A HICCUP IN THE RUSSIAN-ART MARKET | June 15th 2008

Sotheby's

Highly anticipated sales of Russian art in London have yielded sorry results. Fiammetta Rocco, Books and Arts editor of The Economist, explains ...

From ECONOMIST.COM*

The auction houses were trying their best to put on a jolly face. But three solid days of sales of Russian Modernist and 19th-century painting, as well as sculpture and jewellery, showed unequivocally that the Russian-art market has undergone a correction that even the professionals did not forsee.

Just a year ago, two spirited bidders at Christie's in London pushed up the price of "Picking Apples", a sumptuous picture by Natalya Goncharova, a Russian Modernist who emigrated first to Switzerland after the Russian revolution of 1917 and then to Paris. The hammer went down at £4.9m ($9.8m), making Goncharova the world's most expensive female painter.

That achievement brought several other works by the same artist on to the market. But the experience of this past week could not have been more different. "Sailboat", a small blue picture of great skill and dynamism, which Goncharova painted in 1912 and which she gave 40 years afterwards to John Rothenstein, later the longest-serving director of the Tate Gallery, had already been the subject of a bidding war between the three major houses.

Bonhams won the right to sell the painting after promising Rothenstein's heirs a financial arrangement worth as much as 4% more than what other vendors offered. Bonhams also committed itself to a substantial marketing campaign, including an extensive bilingual catalogue for that picture alone, and a tour to New York and Moscow, where the painting was exhibited to potential buyers at a reception in the residence of the British ambassador.

By June 9th, the day of the sale, however, the picture had attracted only a single bidder. He did no more than match the reserve price of £1.5m. Sotheby's experienced much the same later in the evening. Of the two Goncharova paintings on offer in their sale, "Still Life of Peaches and Red Flowers", one of her first still-lifes in oil, began with a single offer of £1m. No further bids were made.

The following lot, "Nature Morte aux Fruits", which Goncharova painted at the start of the first world war and then gave to Guillaume Apollinaire, a French poet, had never previously been auctioned. For two decades it hung above the fireplace in the home of a French collector (better known for his holdings of tribal art) who bought it from the Apollinaire family.

It was tempted out of its cosy domesticity only by the galloping market. On the day of the auction it too suffered from the Goncharova correction effect, entering the sale with just a single £2m bid against the reserve from a well-known collector of Modernist Russian art.

Jo Vickery, head of Sotheby's Russian department in London, said she was happy with the outcome, pointing out that the prices were "in line with pre-sale expectations."

Some bright moments bore out her upbeat view. Sotheby's set six new artists' records during its evening sale on June 9th. In one of the night's biggest flurries, six bidders fought over a pastel nude by Zinaida Evgenia Serebriakova (pictured), painted in Paris in 1929. They took the price up to £500,000, leaving two telephone bidders to fight it out to the finish at just under £1m.

Sotheby's estimates that, across all three days of the sales, close to a quarter of the buyers had never previously bought at a Russian auction, a far higher figure than during the last round of sales in November 2007. One in six buyers was new to Sotheby's altogether.

Those new figures might help explain why the biggest interest this season was in 19th-century classic works. New buyers tend to start with works they know, rather than leaping into the avant-garde.

Two night-time scenes in Paris by Russia's Impressionist, Konstantin Alexeevich Korovin, sold well above their top estimates. And five pictures by Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovsky, a romantic painter of winter scenes and ocean swells, which opened Sotheby's evening auction on June 9th, also sold above their top estimates. These included a scene depicting Pushkin and his muse, the young Countess Raevskaya, by the sea in Crimea. It had been in the Trammell Crow collection in Dallas and made £1.8m. Alas, the rest of the evening was not nearly as successful.

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