques for establishing authenticity. The speed and accessibility of these tools—along with once-rare information now readily available—mean that far more people can access quality art expertise from the comfort of their own homes. While the use of AI in art authentication is still in its early stages, there’s little doubt that within twenty years—if not much sooner—technical art expertise will become more efficient, more widely available, and likely more reliable.

Much is said today about AI replacing human jobs, but the art world—long an exceptionally niche and deeply human domain—will likely continue to offer opportunities that transcend the fluctuations of the market or changes in public funding. In fact, it may serve as a kind of sanctuary from the increasing digitisation and technologisation of our lives. Art helps define humanity’s place in this shifting landscape; it gives voice to the spirit of our time, and remains a champion, a comforter, and a teacher. And for those who work with art—whether in museums, galleries, studios, or auction houses—nothing replaces the physical experience of handling objects. Over time, through personal engagement and human effort, we grow into our roles, building collective memory, deep knowledge, and understanding.

Expertise and connoisseurship are often related, but they are not the same. While AI may revolutionise the authentication of art, it is difficult to imagine it ever truly becoming a connoisseur. Even as a tool for expertise, AI will always require human oversight. Despite its impressive capabilities, it can malfunction, misinterpret data, or lack the nuance required for certain judgments. Connoisseurship may well be the final frontier—one grounded not only in visual analysis and technical skill, but in intuition, memory, and the deeply human art of interpretation.

Art is not merely a product of the soul—it is also a reflection of the ever-evolving dialogue between past and present, a dynamic narrative shaped by countless decisions, contexts, and communities. As art historians, artists, connoisseurs, and collectors, we are all participants in that story. Unreliable, at times, in our wonderfully human way—and yet uniquely equipped to understand one another, both individually and collectively.

Those Kulturträger attuned to change—past or present—can sense what is coming before it’s spoken. They evolve along with their knowledge and, through their insight, help others do the same, in this artificial intelligence has little place.

Russian artist Francisco Infante-Arana’s extensive solo retrospective at the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow earlier this year has served as a reminder to us of the importance today of this grand pioneer of 20th century kinetic art.

During the 1960s Infante experimented with geometric forms, arranging circles, spirals and squares into dynamic compositions that suggest movement and transformation.  His works reflect on time, structure and metaphysical aspects of human perception.

In one such textbook work from 1963, called ‘Catholic Spain’ the static surface conveys a powerful sense of shifting space and rhythm.  The title is a reference to Infante’s own Spanish roots because in the late 1930s his father was among only a few thousand Spanish children who were evacuated to the USSR during the Spanish Civil War. Yet this connection between his own biography and the work itself is left intentionally abstruse, the metaphysics of the artist’s own individual existence as expressed in the forms and colours of the composition ultimately connect with our own perception as the viewer, forcing us to wonder what it all means as we assimilate the light and dynamics in the picture.

Collecting Russian works of art is as much about connoisseurship as it is about passion. For discerning collectors, intricate gold and silver objets de vertu by Fabergé´s top workmasters, luminous icons, and finely carved figurines hold a unique allure, and are a tangible connection to Russia’s rich cultural narrative. These are not merely decorative pieces; they embody craftsmanship, history, and in the case of icons, spiritual devotion.

Fabergé workmaster Mikhail Perchin’s spectacular and historical nephrite, gold and jewelled platter, once gracing the collection of the distinguished Wernher family, and recently rediscovered in a European collection of Russian works of art, assembled over a lifetime, has a commanding presence. The cool depth of its green stone framed with glorious gilded ornamentation, speaks to the grandeur of Russian artistry at the turn of the 20th century – until its recent rediscovery the platter was only known to art historians in a vintage photograph of the legendary Fabergé exhibition in London in 1935 where it is visible on a shelf above the Bay Tree Egg which had been made for Dowager Empress Maria Fedorovna. In contrast, the works created by the nuns of the Serafimo-Ponetaevsky Monastery reflect a quieter, more contemplative beauty—devotional objects crafted with humility and reverence, yet no less remarkable for their refinement and detail.

I believe that to collect such treasures is in some way to participate in a dialogue with history. Each acquisition offers a glimpse into the lives of its creators and patrons—aristocrats, artisans, and religious communities who shaped Russia’s artistic legacy.

As a Russian Art advisory and Russian Art Dealer we strive to find exquisite works of art for you.

The bright, airy rooms of the Beyeler Foundation on the outskirts of Basel could not be a better location for a solo show of the subtle, monochromatic works by Latvian-American artist Vija Celmins (b. 1938). I visited first thing in the morning, as the gallery opened its doors on a sunny June day — a sanctuary of tranquility in what is one of the busiest months in the art calendar. Celmins works at a seriously unhurried pace on each picture, reminding me also to slow down and observe more deeply.

Her practice began with paintings of the most banal, everyday objects found in her studio: heaters, lamps, pencils. These early works laid the groundwork for a lifelong fascination with translating the ordinary into the extraordinary. Moving through the galleries, I found myself gradually drawn in by her mesmerizing images of night skies — black spaces pierced with hundreds of white dots that seem to emit their own inner light. The intense attention to surface, to subtle tonal shifts, lends these works a near-hypnotic quality. Some take on a square format, evoking immediate associations with Kazimir Malevich’s iconic black square, but here reimagined as a cosmos of infinite depth.

Celmins’s art rewards patience and a contemplative eye. Her night skies are at once vast and intimate, cosmic and deeply personal, inviting viewers to lose themselves in their boundless dark fields. These meticulously rendered images function almost as portals, transporting us beyond the white walls of the museum toward something elemental and eternal. In an era of constant noise and speed, Celmins offers a quiet, steady resistance, encouraging us to rediscover wonder through close, attentive looking — and reminding us that stillness can be a radical act.

Russian American artist Oleg Vassiliev (1931-2013) is famous for his powerful paintings that capture moments of introspection, nostalgia, and tranquility. Three of his most notable monumental works, 'Kira on the Path to the Dacha' (1991), 'Before the Sunset' (1990) and 'The Abandoned Road' (2001), stand out for their emotive depth and unique compositions.

'Kira on the Path to the Dacha' displays Vassiliev's mastery in using windows as a metaphor for introspection and self-discovery. The painting depicts the artist’s wife and muse Kira standing within an abstracted ‘window’, lost in thought as she walks along a path leading to the country house towards the viewer or is it towards Vassiliev himself who paints her in his mind’s eye? The subtle play of light and shadow in the central image creates a sense of quiet contemplation, inviting viewers to reflect on their own personal journeys and memories.

In 'Before the Sunset', Vassiliev's use of windows as a framing device enhances the sense of nostalgia in the painting which serves to distance the viewer between past and present, the image of a statue of Lenin bathed in the warm glow of a setting sun in the distance.

'The Abandoned Road' is a striking example of Vassiliev's exploration of solitude and isolation. We see a desolate landscape stretching into a black void, with its overgrown vegetation and crumbling structures, reflecting a sense of abandonment and decay. The stark contrast between the interior and exterior spaces heightens the feeling of loneliness and desolation, inviting viewers to contemplate the transient nature of life.

It is in the mid 1960s that Oleg Vassiliev starts to play with the colour spectrum, creating fully abstract compositions constructed on the diagonals which become a geometric framework.  Later, in 1972 we see the first work on canvas where he creates within the composition a second reality, a naturalistically painted landscape with a figure in an illusory three-dimensional space. There follow a series of canvasses with his wife Kira walking down an alley of birch trees into the centre of the painting, introducing a dynamic we see later of a figure walking into the middle of the painting which eventually paves the way for ´Kira on the Path to the Dacha´. Between 1986 and 1987 Vassiliev explores this further, creating the first ‘window’ composition in ‘Spatial Composition’ a black, white and grey abstract painting in which he places his signature and the date of the painting in red in a prominent position.

In unique ways, all three masterpieces by Vassiliev boldly reference the geometric abstraction of the Russian avant-garde, especially the revolutionary art of Kazimir Malevich. Beyond their formal radicalism, and taken together, Oleg Vassiliev's 'Kira on the Path to the Dacha', 'Before the Sunset', and 'The Abandoned Road', are powerful meditations on memory, introspection, and the passage of time, and have socio-political relevancy as well as being commentaries on the history of art. Through his masterful use of light, composition, and symbolism, Vassiliev invites viewers to ponder the complexities of human experience and the fleeting beauty of art and existence.