Lots of Records, Buy-Ins at Sotheby’s Russian Sales

NEW YORK—A quick glance at the results from yesterday’s two-session sale of Russian paintings at Sotheby’s New York would lead one to think that the field was in trouble, with more than a third of the lots on offer — 121 out of 325 — failing to sell. Though these numbers are obviously disappointing, the results seem less dire when you consider that last year’s Russian sale at Sotheby’s also had more than a hundred buy-ins. In a new and growing field such as this, where one is unsure of which artists the market will favor, scattershot results are not uncommon. Then again, perhaps the sales would benefit from a bit of judicious editing.

The good news is that nearly all of the major paintings did extremely well. The first session of the sale included 19th- and 20th-century paintings, with the focus on the former. The 191-lot session earned a total of $30,400,050 including buyer’s premiums, by far the bulk of the two-day sale’s overall earnings ($46,449,401, including a third session of works of art, discussed below). Five lots sold for more than $1 million apiece, and eight artists established new records. According to Sonya Bekkerman, head of Sotheby’s Russian paintings department, most of the bidders were Russian or Ukrainian — some in the room, most on the phone — but there was also European and American participation.

The highest price of the day was paid for Birch Grove (1881), an oil painting by famed landscape artist Arkhip Ivanovich Kuindzhi. The work, one of three variations of this subject by the artist and the only one not in a museum, brought $3,065,000 (est. $2–3 million), a record for the artist at auction. Another highlight was a pair of paintings, Distributing Supplies and The Relief Ship, both executed in 1892 by Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovsky, Russia’s greatest seascape painter. Together they earned $2,393,000 (est. $2–3 million). The paintings, which came from an American collection, were conceived as a tribute to America for its role in collecting and sending grain to starving Russian peasants during the winter famine in 1892. The works were donated by the artist to the Corcoran Gallery in Washington D.C. the following year. Another Aivazovsky painting from the same consigner, The Arrival of Columbus’ Flotilla (1880), sold for $1,665,000 (est. $1,250,000–2,000,000). The painting was exhibited at the World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago in 1893, which the artist attended.

The session also had some notable casualties. A large Crimean landscape by Aivazovsky (est. $1.5–2 million) failed to find a buyer, as did a painting of two nudes entitled Two Bathers with a Bird (c. 1920s) by Mikhail Larionov (est. $500–700,000). In the Woods, an 1882 painting of birch trees by realist landscape artist Ivan Shishkin (est. $1.8–2.2 million), was also bought in, an apparent victim of an overoptimistic estimate.

The day’s second session featured postwar and contemporary art, and as in the first sale the emphasis was on the older works in the category. The 130 lots fetched a total of $5,706,500 and set auction records for nine artists, among them Oscar Rabin, an initiator of Moscow’s unofficial, or Nonconformist, art movement in the late 1950s, and one of the organizers of the storied “Bulldozer Exhibition” in 1974 — so-called because Soviet authorities sent bulldozers to destroy it. Rabin, who was stripped of his citizenship in 1978, painted less-than-idyllic views of ordinary life. City With Moon (Socialist City) (1959), a depiction of a broken-down cityscape, sold for $337,000 (est. $120–160,000), a record.

Another record-setter was Evgeny Rukhin, whose Da Nyet (1975), which the consigner acquired directly from the artist, sold for $265,000 (est. $60–80,000). Rukhin, another Nonconformist, was influenced by his American contemporaries—Johns, Rosenquist, Rauschenberg, and Dine — whose work he saw at an exhibition in 1963. Most of his works are found outside of Russia.

Ilya Kabakov’s Flying Komarov (1978), an album of 32 drawings that’s one of the 50 such albums the Conceptualist created relating fictionalized stories of a “typical” Soviet citizen, sold for $445,000 (est. $200–250,000).