Two for the Road

MOSCOW—Two auction previews took place in Moscow this week, both featuring postwar and contemporary Russian art bound for London. On February 20, Sotheby’s opened an exhibition at the Moscow Arts Center of work from its upcoming Russian Contemporary sale in London, while the much smaller, younger MacDougall's auction house held a press conference at Moscow's Savoy Hotel on February 21 to announce a London exhibition of three prominent artists from the Russian underground scene.

Sotheby’s Russian Contemporary sale is scheduled for March 12 in London, and Lord Poltimore, head of the auction house's Russian department, said the sale is expected to draw both Russian and foreign collectors. The preview showcased 50 lots, including Oleg Vassiliev’s Pered Rassvetom (Before the Sunrise) (1990), the most expensive of the bunch, estimated at £200–300,000 ($400–600,000). Vassiliev, who lives in New York, is a close friend of the conceptual painter Eric Bulatov, whose Ne Prislonyatsa (Do Not Lean) (1987), commanded a record sum of nearly $2 million in the Phillips de Pury & Co. Russian art sale on June 22, 2007. Vassiliev and Bulatov’s styles are similar, with the former's leaning more toward pure landscape painting.

Some of the works in the preview came not from private collections, but rather straight from the galleries, as is increasingly the case for contemporary art. A bronze baroque-meets-The Matrix sculpture, Warrior # 4 (2006), by the Russian-born artists collective AES+F, is an example, courtesy of Triumph Gallery and estimated at £100–150,000 ($200–295,000).

The preview closes in Moscow on February 24, but will reopen for a four-day stint at Sotheby’s New Bond Street headquarters on March 7.

MacDougall's held an altogether different preview, a press conference promoting the exhibition “Legends of the Russian Underground,” on view in the auction house's Charles II Street headquarters in London from February 25 to March 20. The show, drawn entirely from foreign collections, features works by Evgeny Rukhin, Alexander Kharitonov, and Vasily Sitnikov, three leading Russian nonconformist artists of the postwar period, and coincides with “From Russia,” a grand survey of paintings from the largest Russian museums, currently on view at Britain’s Royal Academy of Arts. Of the three artists, Rukhin is the most recognizable to the Western art lover; his work has been shown several times abroad, including one show in New York, both during his lifetime and since his death in 1976.

Accompanying the exhibition will be a “sealed bid” silent auction on the MacDougall's Web site. The results of the sale will not be announced publicly, but any works that go unsold will be offered at another MacDougall's sale in June, according to Catherine McDougall, a Russian art expert and director of the auction house. Unlike Poltimore, MacDougall expects the paintings from “Legends of the Russian Underground” to return to their homeland. She said the exhibition is being mounted in London and not in Moscow out of financial reasons: Russian customs law makes transitioning works from foreign collections a lengthy and complicated process.