Artist Dossier: Natalia Gonchorova

From the Files

+ In 1986, Sotheby's New York sold the 1911 oil Flowering Trees for $34,100. That same canvas hit the block in June 2007 at Sotheby's London, where it earned a tidy £580,000 ($1 million).

+ Goncharova was 57 when she married her lifelong partner and artistic collaborator, Mikhail Federovich Larionov, in 1955. His top auction lot is Still Life with Jug and Icon, 1910-12, which fetched £2.3 million ($4.5 million) in a Sotheby's London sale in June 2007.

+ In September 2010, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London will stage "Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes 1900-1939," featuring the work of Goncharova alongside that of other Diaghilev artists, such as Matisse and Picasso.

+ London's Grosvenor Gallery sold a large Cubist work by Goncharova for $600,000 in the 1980s; recently another dealer sold it again, this time to a Russian collector, for $5 million.

Pablo Picasso Joan Mitchell Henri Matisse Fernand Leger Le Corbusier Natalia Goncharova Mikhail Larionov YSL/Bergé Auction Fetches Double Its Estimate

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Because her early oils are so rare and sought after, a number of fakes attributed to Goncharova have surfaced, confusing dealers and connoisseurs—and at times even the scholars and curators who know her work well. Ana Maricevic, a managing partner of the Moscow-based Maricevic Fine Art & Antiques, which specializes in blue-chip Russian art of the 19th and 20th centuries, says that although her gallery would love to carry paintings by Goncharova, it hasn’t been able to in a long time because “all the works we’ve come across were, in our opinion, not right.” That includes a Neoprimitivist village scene that a Belgian collector recently sold for a reported  €5 million ($7.9 million) in the private market, which Maricevic says she “wouldn’t touch with a stick.”

The London dealer James Butterwick—who several years ago sold two of Goncharova’s Russian-period oils, the 1914 Rayonist Flowers and the 1906–07 Lilacs, to an anonymous Western European collector for between $500,000 and $1.5 million each—has encountered more fakes than authentic works by the artist. “Recently a bank asked me to value a collection in Liechtenstein with five major Goncharovas in it,” says Butterwick. “They were all fakes.”

Despite such authenticity issues, the market for Goncharova’s oils remains hot. In contrast, her works on paper command comparatively little interest, especially among Russians. “Works on paper are, in general, underappreciated by Russian collectors—people here don’t think graphic works are that prestigious,” says Maricevic. Goncharova’s graphic pieces consist largely of sketches and studies done in pencil, gouache or watercolor for the many ballet performances she worked on as a stage designer from 1914 to the end of her career—the roughly five decades known as her French period. During these years, Goncharova also executed several pencil and charcoal portraits of the cultural luminaries she met in Paris, such as the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky, and a number of highly realistic gouache still lifes and landscapes, the latter often inspired by her travels to the south of France. 

Anthony Parton, a professor at Durham University, in England, who is at work on a monograph on Goncharova, believes it’s a shame that her theater designs are less highly regarded than her oils. “She was one of the best stage designers the 20th century ever knew,” he explains, adding that “there is an organic link between her balletic work and her painterly work.”

Of her ballet material, the brightly colored sketches of settings and costumes that she produced bythe dozens for a handful of Diaghilev productions, notably the 1914 triumph Le coq d’or, are more prized than the designs she did in the ’30s and ’40s for less well known companies. The London dealer Julian Barran estimates that a Diaghilev decor illustration would fetch close to £150,000 ($299,000) and a costume sketch probably between £70,000 and £100,000 ($140–200,000).  At press time, all that Barran had in his inventory was a pen-and-ink study Goncharova did for a ballet staged by the Paris-based Russian dancer and choreographer Serge Lifar in the 1930s. The work, produced after Diaghilev died, in 1929, “doesn’t have the same cachet,” observes Barran, who has priced it between £6,000 and £8,000 ($12–16,000).

In October 2007, Galerie 1900–2000, in Paris, presented a show of 400 of Goncharova’s works on paper representing the full range, from her still lifes to her costume designs to several book illustrations she produced in 1920, priced between €2,000 and  €60,000 ($3,200–94,800). The exhibition traveled in December to Martini & Ronchetti Gallery, in Genoa, Italy. European collectors, principally those who attended the show in Italy, purchased many of the pieces, although a number remain with the Paris gallery unsold.