More Records for Russian Art Sales
Russian Art Week has begun in London with an evening auction at Sotheby's. Records were set for sale prices for 12 artists and the auction as a whole raised £25.7 million ($53 million). That auction was of the best paintings and pieces. It was followed by more sales the next morning and day. Turnout for the auction was very high, and the directors of the London, New York and Moscow Sotheby's offices were present representing VIP clients over the telephone. The auction was conducted by Lord Mark Poltimore.
In the evening auction, Konstantin Makovsky's From the Life of Russian Boyars sold for £2 million ($4.2 million) and two Aivazovskys sold for £513,000 and £580,000. Alexey Bogolyubov's Bretagne Seashore sold for £468,500. Bogolyubov was the favorite painter of Tsar Alexander III. Georgian impressionist Lado Gudiashvili's Green Fairies sold for £580,500. A cubo-futurist still life by Lyubov Popova sold over the telephone for £1.7 million. Two paintings by Pavel Filonov were withdrawn from the auction without explanation.
None of the applied art sold. A silver trophy for horse jumping in Lebedyan, a bronze sculpture by Carlo Rastrelli, a certificate of nobility and works by Faberge went untaken. Half of the lots from the Schreiber family collection were also unlucky. The other half was rather spectacular, however. Thus, a work by Mikhail Larionov and A Vase by avant garde painter Natalia Goncharova failed to find bidders, but Goncharova's early work Bluebells sold over the telephone for £3 million, the low estimate of the price. That was, however, the most expensive item at the auction. Also from that collection, Petr Konchalovsky's Harvest sold for £894,000 and Aristarkh Lentulov's abstract Small Town in the South of Russia sold for £1.7 million. A 1922 work by Nikolay Rerikh, the religious-themed He Himself Came, estimated at £100,000-140,000, sold for £1.7 million.
Another £10 million in sales were chalked up the next day. The biggest surprise was Sergey Vinogradov's View of the Pechora Monastery, estimated at £60,000-80,000, fetching £513,000.
Bonham's held an auction of Russian art at the same time, at which a portrait of a Gypsy girl by Alexey Kharlamov sold for £276,000 and nonconformist Vasily Sitnikov's 1967 Monastery sold for £192,000. Half of the works on offer there did not sell, however.
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All the Article in Russian as of Nov. 28, 2007
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