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.  

ON HOLD

The twice yearly London June Russian art auctions have been put on hold in the face of the tragedy which has been unfolding in the Ukraine and shows no sign of stopping. There is the devastating human cost, the unspeakable suffering; the displacement of people, mainly women and children, on a scale not seen since the 2nd World War.  The crass destruction of historical buildings across the Ukraine.    Artists such as Vassily Kandinsky, Chaim Soutine and Marc Chagall, have always attracted international buyers, and continue to be highly sought-after around the world.  Natalia Goncharova has always had her foot in both camps, sold both in Impressionist and Modern evening sales, as well as Russian auctions; the ballets Russes have had an aesthetic always sympathetic to European and American collectors; marine painter Ivan Aivazovsky had a deep international following across America and Europe until Russian collectors later outbid them.  And there are other fields within the niche ‘Russian’ market which have always attracted global interest, especially icons, and Faberge.  As we saw international collectors gradually get priced out of the runaway Russian art market during the early 2000s, a market which despite dips and troughs has remained buyonant in recent years, I wonder if now there will be new opportunities for international buyers who otherwise were outbid.  This in turn might bring Russian art into other more international collections, something which we saw little of over the past decade.   When working at Sotheby’s many years ago I was once visited by the Georgian Ambassador in London. While we had tea at Sotheby’s café, she rightly questioned me on why auctions which included paintings by artists from Georgia, Armenia, the Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Poland, were called Russian auctions. Perhaps this is indeed the time to revisit what essentially started out in the late 1980s as ‘themed’ sales, a marketing strategy to define marketplaces within the art world as a whole, and thus give a kind of bespoke service and focus to remain competitive.  It was a commercial approach rather than political one, however, this naming of sales as ‘Russian’ which nevertheless covered several different nations, continued to reinforce the scope of influence Moscow had during the Soviet Union, the ghost of the past had not completely gone. 

VIVIAN SUTER: WILD CHILD

I’ve always liked art which is playful, and speaks to our inner child; it is a quality which is easy to underestimate. That hidden part of us which remains childlike, and never grows old, is a source of immeasurable strength. The sheer scale of Suter’s exhibition currently on at the Palacio de Velázquez in Madrid’s Retiro Park feels slightly shocking. As you enter the door and wander around the space, it brings on a state of childlike wonder. The interior of the cavernous 1880s building modelled on Paxton’s Crystal Palace is entirely whitewashed. It is a massive architectural belly of light bathed in Madrid’s winter sun. Into this massive space Suter has stuffed decades of her work; there’s a lifelong odyssey shoved in here, it is the mother of all retrospectives. Huge brightly painted canvasses hanging on simple, specially crafted frames, the paintings unceremoniously unstretched, their ragged, fraying edges in some cases more on view than the actual paint surface. It is as if she does not care that we do not see her paintings. They are just hanging there, semi-hidden. I imagine for a moment the contents of the Prado, taken off their stretchers and hanging here.  These wondrous paintings I am staring at here now are far from brown and far from rigid under layers of varnish scrutinised for centuries by overzealous restorers. There is air, light, colour, stuff, bits from plants, debris, real dirt; each one tells the story of its origins, painted mostly in her Guatemalan studio open to the elements in the rainforest, one of the most dramatic ecosystems in the world. Is this land art, only, on canvas? The hanging canvasses move in the draught and I find myself noticing the gentle circulation of air inside the building. As the artist herself interacts with the elements during the creative process, the lives of these paintings continue. They breathe. They have a life, with us. 

ARCO MADRID

IFEMA’s vast industrial scale building which was turned into a makeshift field hospital during the first wave of the pandemic, was thankfully once more buzzing with art life last week during Arco Madrid.  It was good to see a few galleries from London: the Richard Saltoun gallery had an interesting showing of vintage textile works by two female artists, Columbian Olga de Amaral and Catalan artist Aurelia Munoz.  There were plenty of decent contemporary Spanish works on view especially by Tapies – early ones – and a few beautiful sculptures and works on paper by Jaume Plensa, a stone head at Galerie Lelong and a somewhat larger scale Silent Music V, 2020 at Senda Gallery.  A stand-out attraction was Olafur Eliasson’s ‘Your Accountability of Presence’: simple, beautiful, interactive, and fun.  Among my favourites in the fair were two works on paper by Eduardo Chillida.  An untitled black collage he made in 1984; and at Mayoral a delightful small gem of a work from 1970, with forms reminiscent of his huge metal claws on the north Spanish coast. You can almost hear the wind blowing in it; and smell the sea.  Arco would benefit from a masterpiece dimension, Arco Masters. I find there is something missing when viewing contemporary art without 20thcentury modernist works, especially on such a large scale as an art fair. To my own art sensibility which embraces eclecticism, it seems too arbitrary a cut-off.

AT THE TSUKANOVS

In December just as the festive mood was gathering apace, I got an invitation to speak at a special art soiree organised for young patrons of the V&A at the London house of collectors Igor and Natasha Tsukanov. I have watched this collection grow over the past two decades since I met Igor in the early 2000s when he was exploring Russian modernist art. He made the leap to post-war Russian art and never looked back. Their home in Kensington, is the perfect backdrop, with wide vistas and airy ceiling heights. Igor and I talked together about how Ilya Kabakov’s studio was on the top floor of an apartment in central Moscow where there was no lift: larger paintings were sent down on the outside through a window using a makeshift pulley, such was life then. Many of the guests had arrived from a tour of the Faberge exhibition at the V&A, I could not think of a more polarised cultural offering in one evening, yet there was common ground: the Soviets. Their dislike of the aristocracy was reflected in Faberge (several, now priceless, Faberge eggs were sold off by the Soviets in the 1930s) and the art on the walls around us was created by artists who existed outside the official system, people who thought differently were considered a threat to the status quo and their art was banned.

NEW PAINTINGS, 1,2,3,4,5. 2021

The role of chance in Yoffe’s work moves to the centre of her preoccupations in her latest project called ‘Sluchai’ (Chance). Holed up in a small apartment in isolation for several weeks, Yoffe conceived this new project for a specific site at Fabrika in Moscow. In it she makes a clear break with the figurative work of past years, it is an exciting departure. Four large scale canvasses are hung opposite each other in the space (the fifth is displayed at the end of an adjoining corridor). The titles are numbers between 1-5, emphasising their interrelatedness, although she says they can exist individually too. She insists on a rapport between them and the architecture of the building. Their monumentality contrasts with the spontaneity of their execution. The images were created with her finger on the screen of her phone, it seems with quick swipe gestures.  At close proximity you can see shards of black on the white surface which were created, she says, quite by chance and which are suggestive of forms typically seen in constructivist and suprematist paintings. They are small, hardly perceptible, little references to the past. 

GES-2 FIRST IMPRESSIONS

Imagine for a minute Tate Modern in London without its art collection.  Just a place withclassrooms, a library, cavernous spaces for temporary exhibitions in which you could actually fit probably more than one gigantic turbine.  What would people do there, would they even go? Certainly not in their millions.GES-2 is not an art gallery or museum. It is a cultural space, modelled as a concept on Soviet Houses of Culture. These were places where the workers could learn about art and culture, an edited cut of art aligned with the socio-political values of the Soviet Union. It was part of the propaganda machine.Tate is not a governmental institution, and it still bears the name of its founder the great sugar magnate Henry Tate, however Tate’s main sponsor today is the UK government, and it houses part of the British art collection, so national cultural policy is a part of its fabric. GES-2 is entirely privately funded.One thing is clear at GES-2, art education lies at its heart. When I visited on Saturday morning there were several classes in progress in dedicated rooms with glass walls, there is ahive of activity, I imagine utopian plans being hatched. The classes are advertised on a digital billboard close to the entrance. There are open auditoria which have state of the art sound proofing so that if a concert is going on it can not be heard anywhere else in the building.The building may be gigantic, yet it is friendly. I enjoy walking around, exploring it from top to bottom, finding interesting vistas from different platforms to take in the view and expanse of the building and the landscape which surrounds it.  At this time Moscow is covered in snow, the light is reflecting off it too, it’s beautiful.  Echoes from an industrial past aretransformed simply with the white colouring of the metal structures supporting the glass; and atop, huge pipes and chimney painted in an iconic blue colour described as after ‘Matisse’, not as deep as an Yves Klein blue, much brighter.

Applause For the Contemporary Russian Art!

All of the Russian sales were back in London, live for the first time since the pandemic started.  The market only took a brief tumble at the very outset of the virus in June 2020 and has performed steadily throughout the past few seasons. A clear trend of rising demand over several years for Russian contemporary art (in particular by non-conformist artists) brought unprecedented bidding in this segment. At Sotheby’s, a private collection assembled over 2-3 years during the boom of the noughties fetched close to £6million.  Works flew off the shelf making records, such as for Eli Belyutin an artist hitherto hardly seen at auction previously.  My speculation earlier this autumn that 2021 would see the Russian contemporary art market cross the $10million threshold bore out, a considerable achievement, to be applauded.

A Hero of His Time

A highlight of Russian Art week is Valentin Serov’s Portrait of a Colonel painted in 1911.  It was one of the last portraits he ever painted before his untimely death at the age of 46. Fascinating is how the sitter chose to be painted in a khaki shirt, which is mostly associated with lower ranking military. However, during the Russo-Japanese war (1904-1905) higher ranking officers in action adopted this colour for camouflage.  The portrait has an illustrious provenance, having formerly been in the collection of Vasily Pushkarev the director of the State Russian Museum. It was last exhibited in public at the State Tretyakov Gallery in 2015 marking the 150th Anniversary of the artist’s birth where there was much debate among experts about the sitter whose identity remains a mystery. However, as an image of a decorated man of action who served in the Imperial Russian army it is an alluring portrait of military achievement, a character sketch and document from the very end of the Russian Empire.

Just back from Moscow.  I was in town to select the winners for this year’s Kandinsky Prize and attend the award ceremony, which for the second time took place at MMOMA. The standard was particularly high this time. Art celebrities Anatoly Osmolovsky (the first ever Kandinsky Prize laureate) and Grisha Bruskin as well as Olga Sviblova handed out the prizes in a pared back ceremony due to covid restrictions but broadcast live on the internet for those not able to attend, and the mood at the venue was celebratory.Andrey Kuzkin won the Project of the Year prize for his installation ‘Prayers and Heros’ made out of bread and his own blood; everyone was absolutely in awe of the installation which took several years to complete. Albina Mohryakova won the Young Artist Project of the Year. History repeated itself, both had won already previously and neither thus expected (or were expecting) to win. The Turner prize has never been given to the same artist twice although nominees have been repeated, such as Richard Long who was nominated three times before he won in 1989.  (Lucian Freud was nominated twice in the 1980s losing out over sculptors Tony Cragg and Richard Long, and never won, undoubtedly because at that time painting was perceived as rather old fashioned).Can the Kandinsky Prize be seen as a barometer of the mood of the nation? If so, we can say that in Russia there is an almost all-consuming obsession with the past.  The theme was picked up by Irina Gorlova, head of contemporary art at the Tretyakov Gallery, in her introductory essay about the nominees as so many works were about things that happened in the past.  This created a challenge which the organisers also posed to the shortlisted artists, who were asked: ‘How to live in the present?’Artist Ekaterina Muromtseva sent it straight back: ‘It should be about how to live the past and not the present’ commenting on how many works were about this in the exhibition and that ‘it is hard to be present if you have not properly experienced the past’.  Prize-winner Andrey Kuzkin sought wisdom from his young son who apparently had replied: ‘To live in the present you need to live the past’.  Most roads led to this same ancient Rome, except for Osmolovsky who said: ‘You need to love yourself’ (quite agree) and something about developing a meaningful professional life (quite agree).I do not understand these preoccupations with the past as a collective nostalgia, but I wonder are people seeing parallels in the present, which they are in turn exploring in the past. The present fitted into the glove of the past. Maybe this strange process heals on some level: we all probably know how to look for answers and truth in our personal memories and how this can set us free from past traumas, how forgiveness helps us feel lighter, more alive, so individually as collectively.  But it also raises very tough questions about the present which require change, as Kuzkin, dressed down in khaki and black with a combative demeanour said ‘I am tired of things repeating themselves’. Most of the works in the exhibition were created in the years leading up to the pandemic; I wonder if the life we have been living over the past year and a half might even deepen this preoccupation with the past further in Russia.  Opportunities to connect in the present have resulted in everyone retreating into caves; more time for reflection and living in memories.

On Cosmocow, China and Russia

Cosmoscow, Russia’s premiere contemporary art fair is still in many ways a domestic one, despite its international ambitions. The local galleries far outweigh international participants, even if that probably has helped it continue with some semblance of normality during these covid times.  The fair has grown in stature since it started up nearly a decade ago and is now becoming something like the art event everyone is talking about.  One day I would like to see a Cosmoscow Masters edition, like Frieze in London, that time has not come yet, probably still Russian art collecting has not reached that level of eclecticism, in which collectors embrace equally art from different epochs and are looking for the crème de la crème be it an 18th century Russian imperial portrait or an assemblage by a Moscow conceptual artist. I know some Russian collectors who have such broad tastes, but there are not many, art collecting it seems is a divisive activity where taste puts you in one camp or the other.I was invited by the Association of Galleries to moderate a talk at the fair for gallerists on how to enter the international market. It was energising to sit among such art world movers and shakers as Pearl Lam founder of the successful Pearl Lam Galleries, and Polina Askeri who is fast making a name for herself in the Russian art world, promoting Russian contemporary artists at home and abroad. Their examples are inspirational.We talked a lot of the Chinese art market and the Russian art market, contemporary national art markets which could not be more different: China that darling horse that wins the race every time, and Russia whose contemporary art continues to challenge and provoke finds no place in the stable of the international market.  Lam talked about a game changing auction in 2006 in New York where Chinese contemporary art was sold in a run-away sale which sparked off the market.  I cannot help but think of 1988 in Moscow, and with a sigh I realise it came too early to have much of an effect as a global catalyst: the contemporary international market as we know it today barely existed in the late 1980s; it was not really until the 2000s that globalisation really took hold.  By then, no-one was talking about Russia, the honeymoon period finished long before the end of the nineties. In Asia while the Chinese were buying up Imperial treasures in the West it was western collectors driving the market for contemporary artists; later the Chinese joined them. Today it is mainly only Russian collectors buying Russian contemporary art, a situation which with some cautious optimism I hope will change one day.However, meantime there is a lot to be done. If Russian galleries do not take part in the international art market, the great fairs, the big auctions; if Russian artists are not represented either by them or international galleries, they will simply be written out of art history.  The great international collectors of our time will not buy them, they will not have access, they are and will continue to be invisible.

The new art season has got moving and Vickery Art was in Vienna for the annual contemporary art fair which has always shown strong ties with Russian and Central and Eastern European art. In Vienna, the first Russian Art Focus Prize winner’s ceremony took place - I helped to assemble the shortlist over the Summer - and it felt exciting to be a part of this new prize to recognise writing on Russian contemporary art. The winners of this inaugural edition were Telegraph journalist Theo Merz for his article ‘Back to Black’ and a new research group called AGITATSIA writing on the art collective The Party of the Dead and their performances and actions during the pandemic. It could not have been more topical. We had an Oscars style panel chat before the winners were announced with Hans Ulrich Obrist, Anna Somers Cocks, Nic Iljine and Ekaterina Chuchalina, all board members of RAF.The owners of Russian Art Focus had wanted to celebrate it in a special way, so I curated an NFT project for them with the Prigov Foundation which we presented in Vienna as something of a surprise.  I had been thinking about Dmitry Prigov’s love of the word in art and this shared resonance with the values of the prize itself. The late artist’s Foundation were immediately responsive and put forward seven short recordings he had made on his mobile phone in 2004 and we all felt that they captured something of the moment and would be suited to the NFT medium. These recorded messages were a re-enactment of a performance the artist did 35 years ago, called Citizens’ Addresses, where he wrote 1,000 short messages on pieces of paper which he posted on trees and lampposts around Moscow and gave out at art gatherings, readings and apartment exhibitions to friends and art lovers.  The foundation minted 49 in total, an edition of seven of each, and they were given to everyone taking part in the Prize ceremony, including shortlisted nominees and random guests who attended in Vienna.  I received my own red envelope and following the instructions inside managed to not only access a crypto wallet, but eventually was able to view my little video on Opensea.  I got the one about love which says ‘Citizens! I love you, and that’s why I’m strict, a bit too much sometimes’.