Sotheby’s should know. Thanks to the nouveau Russian rich, Russian art has become the single hottest commodity at auction houses. Sotheby’s has already moved more than $100 million of Russian art since January, putting it on pace to trounce last year’s record total of $150 million. Last week Christie’s in London held its first-ever summer Russian sale, fetching an impressive $36 million, and setting a new world record for the highest price ever paid for a painting in a Russian sale (with Konstanin Somov’s $7.3 million “Rainbow”). Total Russian-art sales, just $25 million at auctions in 2002, will likely be 10 times that this year. “The growth is absolutely astronomical,” says Joanna Vickery, head of the Russian-art department at Sotheby’s in London. “What we’re seeing is the establishment of a whole new market.”
International interest in Russian art first began brewing when Mikhail Gorbachev took power at the Kremlin in 1985. But under Boris Yeltsin’s leadership, mafias and murders, rather than art and culture, took center stage. In 1994, Yeltsin’s government shut Moscow’s two major artist studios, effectively closing down the country’s art world.
The oligarchs are reopening it. At the top of the pack are well-known figures like Boris Berezovsky, the exiled oil tycoon, and Victor Vekselberg, who bought the entire Forbes collection of Fabergé Easter eggs in 2004 for a cool $90 million. But there are plenty of unknown buyers snapping up homegrown goods as well—80 percent of Russian art is purchased by Russians themselves. “There is a strong feeling that rich Russians want to get back their heritage,” says Pierre Brochet, a prominent collector.
There’s plenty of rich heritage to buy—Fabergé miniatures, imperial porcelain, Ballets Russes costume designs and Soviet propaganda plates are all commanding record prices. In the past five years, the value of the average Russian painting has grown fivefold. The inflation is happening so rapidly that even Sotheby’s experts can’t keep pace. At Tuesday’s auction, a number of pieces sold for six times their estimated values.
This raises an obvious question: will the boom end in tears, as others have in the past? Perhaps. The 1990 art-market crash saw top impressionist works lose half their value in just six years when Japanese buyers suddenly pulled out of the market. But experts like Sotheby’s believe the Russian-art rush has legs, in part because the country’s cultural and artistic history is so rich, and the urge to repatriate lost treasures is not likely to fade soon. When Vekselberg bought the imperial eggs, he said at the time, “This was a chance to give back to my country one of its most revered treasures.” Other nouveau-riche Russians want to hang legendary artists on their walls to prove their own status, in much the same way that America’s early-20th-century industrialists—like the Fricks and the Carnegies—collected old masters. Finally, others simply see Russian art as a superb investment opportunity, as booming prices keep soaring higher. “This is not a bubble,” says Sotheby’s Vickery. The auction house recently put money on it by opening a permanent branch in Moscow.
Meanwhile, the new crop of buyers isn’t stopping at Russian art. Like the Japanese in the 1980s, Russian collectors are sending prices higher in other trendy genres like impressionism and modern art. Last year an unnamed Russian paid $95 million for Picasso’s “Dora Maar au Chat,” making it the second most expensive painting ever sold. At massive contemporary-art sales in New York last month, Christie’s and Sotheby’s both posted prices in Russian rubles for the first time. Last week hundreds of wealthy Russians flooded the famous Venice Biennale art fair aboard private jets and yachts, shocking organizers who were expecting merely dozens. In short: get ready for more brawls, parrots and other hoopla at the world’s most rarefied art sales.
