Much to its detriment, Christie’s seemed to maintain a boom mentality. The house’s experts decided to retain the hefty estimate of £300,000 to £500,000 ($449-749,000) for a series of sketches by Kasimir Malevich, hoping, no doubt, to ride the same wave that had propelled the artist’s Suprematist Composition, 1916, to a record-setting $60,002,500 at Sotheby’s in New York earlier that month. Alas, the tide had turned, and the double-sided drawings were bought in. Konstantin Somov’s provocative Boxer, 1933, showing a nude young athlete from the groin up, was also knocked out of contention by an overpowering estimate — £600,000 to £900,000 ($899,000-1.4 million) — whose low end surpassed the £580,500 ($1.2 million) the painting fetched a mere year ago at Christie’s.

MacDougall’s, which has ranked just behind Sotheby’s in London-based sales of Russian painting since June 2008, had better luck with its Somov lot: 122 ink drawings, 1908-19 (est. £1.5-3 million; $2.3-4.5 million ) done for Le Livre de la marquise, a book of 18th-century erotic French poetry, that went for £1,150,000 million ($1.7 million). Overall, however, the house’s results were as disappointing as those of its counterparts. Its two November sales of 19th- and 20th-century art brought in £2 million less than its single session in the category five months earlier.

"Russian Paintings" originally appeared in the February 2009 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction''s February 2009 Table of Contents.