Sotheby’s London presents its forthcoming important Russian art sales series

LONDON.- Following Sotheby’s Russian Art Auction in New York this November, which established the highest price for a painting in any Russian Art sale at Sotheby’s worldwide, with the $6.3 million achieved for Natalia Goncharova’s Street in Moscow, Sotheby’s to present highlights from the forthcoming Russian Art Sales Series in London.

The Important Russian Art Evening Auction on Monday, 28 November 2011 will comprise exceptional paintings by artists including Konstantin Makovsky, Petr Konchalovsky, Konstantin Korovin, Natalia Goncharova and Niko Pirosmani, as well as the superb Collection of Arthur Ferdinand Hamann. The Important Private Collection of Works by Alexander Benois on Tuesday, 29 November 2011 is a stand-alone sale of the artist’s most outstanding and intimate works. The Paintings and Works of Art, Fabergé & Icons auction on Tuesday and Wednesday, 29 and 30 November 2011 features some spectacular treasures, including several of Imperial provenance.

Important Russian Art Evening Sale, Monday 28 November 2011
The Collection of Arthur Ferdinand Hamann brings a marvellous group of Russian paintings to the market. Hamann was born in Riga in 1888 to a wealthy German family: his father a successful industrialist and member of Riga’s Large Guild, and his mother a concert singer. A discerning collector, he acquired paintings from other esteemed collections.

An important work from the collection by Nikolai Roerich has a distinguished early provenance, having been presented to Soviet activist and literary icon Maxim Gorky. The Doomed City (est.£400,000-600,000), first exhibited in 1915, is the most significant work from Roerich’s ‘pre-war’ or ‘prophetic’ series prefiguring World War I. This painting captivated Gorky, who praised Roerich as a ‘great intuitivist of modern times,’ and Roerich subsequently presented the piece to Gorky for his private collection. The painting has not been shown since 1937 at the inaugural exhibition of the Nicholas Roerich Museum in Riga.

The Rostral Columns Near the Stock Exchange, St. Petersburg (1878), by Alexei Petrovich Bogoliubov is estimated at £500,000 – 700,000. This moonlit view showing the gilded dome of St Isaac’s in the background is one of the largest works by Bogoliubov ever to have appeared at auction. Thought to be one of three paintings he sent to the 1878 World Exhibition in Paris, it is also among the most important depictions of his native city to have come to light in recent years. The dimensions of work are extremely impressive, but one of Bogoliubov’s most appealing aspects is his ability to balance grandiose vistas with enchanting detail. These qualities have contributed to making Bogoliubov as one of Russia’s most sought-after artists of the nineteenth century.

Petr Konchalovsky’s exceptionally rare, pre-revolutionary painting Tatar Still Life, dated 1916 is estimated at £500,000-700,000. It first belonged to influential Polish art critic Waldemar George who presented the painting as a wedding gift to Louis Gautier-Chaumet, editor-in-chief of “La Presse” newspaper, where George served as art critic. The still life was executed at the height of Konchalovsky’s creative output, several years after he founded the Jack of Diamonds artists’ society, which pioneered the Russian avant-garde. Konchalovsky and his peers were deeply influenced by the works of Paul Cézanne, and their innovative form of Russian Cézannism finds its most vivid expression in this distinctive work of art.

Petr Konchalovsky’s exceptionally rare, pre-revolutionary painting Tatar Still Life, dated 1916 is estimated at £500,000-700,000. It first belonged to influential Polish art critic Waldemar George who presented the painting as a wedding gift to Louis Gautier-Chaumet, editor-in-chief of “La Presse” newspaper, where George served as art critic. The still life was executed at the height of Konchalovsky’s creative output, several years after he founded the Jack of Diamonds artists’ society, which pioneered the Russian avant-garde. Konchalovsky and his peers were deeply influenced by the works of Paul Cézanne, and their innovative form of Russian Cézannism finds its most vivid expression in this distinctive work of art.

Highlighting the Contemporary works in the sale is Ilya Kabakov’s oil on canvas Landscape with Buildings, 1973 from 2002 is estimated at £300,000-500,000 and forms part of a Tatal Installation, which presented works by two fictional artsists side by side. As with all of Kabakov’s work, memory lies at the centre of the entire series of works which focus on the fictional Kabakov’s relationship with his teacher, Charles Rosenthal. The viewer is presented with a vista onto an idyllic image of Soviet Russia, executed in a palette of muted hues to anchor it firmly in the melancholic past and which is partially obliterated by a dark shape covering the entire right hand side of the canvas. Faced by the problem of how to unite what is seen by the naked eye of reality and abstraction, the fictional Kabakov literally offers a comparison between the bright new world which Rosenthal was led to believe in during the 1920s, and the murky gloom he would have experienced had he lived until the 1970s.

Important Private Collection of Works by Alexander Benois, Tuesday 29 November 2011
The 127-lot evening sale of An Important Private Collection of Works by Alexander Benois, spanning the artist’s lifetime and artistic oeuvre, is expected to realise in excess of £800,000. It represents the largest collection of works by Benois to be offered for sale in recent history and comprises ballet, opera set and costume designs; watercolour views of Russia, France and Italy; book illustrations; sketchbooks and portraits of the artist’s family. Among the many highlights in the sale will be The Bolshoi Kamenny Theatre, St. Petersburg Beneath the Snow, which is estimated at £20,000-30,000. Benois was the descendant of Alberto Cavos, the Russian-Italian architect who built the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow as well as the Mariinsky and Bolshoi Kamenny theatres in St. Petersburg.

Russian Art Day Sale: Works of Art, Fabergé and Icons, Wednesday 30 November 2011
One of the most exquisite Fabergé pieces to be included in this sale is a jewelled silver-gilt and enamel moon clock (est. £120,000–180,000). The translucent midnight-blue enamel covers an underlying pattern of radiating engine-turned waves, and the surface scattered with rose-cut diamond-set stars forming constellations including the Plough and Cassiopeia. The theme of the night sky is perfectly suited to timepiece intended for a bedside table and was employed by Fabergé designers on other examples of varying forms.

A Rare Mechanical Silver Model of a Train (est. £15,000–20,000) was probably among the spectacular gifts given to Tsar Nicholas II in 1915 during his visit to the Bryansk Mechanical Engineering Railway Plant and which was intended to be passed on to Tsarevitch Alexei. Unfortunately many such gifts did not survive or were never transferred to the Museum of Toys, where the majority of the Imperial toys from Tsarskoe Selo are kept. The train features a coal carriage and a railway track measuring 70.5cm long, head and rear lights set with rock crystals, position lights with garnets, railway traffic lights with moonstone and garnet, and the locomotive is applied with the Imperial eagle and Bryansk factory plaque. The train is propelled along the track by means of a winding key.

A Rare and Magnificent Coronation Album of Tsar Alexander II (est. £60,000–80,000) is the first edition of the Imperial Coronation Album, recording the spectacular crowning ceremony of Alexander II on 26 August 1856. It was privately issued at the time of the coronation to guests and participants. The ceremony unfolds visually in 170 pages through a series of coloured lithographs and engravings. This is followed by illustrations of lavish receptions, banquets, gala performances, hunts and fireworks.

A rare and important porcelain snuff box from the Imperial Porcelain Manufactory, circa 1770 is estimated to sell for £25,000–35,000. Only three similarly decorated boxes are known to exist and the present lot was owned by General Matthew (Matvey Feodorovich) Tolstoy, the son of Feodor Tolstoy and the chamberlain and privy councillor to Empress Catherine the Great. This elegant object reflects the exquisite tastes of Empress Catherine and her court. Catherine II loved tobacco, carrying her luxuriously decorated porcelain snuffboxes with her at all times. The lid is decorated with a moulded portrait of the Empress represented as Athena, which can be interpreted as a secret message to the recipient.

Russian Art Day Sale: Paintings, Wednesday 29 November 2011
Ignaty Nivinsky’s oil on canvas 1917 Gurzuf Landscape comes from a private European collection and carries an estimate of £100,000-150,000. Lev Lagorio’s luminous oil on canvas, The Bay of Feodosia is estimated at £150,000-200,000 and comes from a private Greek collection.

Alexander Yakovlev’s sanguine and charcoal on paper Nakamura Utaemon, estimated at £30,000-50,000, comes from a distinguished private collection in New York. Nakamura Utaemon V (1865-1940) came from a long line of famous Kabuki actors. He was an onnagata, a Kabuki actor who typically specialised in female roles. In the present work, he is portrayed as a young bride dressed for the marriage ceremony. Onnagata actors were highly regarded and Utaemon was particularly influential, eventually becoming dean of all Kabuki actors. He sought to ensure the continuity of the kabuki theatre when it became threatened by periods of Westernisation in Japan.

Russian Art Day Sale: Modern and Contemporary Art, Wednesday 29 November 2011
Suspects: Seven Sinners and Seven Righteous by AES+F Group (est. £25,000 – 35,000) is an arresting set of portraits of fourteen teenage girls, aged 13 to 15, half of whom were convicted of murder in cold blood. Seven of the portraits, taken in 1997, were shot in a special prison for youth offenders; the other seven in a prestigious Moscow school. The viewer is challenged to decide for themselves which seven of the fourteen are murderers and which are innocent.

Imperator II (est. £50,000 – 70,000) is an important work by Boris Orlov. Of the piece, Orlov has said: “I reconstructed imperatorial art, the art of the Brezhnev era, an unmistakably imperatorial era, a ‘Trojan epoch’, that we experienced from morning to night. I wanted to create such a model, of course also slightly ironically, as with Conceptual Art.”

Onward to the Victory of Communism (est. £15,000 – 25,000), a banner by the conceptual art duo Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, is a rare piece of Russian conceptual art. It carries considerable historical importance as part of the 1976 series “Questions New York Moscow, New York Moscow”, resulting from the artists’ collaboration with American artist Douglas Davis. The work plays with Soviet mass culture in a complex interaction, in similar ways to Pop Art’s appropriation of advertising imagery.

Oleg Vassiliev’s November. A Beach. Florida (est. £60,000 – 80,000) illuminates the image of family bliss with a force that recalls the artist’s own words: “I want to energise the ordinary within an organised geometric structure.” Although Vassiliev officially conformed to Soviet standards in his work, he also participated in the Soviet Nonconformist Art movement, known as “unofficial” or “dissident” art.