Among the growing number of American business people braving Soviet bureaucratic red tape in the hope of fulfilling entrepreneurial drams, art dealers figure in some quantity. But unlike their counterparts in fiber optics and Kentucky Fried Chicken, the dealers are not particularly interested in selling their wares to the Soviets; rather they come to Moscow to buy what the Soviets have. At least since the Sotheby's auction in July 1988, Soviet art has been one of the hottest things on the American art market. The boom received another boost in May 1990, when Habsburg, Feldman (a Geneva-based auction house) held its New York sale of the KNIGA collection of contemporary Soviet art.
The KNIGA collection sale, shown Grisha Bruskin and Vadim Zakharov, capped a year of unprecedented influx of Soviet art and cultural artifacts to the United States. Where for most of the 1980s satirical works by the dissident team of Komar and Melamid and the Russian émigré Leonid Sokov represented Americans' only major points of contact with Soviet avant-garde sensibilities, a veritable firmament of Russian art stars has recently burst onto the international scene. In addition to Bruskin and Zakharov, a short list would include the nigh ubiquitous Ilya Kabakov, who during the past year has had one-person exhibits at the Ronald Feldman Gallery in New York, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., and the Riverside Studios in London. Grim testimonials to realities of life under communism, Kabakov's environmental simulations of Moscow's depressing communal apartments and their inhabitants' struggle to maintain sanity make an indelible impression on Westerners. Another equally well-known elder statesman of "unofficial art," Eric Bulatov, was last fall given a major retrospective exhibit at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago.
The American appetite for Soviet culture is as insatiable as it is wide-ranging. Recent exhibitions have explored diverse topics, including Poster Art of the Soviet Union at the La Jolla Museum; Russian Glass of the 17th-20th Centuries at the Corning Museum of Glass in upstate New York; and the blockbuster Nomads: Masters of the Eurasian Steppe at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.
The Soviets have also been making their mark internationally, mounting group shows and exhibitions of individual artists in Britain, Italy, and The Netherlands. An exhibit titled From Revolution to Perestroika, drawn from the collections of the German Peter Ludwig, opened in February 1990 at the Museum of Modern Art in Saint-Etienne, France. Spanning some seventy years of avant-grade activity, the more than one hundred pieces selected mingle works by Kabakov and Bulatov with those of Russian Modernist masters such as Malevich, Rodchenko, Larionov.
Groundbreaking Exhibition
Perhaps the most important and groundbreaking exhibit to appear thus far is 10 + 10, a joint showing of ten Soviet and ten American contemporary painters. Organized by the Soviet Ministry of Culture; InterCultura, a private organization based in Fort Worth, Texas; and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the exhibit of Soviet and American artists but is also the first to tour both countries, stopping in San Francisco, Buffalo, Milwaukee, and Washington, D.C., and then Moscow, Tbilisi, and Leningrad.
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