MOSCOW—A charity auction of contemporary art raised €260,000 ($390,000) for a children’s home on Monday evening. The auction took place at Moscow’s Ararat Hyatt Hotel and gathered a glamorous crowd including pop stars, fashion editors, and a collector or two who were drawn to the charity prices and wished to support a good cause.

Most of the artworks were donated directly by artists, among them Anatoly Osmolovsky, Dubossarsky/Vinogradov, and Leonid Tishkov, with less than 30 percent coming from galleries. A good deal of the lots were multiples of various kinds (prints, videos, photographs), though a few original works also found their way to the sale. Dmitry Gutov, a Russian artist whose work was featured in the latest editions of the Venice Biennale and Documenta, provided the work with the highest estimate — Red October, a new painting priced at €9,000 ($13,500).

The auction was organized by the experimental theater collective Practica, Time Out Moscow magazine, and Sovcom gallery, which not only sells art, but also runs low-profile auction events in its fields of expertise (Soviet and contemporary art).

Proceeds from the sale will go to a government-run children’s home in Suzdal, a medieval city some 130 kilometers from Moscow, to finish a new building for the children. The auction proceeds fell short of the half million dollars required for the project, but the organizers seemed pleased with the results nonetheless. One dealer at the sale remarked somewhat cynically, “Charity in Russia is en vogue, even more en vogue than contemporary art.”

Press was not admitted to the actual sale, but sources say that more than 90 percent of 78 lots were sold, some doubling or even tripling their presale estimates. Sources close to the organizers caution against interpreting the results as indicative of the Russian art market, however: Most of the buyers were not collectors and do not employ consultants or follow trends.

There are a large number of children’s homes in desperate need of investment in Russia. During the Soviet era, publicly funded children’s homes functioned as both shelters and medical institutions, but like many similar government projects of the past, they have struggled since the country’s turn to capitalism due to neglect and inflation. The Suzdal institution won the attention of Practica director Edward Boyakov thanks to relentless fundraising activity by the home’s staff. Boyakov, who is well connected to upper-echelon businessmen and politicians from his stint as the director of Russia’s high-profile theater award, the Golden Mask, was one of the few people who could have pulled off the event.

The Suzdal home hosts about 30 children with various developmental problems, including autism. Auction sponsor Time Out Moscow’s director Oleg Ryazhenov stressed the importance of improved medical care for children. He told the crowd before the sale that his son, who is autistic, was deemed retarded by Russian doctors. Ryazhenov learned the proper diagnosis when he took his son to doctors in the United States.