The chronicle

QUIET ADVOCATE FOR SOVIET NON-CONFORMISTS IN PARIS

The recent passing of French collector Jean-Jacques Guéron is a sad event for those of us who knew this softly spoken, unassuming man who once supported a whole generation of Russian emigree artists living in France at a time when barely anyone else was interested in their work. I always found it remarkable that Jean-Jacques, a Frenchman by birth, collected Russian art for over a decade before he finally had the opportunity to visit the Soviet Union in 1989 and he reminded me that it is possible, as an outsider, not only to find a deep appreciation of the art of another country to that of one’s birth (and one that for many years he only knew through emigree artists and their stories) but also to create a legacy which itself adds some palpable, individual contribution to the cultural heritage of that other country.  This is an amazing achievement which perhaps with time will become more clear.

Jean-Jacques’ art collection grew through personal encounters and, later, long lasting friendships with artists, especially Mikhail Chemiakin and the late Vladimir Yankilevsky whose work he admired above all others.  He often acknowledged the role that Chemiakin played in forming him as a collector, from the early seventies the artist opened doors to other Soviet non-conformist artists who had settled in Paris including Oleg Tselkov, Oscar Rabin, Lydia Masterkova, and Jean-Jacques discovered a diverse community so rich that he never found the need to cast his net wider as a collector, preferring to contain his interests among the artists of the second Russian avant-garde. Jean-Jacques lived surrounded by his art collection, which he displayed almost casually in his Paris apartment where paintings were hung everywhere from floor to ceiling, piled up in corners, chests filled with works on paper, there was a feeling of quiet chaos, of the art being a living presence in his home.

JEAN POUGNY:  ARTIST, THEORIST AND PIONEER

Pougny’s multifacetted artistic career is a story of two halves, punctuated by a four-year period spent in Berlin from 1920-1924, after which he settled in France where he was to remain for the rest of his life, taking French citizenship in 1946. It was the body of work he produced in Russia during the 1910s that has sealed his reputation as one of the greats of European modernist art. In Western Europe and North America, after the Second World War, his international stature grew with the rise in interest in the Russian avant-garde, and long before this for his activities in Berlin, he was an actor in European modernism itself. The pinnacle - and swansong - of his artistic achievements was a solo exhibition curated by himself at Herwarth Walden’s avant-garde Der Sturm Gallery in 1920.  After his death and in the early 1960s, there were numerous major retrospective shows of his work held throughout Europe including at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Kunsthaus in Zurich.  Since then, however, there has been undeservedly scant sole museum representation, only inclusion in key group exhibitions on the Russian avant-garde. A new reassessment of his entire oeuvre and contribution to the story of modernism is overdue. This Spring at Vickery Art we shall be celebrating the work of  this somewhat neglected Russian avant-gardist.

IN THE EYE OF THE STORM: UKRAINIAN MODERNISM AT THE THYSSEN MUSEUM

Long awaited – because there has never been a survey of Ukrainian modern art ever outside the Ukraine -  and in the current climate highly politicised, the first ever international exhibition of Ukrainian modernism has opened at the Thyssen Museum in Madrid. It feels like a huge breakthrough for the national art scene.  During the thirty years which the exhibition covers, the Ukraine was independent for only four of them, 1918-1922, formerly being a part of the Russian Empire and later the new Soviet state. This sustained condition of natural political submission, and its legacy today, means that the real art historical and cultural achievments of Ukraine have been at best misunderstood, and at worst appropriated by its more powerful neighbour. Artists such as Olexandra Exter, who was born in Kyiv, have all too often been automatically categorised as Russian even though she only spent a few years in Moscow during her long career and her work is full of Ukrainian cultural and folk references.

I first became acquainted with Ukrainian art when working for Sotheby’s where my colleagues and I brought Ukrainian contemporary artists to the international market in London for the first time in 2009. Visiting artist studios in Kyiv, it was quickly clear to me that Ukrainian and Russian art in general are much differentiated, and have quite different characteristics.  Ukrainian art is more painterly, influenced in part by the Odessan school which bathed in the southern sun like the impressionists and post impressionists in the South of France. It is less political in general, and more free. In the modern era the Ukrainians were exceptionally active in the futurist movement, and any history of this artistic and literary phenomenon today would be woefully lacking without mentioning artists such as the Burliuk brothers, Oleksandr Bohomazov or the Cubo-Futurist Oleksandra Exter.

EL TIEMPO ES UN SONIDO QUE NO ESCUCHAMOS

Cuban artist Glenda León’s exhibition ‘El Tiempo es un sonido que no escuchamos’ has just opened at the Juana de Aizpuru gallery in Madrid.  On Saturday we were treated to a  musical performance at the gallery by Neopercusión musical group who played on some of the works creating an atmosphere in which sounds and energies vibrated together around the room. Parts of a sculptural work made out of hand drums (one whole, the others shaped into crescents of differing sizes arranged along the wall to suggest phases of a moon cycle) were lifted off the wall and played by three musicians as they danced around the room.

A raft of plagues has come to our global world: pandemic, war, the gradual breakdown of old political systems which are no longer working; environmental crises. Perhaps we did not listen before to the old stories of bad and good crops laying waste to our plans and the inevitability that things would turn sour one day. It is as if we did not believe the new realities of the past few years were even possible, and now as a consequence we think we could believe just about anything. So here is something. Cuban artist Glenda León has created a body of artwork over the past few decades, using sound, and elements drawn from nature which teaches us how to look and think about life in a far deeper way and to connect with nature both outside and within ourselves. During times of stability her work is an invitation to reflect and meditate on a higher reality; during times of crisis it can still be a space of peace and comfort but it can also be an urgent warning and call to action. ‘Humanity is innovative but destructible. Nature is stronger. We need to coexist with nature and alter our behaviour if we are to reverse climate change’ (GL).

WE ARE A LONG ECHO OF ONE ANOTHER

There is the cliché that history repeats itself, as captured in Spanish-American writer George Santayana’s famous aphorism, ‘Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it’.  It is a phrase which is useful not only in our political lives - it has been borrowed and rephrased by many great leaders, including Winston Churchill - but also our personal lives. I recall a time in my own life when I was haunted by an image, a bit like a daydream. I saw myself in an airplane flying in circles in what is called ‘the hold’ above the airport. There was a claustrophobic feeling of not going anywhere and I had the deep and uncomfortable realisation that this was my life. I was held by this, until I faced what was holding me back and that image helped me to process my feelings and move forwards.

In their didactic show currently on view at Emalin Gallery in London ‘We are a long echo of each other’ Russian artists Antufiev and Nalogina are looking into the past to find answers about the present. They want to better understand why the Russian army is in Ukraine. Their exhibition does not give answers, we must do the work and draw our conclusions, but they build a notion that what is happening now is a repeat (echo) of what happened in the past. In the space they assemble things fit for an Empire: gold pots, decorative mosaics, an oversized child’s toy tank, vintage hunting photos, some pieces are made by the artists, others are artefacts they found and bought at auction from the archive of Marshal Grechko, Soviet Defence Minister in the late 60s and early 70s. Grechko presided over the editorial commission which wrote the official Soviet History of the Second World War. When we tell stories about the past or present, we commit those who read them into the same binds that ‘hold us in the hold’, because we cannot move forwards with authenticity.

ON THE ROAD TO SOMEWHERE

I recently caught up with artist Alejandro Campins in Madrid where he currently has an exhibition at the Elba Benitez gallery. There are many roads into an understanding and appreciation of Campins’ paintings. First there is where he came from: the Eastern part of Cuba, at the opposite end of the island to Havana, an area of beaches and rugged mountains, the Sierra Maestra.  It was this part of Cuba that Columbus called the ‘most beautiful land eyes have ever seen’. For someone like Campins with an artistic sensibility, would he not carry this landscape within, or see it in the background of every landscape he paints, comparing everything to it, as though it were his first love?

Campins studied at ‘El Alba’, a provincial art school in Holugin in the East of Cuba. It was a place to learn how to paint, and today surveying his work in the middle of his career, Campins’ technique is so perfect, that when I congratulated him at his recent exhibition in Madrid because every single painting in the show struck me as exceptional, he immediately wondered whether that was a good thing. In our contemporary art world, have we collectively become so blasé about painterly technique that when we are faced with a great painter, we think there is something wrong?

Campins is a name with medieval European connotations, I do think there is something of the ‘champion’ in his battle to create something more than perfect. As a person – and artist – he is a travelling hermit, most at home on the road, in the outdoors.  However, his landscapes certainly do not link back to the impressionists and their ‘en plein air’ practices: his hero is Casper David Friedrich, an artist he professes to have in his mind’s eye. He freely references Friedrich’s basic approach to painting: ‘close your eyes and paint what you see…’.

Campins, born in 1981, inherited the legacy of ‘Volumen Uno’, the name of an exhibition which took place in 1981 in Havana, in which art was cut free from political constraints. Among the artists who were a part of this group, Tomas Sanchez (b.1948) became the posterchild for Cuban landscape painting, a figurehead to admire and react against. Where Sanchez’ idealised landscapes are pieced artificially together from elements of nature, Campins investigates his subjects and locations, using photography and sketching on site, before painstakingly creating the finished canvasses in his studio, often some years later.

Campins is naturally drawn to isolated places which have captivated humans for centuries if not millennia: the city of the dead in Cairo; the Arizona desert; the Himalaya mountains in Tibet scattered with ancient stupas; derelict, empty war bunkers throughout the world. He is fascinated most by ancient or abandoned architectural traces of human civilisation in the landscape. The fusion of the two in his paintings sites humankind – us – firmly back in nature, something which he feels we ourselves have left, long ago. Perhaps he is searching for a way back, and in sharing with us his vision, we might reflect on this ourselves.

VERRE, TABAC ET PIPE

Vickery Art is delighted to announce the sale of George Braque’s 1917 ‘Verre, Tabac et Pipe’.  Marking a transition between his early and mature works, it is one of only a small handful of still lives to have come up for sale on the modern art market, dating to this period. Braque served in the French army during the First World War and was badly wounded, returning to painting after his convalescence in 1917-1918 which although among his least prolific years as a painter, they crucially spell out the evolution between his early cubist works and the more decorative, high cubist style of his late work.  Most of the recorded works from these few years are in museum collections, such as the Musee Kroller-Muller which has two still lifes from 1917 with which the offered painting shares many similarities, and perhaps the greatest from these two years: ‘La Musicienne’ in the Kunstmusuem Basel or ‘Still life with a Table’ in the Philidelphia Museum of Art painted in 1918.  ‘Verre, Tabac et Pipe’ was sold by the eminent Swiss art dealer Marie-Suzanne Feigel (1916-2006) through her Galerie d’Art Moderne in Basel in 1967.  Prior to that it had been sold by Leonce Rosenburg (his elder brother Paul Rosenburg also represented Braque) at L’Effort Moderne in Paris in a 1919 come-back exhibition presenting the new work Braque had produced since he came back to his easel after the war.

FRIENDSHIP BETWEEN ARTISTS

There are not many Russian paintings on the auction market in London at the moment but a portrait by Prince Pavel Troubetskoy not much larger than the outstretched palm of my hand caught my eye recently.  It is coming up for sale at auction online, in the Isabel Goldsmith collection at Christie’s. It depicts the famous Spainsh 19th century painter Joaquin Sorolla y Batista.  Although the friendship and mutual respect between the Russian sculptor Troubtetskoy and the Spanish painter Sorolla is well documented, Troubetskoy is not known for his paintings. Around 1909 the two men had sat for one another: there is a striking, large scale portrait by Sorolla of Pavel Troubetskoy dated 1910 in the Fundacion Cristina Masaveu collection in Spain. And Troubetskoy did an equally dashing and moody potrait of Sorolla holding a cigarette, this time in bronze, which can be seen today in the Sorolla Museum in Madrid.  Both of these works are undeniably far more powerful than this little portrait; yet how nice it is to see such an unselfconscious document of the times, a breezy rendition, perhaps not so resolved, however, reasonably well-priced and it ought to appeal to fans of Sorolla and Troubetskoy, or collectors who love potraits by artists of artists. The Sorolla Museum in Madrid also has on permanent display one of Troubetskoy’s best loved sculptures, the sensual model of dancer Madame Svirsky in which she is depicted dancing barefoot, very liberal for the times. Sorolla liked it so much he included the sculpture in the background of a portrait he painted of his wife called ‘Clotide on the Sofa’ in 1910.  

OF WARRIORS, PEACEMAKERS AND REFUGEES

For decades I have travelled within both Russia and the Ukraine, and other parts of what was the Soviet Union, and like others before me who have walked the road of going deeper into understanding other cultures, these experiences have inevitably over time left their mark.  So I find myself not really as an observer sitting in London or a sunny terrace in Madrid, but drawn myself into the stark new realities surrounding this armed conflict, which have evolved since February this year. As I speak with and write to my friends and acquaintances in the art community from these parts of the world, I find myself thinking about artists and their predicament. Conflicts feed propaganda machines. 

Yet art has to be free and at its extreme: let it rattle at the cage of our collective limits and find ways of expressing things for which many of us cannot find words! Words when there are none, lines drawn in a void, a claim of the void itself, and more than once if you like. If that means you want to paint or photograph the beauty of a flower, so be it, just do it well.  If that means you must tie yourself to the mast of a ship in a storm, so be it, tell us about it, show it in your art how it got into your veins, it is fascinating. And if you want to talk about injustice or conflict and remind us all about things we try not to see while we go about our daily lives, do it, and do it well. 

Increasingly stuck in a multi-faceted kafkaesque prism many Russian artists have left their homeland and gone abroad. In the West they are finding a less than cool reception, a cold shoulder. When applied as a blunt political weapon, cancel culture can be cruel. Are we not often silencing those who are speaking from the heart? Who can help to build bridges of understanding? We must be just and fair. We must give space and voice to those both caught up in this conflict, and those afraid to speak out, or those afraid to speak out but who do so regardless; those who are warriers for peace and humanity; those who are refugees, who have been forced to leave their homes, families, and gone abroad. 

TIGER, COLLECTOR, BEHOLDER

We showed an ‘eye at the eye’… at London’s newest boutique art fair.  It was our first art fair (and hopefully first of many more to come) and Alisa Yoffe’s first showing in London. Double first! 

Yoffe’s work ‘Fortuna’ was selected by a combination of tastemakers, including the artist, us and the curatorial board of the fair.  The oak panelled room in which it was hung turned out to be an ideal backdrop showing how edgy contemporary art can work perfectly in a traditional interior.  

‘Fortuna’ started out as a picture of an eye and a mouth, and only through a process of adding and erasing the image did Fortuna appear, formed into a gigantic play of white and black shapes and motion (or rhythm as the artist insists) creating a puzzle. Your reading of the image changes as you move around the room and observe it from different perspectives.

The only other artist famous for a face with one horizontal eye and the other vertical is Picasso but that is as far as the comparison goes;  Yoffe’s art historical sources are many: pop and surrealism to name a few, and process art is closer to what shapes her image, although she remains a painter at heart.

One must make a big distinction between Yoffe’s drawings and murals and this kind of finished painted composition in which she explores the processes behind image making and plays with poetic, literary and art historical sources using a contemporary aesthetic rooted in the digital world. 

THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER

It was the first day of the Eye of the Collector art fair in London today and a good steady stream of collectors came through the doors in spite of the rain outside which persisted most of the day.  We hung Alisa Yoffe’s painting ‘Fortuna’ in a small room with a floor to ceiling safe, which looked to be as old as the house itself.  ‘Fortuna’ stood out against the dark wood panelling of 2 Temple Place; I thought about how contemporary art often works so well in a traditional interior, and the whole concept of this fair is about as far away from the white cube as you could imagine. Mostly there is contemporary art and design on view.  As we were introducing Yoffe’s work to collectors in London for the first time, I was curious to gauge people’s reactions.  With many of Yoffe’s semi-abstract paintings, the ones where she plays with adding and subtracting elements, they create entirely different sensations depending on where you are standing.  The further away you are, the clearer the image; yet at close hand there is a wonderful tension between the black and the white fields; I remind myself to look at the white, and not see it as absence yet a kind of active drawing itself, much the same as the black lines, this is not instinctive but when you do this, the painting positively moves with energy.  Rhythm, pace and dynamic movement - these are all things which interest the artist. 

ILYA KABAKOV

I first encountered the work of Ilya and Emilia Kabakov back in the late 1990s when they exhibited the Palace of Projects installation at the Roundhouse in Camden in London close to the neighbourhood where I was living at the time.  I knew nothing of their work, however, was curious as I was already working with Russian art as a young expert at Sotheby´s and I had never come across anything like it before.  This was a time when contemporary art was still overshadowed by the art of the past, and the market even for what we call blue-chip artists today was relatively small, the exponential growth of the contemporary art market happened later. It was not until several years later that I started to get interested in Russian non-conformist artists and by the mid 2000s there were even collectors looking for such works.  They came from within Russia, it was a new generation although then most Russians were looking for realist or modernist paintings.    In 2006 when putting together the Autumn Russian art auction at Sotheby´s I decided to shake things up, and not only took an important work by Ilya Kabakov for sale but put it on the front cover of the catalogue.  It turned out to be extremely controversial; I remember the eyes of a friend of mine from Moscow who had a contemporary art gallery there welling up with emotion to see such a work on the front of a catalogue where often there were most often rather traditional images drawn from Russian Imperial visual culture.  Others were extremely critical, they did not like change, and it proved to be too early, the work did not find one bid.   Ilya Kabakov is not in fact Russian although he is closely associated with the Moscow conceptual school. He was born in the Ukraine in Dniepropetrovsk in 1933 and has been living in Long Island, New Jersey since the early 1990s where he keeps a studio practice until this day, working with his wife Emilia.  Vickery Art has two important paintings by Ilya Kabakov for sale on our digital wall this Spring, if you click on the link to our ´Wall´ you will find out about them.