18 17th December 2011


art market Piety and patriotism, keys


■ Bonhams’ Polenovs set the pace as London again woos wealthy Russian buyers


Alex Capon reports


LOOK at the latest Russian sales in London and it would seem that this is one area of the market where traditional art is outselling its Modern and Contemporary counterparts.


Does this mean that wealthy Russians


have conservative tastes as some have suggested? Or is it more indicative of the fact that the market for post-War and Contemporary Russian art has yet to fully develop and that works by the key names in the earlier Russian avant-garde movement, such as Kandinsky, Malevich and Chagall for example, appear instead in the Impressionist sales? Either way, while the odd Goncharova


may be offered at these events, the slack at these specialist Russian art sales tends to be taken up by 19th century artists, some of whom can generate major sums thanks to the hefty spending levels of wealthy private buyers from ex-Soviet countries. A number of such works lifted the


latest Russian auctions in London. While bidding was generally rather


lacklustre, these star performers helped push the overall hammer total from the sales held by four salerooms to £39.9m, which compares with £36.9m for the equivalent series last year. Since the Russian market downturn


in 2008, selling rates and overall totals are substantially lower than the £58m peak. Lucrative consignments are less forthcoming and buyers notably more selective. The top lots of the current series,


however, demonstrated the rewards still available for securing highly prized Russian historical and traditional pictures – provided they are reasonably pitched. The two highest prices of the week


came at Bonhams (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) on November 30 when two rare works by Vasili Polenov (1844- 1927) drew unprecedented interest for the St. Petersburg-born realist. Offered separately, the paintings


came from an unnamed North American institution (thought to be the Muscarelle


Above: He That is Without Sin, one of the two works from Vasili Polenov’s epic 60-work Life of Christ which were consigned from America to Bonhams where it set an artist’s record of £3.6m.


Above right: the second of the Polenov pictures, He is Guilty of Death which at £2.5m also beat the previous £900,000 auction record for the artist.


Left: A Bogatyr by Viktor Vasnetsov – a record £950,000 at Christie’s Russian art sale.


Right: Crucifixion by the Romans from Vasily Vereshchagin’s trilogy on capital punishment – £1.5m at the same Christie’s sale.


Museum of Art in Williamsburg, Virginia) and were billed as “masterpieces of the golden age of 19th century Russian painting”. Both were part of a monumental


series of 60 pictures entitled Life of Christ which took over two decades to complete. Considered to be Polenov’s seminal works, they were only ever exhibited all together once – in Russia in 1909. This exhibition was due to transfer to America and the works were scheduled to be taken on board the Titanic. Reputedly, only a shipment delay saved the works from being lost forever. The works were subsequently


dispersed, with most ending up in various Russian art museums, but these two pictures were among 13 Polenovs which did end up in America, later featuring in The Russian Art Exhibition at Grand Central Palace in New York in


1924. They were then acquired by


industrialist Charles R. Crane who subsequently donated them to the museum and thence to Bonhams. Considered the most important


works by the artist to have emerged on the market in living memory, they were exhibited by the auctioneers in New York and Moscow, as well as London. The more valuable of the two,


estimated at £1.2m-1.8m, was entitled He That is Without Sin, a 3ft 10in x 7ft 10in (1.18 x 2.39m) oil on canvas depicting Christ defending a woman taken in adultery. An earlier large-scale version is now


in the collection of the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg. The other was He is Guilty of Death,


a 3ft 9in x 7ft 3in (1.13 x 2.2m) oil on canvas depicted Christ before the Great


Sanhedrin, supreme court of ancient Israel, after his arrest at the Garden of Gethsemane. This was estimated at £600,000-800,000. Religious subject matter can be a


problem at auction but certainly it didn’t seem so here. Bidders instead appear to have


responded to the emotional intensity of the works as well as a certain familiarity of style – they were by one of Russia’s best-loved artists who was a plein air painter but one who did not experiment with Impressionism. Both exceeded the previous auction


high for Polenov – the £900,000 bid at Sotheby’s London in November 2008 for Egyptian Girl. He That is Without Sin sold at £3.6m


to an anonymous bidder in the room while He is Guilty of Death took £2.5m, also selling to an anonymous buyer.


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