Foreign Investors Donate Artwork to Russia

MOSCOW (Agence France-Presse)—This is a story about a passionate love affair, a landmark in art history, and the reality of doing business in President Vladimir Putin's Russia—all contained in a simple drawing.

It was 1911 in Paris when celebrated Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920) sketched his lover Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966), who was to become one of Russia's most popular poets.

This June, a Swedish real estate firm, Ruric, donated one of those drawings to the Russian state, becoming just the latest in a growing list of companies sponsoring Russian culture, even as the climate hardens against foreign investors.

"People who do this think it's important to create a positive image. It's a sign of trust in Russia, in Russian partners, in Russian culture," said Mikhail Shvydkoi, head of the Russian government's culture agency.

"It shows a long-term strategy," Shvydkoi said at a joint press conference in Moscow with Ruric chairman Nils Nilsson announcing the unprecedented donation.

He listed Nestle's sponsorship of the Golden Mask theatre festival and Credit Suisse's donations to the Bolshoi Theatre as other examples of how foreign companies are helping boost the Russian arts scene.

Ruric is a member of Cultural Patrimony of the Russian Federation, a foundation set up in Switzerland this year that plans to encourage major foreign investors in Russia to donate more works of art.

"It's pretty good public relations," said Albert Isequilla, CEO of Arts Finans Trust, a major sponsor of a recent Modigliani exhibition at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, who also heads up the foundation.

"We want this to be in concert with the Russian ministry of culture and to respond to the particular needs of cultural institutions in Russia," said Isequilla, who helped arrange the purchase of the Modigliani drawing.

After the purchase of the Modigliani drawing, bought in London for around $500,000, Isequilla said the foundation plans to buy more drawings, and possibly even a painting, by the Italian artist.

It's not just foreign firms in Russia that are becoming patrons of the arts. Russian companies have also given donations as part of a government-backed drive to encourage Russian museums to become self-financing.

In 2004, Russian oil magnate Viktor Vekselberg purchased nine bejeweled Faberge eggs from the Forbes family in the United States for at least $70 million and donated them to the Russian state.

Donations such as these help make up for the gaps in Russian museum collections, which have suffered from severe funding problems since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

"This is the Wild West.There is no cultural policy that makes any sense. We hope that by establishing a foundation ... we can produce some results that can lead to policy creation," Isequilla said.

The art dealer said he had started with the Modigliani purchase because he had noticed that no museum in Russia owned any works by the Italian artist, despite extensive collections of other Western European art.

The drawing is also significant because it marks an important shift in Modigliani's art, showing a move away from his earlier expressionism to a style influenced by Egyptian art, Isequilla said.

In her memoirs, Akhmatova remembered how Modigliani would take her to the Egyptian art section of the Louvre Museum in Paris and how he encouraged her to wear African beads.

It was a fateful year for Akhmatova, too, who published her first collection of poems. In one, she wrote: "How to win you back, swift weeks/ Of his love, so airy and ephemeral!"

Among the planned purchases by the foreign investor foundation is another drawing by Modigliani of Akhmatova that had been thought lost for decades. She kept it all through her tumultuous life, hanging in her bedroom.