THE RUSSIANS COME TO LONDON | June 8th 2008

Sotheby's

Three London auction houses host sales of Russian art next week, catering to some of the most flamboyant spenders in the market today. Fiammetta Rocco, the Books and Arts editor of The Economist, examines the purchasing habits of this relatively new group of collectors ...

From ECONOMIST.COM*

They are known as RRs--Rich Russians--and everybody wants one.

As the credit crunch has spread from banks and hedge funds to the property market and the high street, the major auction houses are anxious to counter any talk that the art market is about to turn. The Federal Reserve may be warning that recession stalks America--and the OECD that Britain faces a 10% fall in house prices and the loss of 200,000 jobs--but the art market, Christie's and Sotheby's insist, is going from strength to strength.

Since the last major slump in the early 1990s, the buyers' profile has completely changed. Then most were American or Japanese. When the boom of the 1980s turned to recession in 1991, both markets were hit at the same time. Today's market is better protected, the auction houses say, because the purchasers are much more widespread.

Tempted to sell by the recent surge in prices, and put off from competing at the highest levels at auction by the weakness of the dollar, Americans have become net sellers of art, disposing of more than they buy. But they are more than made up for with new purchasers from China, the Middle East, India and Russia.

Five years ago, buyers who spent more than $500,000 at Sotheby's auctions, for example, came from 36 countries. Last year they came from 58. The Russians are the most flamboyant. Only last month, Roman Abramovich, a London-based billionaire, paid $86m for Francis Bacon's "Triptych, 1976", the highest price ever paid for a work of art at auction, and $34m for Lucian Freud's "Benefits Supervisor Sleeping", making Mr Freud the highest-selling living artist at auction.

Mr Abramovich has never been known as a major buyer. During his 15-year marriage to the mother of his five children, Irina, he would buy interior-decorating pictures. The couple divorced early last year. On Wednesday, June 4th, Mr Abramovich was seen touring Art Basel, a contemporary-art fair, accompanied by a new girlfriend, Daria Zhukova, who is transforming a disused bus garage designed by Konstantin Melnikov, a Constructivist architect, into the Centre for Contemporary Culture Moscow, due to open in September. Mr Abramovich's new art advisor, who accompanied the couple to Art Basel, is Mollie Dent-Brocklehurst, a former director of the Gagosian gallery in London and Damien Hirst's agent.

But Mr Abramovich is only the tip of the iceberg. In 2004, Viktor Vekselberg, an oil and metals baron, unexpectedly paid more than $90m for the Forbes family collection of Fabergé imperial Easter eggs.

Boris Ivanishvili, a Georgian billionaire, is believed to be the anonymous buyer who in May 2006 bought Picasso's "Dora Maar With Cat," for $95.2m at Sotheby's in New York.

Last February, his nephew bid $11.2m on his behalf for "White Canoe," which Peter Doig, a Scottish-born artist now living in Trinidad, painted in 1991. And last September, Alisher Usmanov, a senior advisor to Gazprom, paid more than $40m for the art collection put together by Mstislav Rostropovich, one of Russia's most famous cellists, and his wife, Galina Vishnevskaya, taking it off the market just days before it was due to be auctioned by Sotheby's. Three weeks ago, Mr Usmanov, who is not an art collector himself, put the Rostropovich works on show at the Constantine Palace outside St Petersburg.

Russians, Georgians and Ukrainians, like many neophytes, usually begin by buying what they know. Their enthusiasm has helped Sotheby's sale of Russian art grow 30-fold in nine years, from $6m in 2000 to more than $180m in 2007. Over the past five years, the auction house reckons it has been adding to its list of Russian buyers at a rate of 100 new names a year.

At Sotheby's most prestigious Russian auction, the evening sale held in London last November, 15% of the buyers were new to the Russian department and had never previously bought at Sotheby's at all.

Next week, the three auction houses will have a chance to test whether the Russian buyers are here to stay when over £100m ($200m) of painting, sculpture, jewellery and other works of art will be sold in the course of four sales between June 9th and 11th.

The highlight of both Bonhams' and Sotheby's auctions are two works by Natalya Goncharova, a leading figure of the Moscow avant-garde who left Russia after the revolution of 1917, eventually settling in Paris. Last June Christie's sold a Goncharova work from 1909, "Picking Apples", for £4.9m, making her the world's most expensive female painter.

That record has enticed two unusual works on to the market, including a painting of a speeding blue sailboat that she completed in Switzerland soon after leaving Russia and which she gave in the 1950s to John Rothenstein, later director of London's National Gallery. The other is a still life, "Nature Morte aux Fruits" (pictured above), which Goncharova painted before leaving Russia and which for years has hung over the fireplace of a Frenchman who collects tribal art.

The contemporary Russian market, where prices can leap from a few thousand pounds to millions in a short space of time, is where the richest pickings are. The traditional market is already more mature. Buyers who cleave to the maxim, "buy quality, buy names" will have much to choose from. There may be no works by Ukraine's Cubist, Konstantin Malevich, for example, whom Jo Vickery, the head of Sotheby's Russian department believes to be the greatest painter from the former Soviet Union, but that is more than made up for with 11 works by Ivan Aivazovsky, Russia's J.M.W. Turner; a beautiful reclining nude by Zinaida Serebriakova from 1929, her most sought-after period; three colourful works by Marie Vassilieff, a Modernist who also moved to Paris before the second world war, several works by Konstantin Korovin, a Russian Impressionist; and a beautiful, energetic landscape of trees by Russia's most famous painter, Martiros Saryan.

Bonhams' auction of Russian art is at its New Bond Street saleroom on June 9th, starting at 2pm. Sotheby's main Russian sale is on the same day at 7pm. Its second sale is on June 10th at 10.30am. Christie's Russian auction is at its King Street saleroom on June 11th at 2.30pm.

(*Fiammetta Rocco writes the Art.view column on economist.com, and is the author of "The Miraculous Fever-tree".)