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Weak Russian Sales Don't Deter Fabergé Buyer

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Colin Gleadell wraps up the Russian art sales in London:

The Russian art sales in London last week registered a disappointing £47.2 million when at least £55 million had been expected. Of all the sales by Sotheby’s, Christie’s, MacDougall’s and Bonhams, only Christie’s managed to hit its pre-sale estimate by keeping lot numbers down and focussing on the more conservative end of the market.

It also had the highest selling lot of the week, a salon style painting of fashionable figures outside a Parisian café painted in 1875 by Ilya Repin, which sold for £4.5 million — a record for the artist and for any work sold in a Russian art sale. A sketch book for the painting sold for £253,250 to London dealer, Jean-Luc Baroni who is currently exhibiting Russian art in his gallery with the specialist Rusian art dealer, Ivan Samarine.

Among the buyers was Russian billionaire, Alexander Ivanov, the owner of the Faberge museum in Baden-Baden, who spent over £2 million on a variety of works including a £181,000 gold plated Imperial service plate, and a large number of orthodox icons which he will give to Russian churches.

Contemporary Russian art was less in evidence than in previous years, perhaps because that market has not yet recovered confidence.

New heights for modern Czech art at landmark London sale (Telegraph)

 

Russians Forsake Paintings

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Colin Gleadell gave us a good wrap-up of the Russian sales in London a few weeks ago where there was plenty of money to chase up Imperial works of art but a cooling interest in Russian painting, except at MacDougall’s which was able to generate some excitement.

Altogether, the sales made £46m which Gleadell puts in context:

Three years ago, Russian pictures and the price of Fabergé were soaring, and a series of sales in London reached almost £100 million. But in November 2008, they crashed to £50 million, and last year, with wealthy Russians increasingly putting their money into Impressionist and modern art, they fell to £40 million. This year, four London salerooms were hoping to halt the decline with at least £43 million of paintings and works of art on the block.Continue Reading

Sotheby's Russian Evening Sale

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At first glance, today’s evening sale of Russian paintings at Sotheby’s London appears to have yielded lackluster results as only 16 of the 26 paintings offered found buyers. However, the high buy-in rate was redeemed by the relatively large number of works that sold for hammer prices above their estimates.

Among the sale’s estimate-topping highlights were Sergei Vinogradov’s View of Ai-petri, Crimea, which more than tripled its high estimate, selling for a final price of £623,650 and Alexander Iacovleff’s Titi and Naranghe, which exceeded the house’s expectations by 45%, bringing a final price of £2,505,250. In the end, the sale total fell just above the low end of the house’s pre-sale estimate, grossing £10.5 million

For more analysis of the Russian art market, see the latest edition of The ART Report.

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Portrait of a Portrait Artist

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Tonight, Sotheby’s offers Yuri Annenkov’s Portrait of Zinovii Grzhebin for £800,000 to £1,200,000. Grzhebin, the subject of the 1919 painting, was a prominent literary figure of Russia’s Revolutionary Era whose publications often featured collaborations with World of Art artists like Annenkov.

Although Annenkov completed portraits of numerous Russian cultural and political leaders, such works rarely appear on the market. The last comparable example to cross the block was Annenkov’s Portrait of Aleksandr Nikolaevich Tikhonov, which nearly doubled its high estimate, bringing £2,260,500 at Christie’s in 2007.

The estimate on the forthcoming Grzhebin portrait is about the same as the one carried by the Tikhonov portrait (the Grzhebin portrait‘s low estimate is £100,000 less, but the high estimate is the same). Will the Grzhebin portrait also mimic the Tikhonov portrait’s record-breaking performance? For more on Annenkov’s market and the fate of Sotheby’s cover lot, see the latest edition of The ART Report.

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Points for Style

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Russian art sales are typically a mishmosh of Russian periods and styles, and next week’s sessions at Christie’s, Sotheby’s and MacDougall’s are no exception. The earliest dated painting on offer is a waterfront scene from 1815 by Andrei Martynov, (offered at MacDougall’s with an estimate of £170,000 to £250,000) while the most recent, Valery Yershov’s Vigin Soil Upturned (at Sotheby’s for £12,000 to £18,000) dates to earlier this year (is the paint even dry yet?).

In terms of value, the sweet spot is really early 20th-century avant-garde art; the top three prices achieved at Russian art sales in the past five years went to 20th-century works conceived before 1930 by  esteemed members of the vanguard, Konstantin Somov, Natalia Goncharova and Alexander Iacovleff. When average prices and boom-era growth are taken in to account, however, avant-garde art is not the star of all Russian styles. To find out which styles—and specific schools—grew in value during the boom, see the latest edition of The ART Report.

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