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In the arts and cultural events calendar that I put up at the beginning of the month, I noted that there was going to be a big sale of Russian art at Christie’s in New York mid-month. Well, if one picture is worth a thousand words, then the results of this sale–and a similar sale at Sotheby’s–say more about the state of Russia’s economic development than several hundred copies of Anna Karenina.
The results at both auctions topped the high end of their pre-sale estimates. The Christie’s International sale brought in $19.3 million; Sotheby’s sale of modern and contemporary Russian art totaled more than $50 million.
The top seller at Sotheby’s April 16-17 sale was “Vision of St. Sergius When a Child”, painted by Mikhail Nesterov in 1922. It went for $4.3 million, which was more than double its pre-sale estimate of $2 million. But a Faberge piece, a gold and enamel miniature armchair, sold for $2.3 million.
The top seller at Christie’s April 18 sale was “Solomon’s Wall”, a depiction of the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem painted by Vasily Vereshchagin in 1884-85. It sold for $3.62 million, which was just above its low estimate of $3 million, but a record for the artist. Still, Alexis de Tiesenhausen, the international head of Russian works of art at Christie’s, reportedly told Art Daily that his auction house was “thrilled” with the results. Christie’s also had a Faberge piece on the block: a three-inch perfume flask made for Empress Alexandra, the wife of Tsar Nicholas II. It sold for $1.38 million, which was four times its top estimate.
But the big dollar amount was just part of the story. According to Bloomberg, about 80% of the buyers were Russians (most of the sellers were Americans). Who was doing all the high-ticket shopping? One of the major buyers was Aurora Fine Art Investments, which is owned by one of Russia’s 53 billionaires, Viktor Vekselberg. He has been on an art buying tear, most notably picking up a collection of nine Faberge eggs owned by my former employer, Forbes, in 2004 for what was rumored to have been $90 million.
