February Silent Auction 

As our silent auction selection for February we are pleased to present this wonderful work, "Portrait of Tanya and Vera", by Piotr Serapionovich Krokholev, estimated at $4,000- $5,000.

We invite you to participate in this month's auction and thank everyone who placed bids last month.

Piotr Serapionovich Krokholev, "Portrait of Tanya and Vera" 39'' x 31¼'', 1960, Oil on Canvas Estimated Value, $4,000 - $5,000, Current Bid, $1,250 J. Rondeos

Piotr Serapionovich Krokholev, (b. 1919)

 

Piotr Krokholev, a Minsk painter, Merited Art Worker of the Byelorussian Republic, was born on October 5, 1919 in the District of Shadrinsk of the Kurgan Region (Russia).

 

In 1933-1937 Krokholev studied at the Pedagogical College in the city of Sverdlovsk where the family moved to.  In 1937 he entered the Sverdlovsk Art College and studied there only three years.  In 1939 Krokholev was called to serve in the army.  Krokholev was a participant of the Great Patriotic War.

 

On demobilizing, in 1945, Krokholev became a student of the Repin Institute (Leningrad).  His teachers at the Institute were V. Oreshnikov, A. Mylnikov, I. Serebrjanny, Y. Neprintsev, B. Fogel.  In 1952 he graduated from the Leningrad Repin Institute.  "The Arrest of T.G. Shevchenko in 1859" was his graduation work.

 

Krokholev's creative activity is greatly influenced by the traditions of Russian art and such painters as V. Surkilov, Valendtin Serov, Mikhail Vrubel, Ilja Repin, Isaak Levitan, Ivan Shishkin, Titian, El Greco, Van Deik and others.

 

"To paint means for me to portray our Motherland," says Krokholev. Krokholev paints pictures, portraits and landscapes vividly depicting his native land in all its beauty, history and present-day life.  Land and its people are the main theme of P. Krokholev's paintings.  His Organization of a Collective Farm in 1929 (1957), Land Collectivization (1967, a triptych), First Commune in Byelorussia (1969), Towards New Life (1972) reproduce very well the sweeping changes in the life of the Byelorussian village under collectivization.  Former Marches (1958), Having Seen Off Those Leavings for the Front (1968).  Before An Operational Sortie (1974) portray the feats of the people in the Great Patriotic War.

  

A great deal of the artist's pieces are portraits of collective farmers (Portrait of a Collective Farmer [1961], Portrait of a Herdsman [1962], Portrait of a Fishman [1949] and landscapes depicting the beautiful nature of the artist's native land, Early in April [1962], Birch Trees [1963], and Spring Vyacha River [1965]).

 

Instructor of the Byelorussian Institute of Theatrical Art (Minsk), P. Krokholev devotes much time and energy to educating young artists.

 

In 1970 Krokholev was awarded the title of the Merited Art Worker of the Byelorussian SSR.

  

Krokholev is a constant participant of All-Union, Republic and Region exhibitions.  He participates in several international art exhibitions as well (China, Romania, England, Poland and Japan).

 

NEW ARTIST- KAMILLE CORRY  

"In Search of the Muse: Self Portrait" Charcoal, Conte & Ink on Paper

Kamille Corry was born in 1966 in Houston, Texas. Her desire for intensive traditional academic training in drawing, anatomy, perspective, and other core skills lead her to Florence Italy. There she relished the rigor and respect for tradition instilled at Il Bisonte (etching) and Studio Cecil-Graves (painting). In Florence she also painted alongside D. Jeffrey Mims as he pursued a mural commission, and then followed him back to his North Carolina atelier for six years of formal study. She was later an assistant instructor to Mims at The Florence Academy's summer workshop.

"The Blue Swallowtail" 7'' x 18¼'', 2012, Oil on Linen, $3,400

"Aubergines", 14" x 24", Oil on Linen Over Panel

"Morning - Looking Over Wasatch Mountians" 8'' x 10'', 2012, Oil on Linen, $1,000

"Storm at Lee's Creek , The Great Salt Lake" 6'' x 10¼'', 2012, Oil on Linen, $900

"Twilight - Foothills" 10'' x 12'', 2009, Oil on Linen, $2,250

Although she is an adept portraitist and landscapist, Corry has garnered more recognition for expertly drawn, innovatively cropped paintings that celebrate female beauty. Whether her canvas present the full figure, half figure, or head alone, the poses and gazes of her very contemporary-looking models always convey both serenity and strength. This may relate to Corry's belief that "the human figure, in all its infinite beauty of rhythm, expressiveness, anatomical structure, and design, is inexorably infused with the most complex of features: the individual human soul. To call these pictures "soulful," however, infers that they are somehow sentimental, when in fact they are notably clear-eyed, sometimes even unsparing, despite the models' physical perfection."

Particularly appealing are the stylized backgrounds before which Corry's models often lean, lie, or float. Some flat patterns reminiscent of Eastern block prints or William Morris wallpapers, while others feature scrolling foliage that recedes into space and evokes the languor of Art Nouveau The juxtaposition of palpably "real" bodies against such "artificial" backdrops signals Corry's intriguing evolution beyond her classical training, toward something more individual , modern, and even metaphysical.

"Noon", Oil on Linen, 52" x 36", 1995-1996, $48,000

"Cassandra II", 18'' x 10'', 2007, Charcoal on Pa

Untitled, 24" x 18", 2011, Charcola & Pencil on Toned Paper

View More of Kamille Corry's Work...

The Museum of Russian Art:

 A Decade of Russian Art and Culture  

The Anniversary Celebration: "A Decade of Russian Art and Culture" showcases selections from the Museum's permanent collection and many past exhibitions that highlight its stature as the "only institution in North America dedicated to the preservation and display of Russian art."

   

Bringing together eighteen superb works by prominent Soviet artists from the post-WWII period, The Anniversary Celebration: A Decade of Russian Art and Culture includes technically proficient and stylistically diverse paintings. These post-war paintings are excellent examples of a revival in the unique tradition of Russian Realism, and a move away from the controlled style and content of earlier decades. Artwork from this period touched the hearts and minds of the masses, telling stories and addressing universal themes. Artists from this period created works that were sincere and non-commercial. They found ways of addressing Soviet ideology while striving for personal integrity in a difficult political situation.

"Milkmaids, Novella," Nikolai Baskak

The 18 works that are featured as prime examples of socialist realism in the Anniversary Celebration come from the following exhibitions:

• In the Russian Tradition (2005)--first exhibition held in the Museum's current building
• Russian Realism: Art of the 20th Century (2006)
• Colors of Russian Winter (2007)
• Russian Impressionism: On the Edge of Soviet Art (2008)
• Russkiy Salon: Select Favorites and Newly Revealed Works (2009)
• The Road North (2010)
• The Art of Vassily Nechitailo (2011)

A patron favorite, "Milkmaids, Novella," by Nikolai Baskakov, which was a key painting in the 2007 exhibition, Milkmaids and Friends, is also displayed.

 

Igor A. Popov, "Our Courtyard"

The new feature, Discovery Corner, dedicated to "concepts of exploration and invention" also will be available during this decennial exhibition. Highlighting art from the former Soviet republics as well as Russian-American artists, the Corner invites Museum patrons and visitors "to learn, contemplate, and be surprised" by the skill of "relatively unknown painters, photographers, sculptors and craftsmen as well as reinterpret better known ones."

Bringing together and displaying these works over the past ten years has fostered greater understanding of Russian culture and aspirations. These efforts have enabled visitors and art lovers in general to better appreciate a part of their own cultural legacy. 

Aleksei M. Gritsai, "Spring"

Nikolai E. Timkov, "Winter Laundry Line"

Aleksandr M. Gerasimov," After The Rain"

Vladimir Stozharov, "May"

Vasily K. Nechitailo, "On The Kuban Steppe"

Museum Director Chris DiCarlo shared his thoughts saying, "The past decade has been a time of incredible growth and change for The Museum of Russian Art. This exhibition only addresses a fraction of what the Museum has accomplished, but also demonstrates the immense potential we have." 

Here's to the vicennial celebration!

High Court Art Drama

A judge decided it was a fake, but some scholars maintain that a Russian painting sold at Christie's is genuine. 

On June 27, 2012, Justice Guy Richard Newey of the High Court in London ruled that the Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg was entitled to recover the £1.7 million his Aurora Fund had paid for the painting Odalisque at Christie's London on November 30, 2005. The judge agreed with Vekselberg and his experts that the work was not by Boris Kustodiev, the important Russian painter, as Christie's and a number of other experts had claimed. Christie's was also ordered to pay court costs.

The ruling ended a battle that began on December 18, 2006, when Vekselberg's Aurora Fund associate, Andrei Ruzhnikov, sent a letter to Alexis de Tiesenhausen, international head of Russian art at Christie's, demanding that the sale be cancelled. Attached to the letter were two expert opinions casting doubt on the work's authenticity. In response, Christie's called on another set of experts who vouched for the work, and the matter ended up in court, where a judge had to choose between the competing experts. 

The judge decided against the painting, but his decision wasn't greeted with universal approval among art historians and other experts on Russian art. A number of them believe the work is genuine, and they ask whether the courtroom is the best place to decide whether an artwork is authentic or not.   

Boris Kustodiev's Odalisque, 1919, became the subject of a long-drawn-out dispute over its authenticity.

The buyer of the Kustodiev, the Aurora Fine Art Investments Fund, was established in 2005 and came to the world's attention when a partner, Viktor Vekselberg, purchased the Forbes collection of Fabergé eggs for $90 million in 2004. The fund's purpose is to buy Russian art abroad and is known to have spent more than $100 million in its first three years of operation, purchasing works through its branches in New York and London. 

The bidding for the Odalisque was more dramatic than anyone had anticipated as the final offer for the painting soared to more than seven times its high presale estimate of £220,000 ($354,000), setting an auction record for the artist at £1.68 million ($2.9 million), including the buyer's premium. But a year later, the Aurora managers demanded the cancellation of the purchase, claiming that the painting was a forgery. 

Christie's countered that Aurora had belatedly realized it had overpaid for a work that is genuine but not a masterpiece. The painting is small, only 13¾ by 18 inches, and depicts a reclining nude half covered by a blue quilt. In court papers, Christie's refers to it as "quite probably a bread and butter picture painted to sell quickly" by a "wheelchair-bound invalid, working hard to feed the family in a city still in the throes of the revolution." 

Viktor Vekselberg, 56, an oil tycoon and art collector, is arguing that the painting, Odalisque, bought through his Aurora Fine Arts fund in 2005, could not possibly be by the prominent Russian artist Boris Kustodie

The first shadow on Odalisque was cast by Vladimir Petrov, an expert on Russian art of the 19th and early 20th century. Petrov earned a reputation as a "fake hunter" in 2005 by revealing that hundreds of Western European paintings bought for modest sums at auction houses all over Europe had been reworked, attributed to well-known Russian painters, and sold for inflated prices to Russian buyers (as reported in ARTnews, January 2006). Petrov's disclosures embarrassed collectors who had purchased the paintings and curators who had authenticated them. Subsequently Petrov resigned from his curatorial position at the Tretyakov Gallery.

Petrov saw the Kustodiev in 2006 and stated his opinion succinctly: "The authorship of Kustodiev is categorically declined." The grounds for his rejection of the work were entirely stylistic. He didn't consider it good enough to be a Kustodiev. 

A more detailed evaluation came from Irina Gerashchenko, an expert with the Grabar All-Russian Art, Scientific, and Restoration Center in Moscow, who conducted a technical analysis of the painting as well as a stylistic examination. Gerashchenko didn't question the painting's date. She concluded that it had been created in the period from 1918 through the 1930s and that the signature had been added later. But she, too, rejected the work on stylistic grounds. Her report didn't mention the first monograph on Kustodiev, published in 1925 by his close friend Vsevolod Voinov, in which Voinov lists a work called Sleeping, which Christie's maintains is Odalisque.

Instead, Christie's asked for an expert opinion from the Tretyakov. This was extraordinary because in 2007 the Russian government ordered the museum to stop authenticating paintings belonging to private individuals after a series of scandals arising from questionable certifications. But Christie's found no support at the museum. The expertise, signed by deputy director Lidia Iovleva as well as Lydia Gladkova, head of the department of scientific expertise, and curator Alla Gusarova, was another rejection. Their judgment was that "the authorship of Kustodiev cannot be confirmed on the basis of stylistic and technological analysis."

In the meantime, the painting was officially branded a fake; it was included in the fifth volume of the Catalog of Forged Paintings, published in 2009 by Rosokhrankultura, the Russian federal agency for the protection of national cultural heritage.

Experts at the State Russian Museum in Saint Petersburg agreed with their colleagues in Moscow. Curator Vladimir Kruglov, research fellow Alisa Lyubimova, and Svetlana Rimskaya-Korsakova, head of the department of technological research, also rejected the painting, mainly on stylistic grounds. They, too, thought it wasn't good enough to be a Kustodiev.

"Coachman" a landmark painting by early twentieth-century Russian artist Boris Kustodiev sold at auction in London, last November for $7 million.

Kruglov had included a color reproduction of the painting in the 2007 edition of his monograph on the artist. He did not explain why he had changed his mind about the work.

Aurora also commissioned Art Consulting, a Moscow firm that specializes in appraisals and authentication of art and antiques, to conduct another technical analysis of the painting. Director Denis Lukashin claimed that Kustodiev's signature and the date were painted over the craquelure in aluminum stearate, a pigment that was not available before the 1940s. That was his only observation.

Armed with these opinions, Aurora filed a complaint in the High Court of Justice in London in 2010. Christie's then marshaled an entirely different phalanx of experts, who disputed the conclusions the Russians had come to.

Establishing the date of the painting was contentious. Petrov maintained that Odalisque-on the basis of its style-had to have been painted in the 1930's or 1940's, although the painting is known to have been exhibited in Riga in 1932. Lukashin of Art Consulting didn't question that the painting had been created in 1919, but he believed that the signature and the date had been added in the 1940s.

Christie's approached Nicholas Eastaugh, director of research at Art Access & Research in London, a firm he cofounded. Eastaugh, a pigment specialist, was asked to analyze an unquestioned painting by Kustodiev, Portrait of Peter Kapitza (1926), in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, England, and compare its style and materials with those of the Odalisque.

Eastaugh did not believe that Odalisque was a forgery. He wrote: "X-ray imaging of the Odalisque . . . supports the notion that it would have been difficult for a hypothetical forger to have produced this painting since hesitations associated with lack of familiarity of Kustodiev's working methods, or a wholly different approach to developing the painted composition would have been apparent."

Eastaugh also contested Lukashin's opinion that the signature was a later addition. According to a court document, "Eastaugh considers that the date is highly plausible and, on the basis of the materials used in the Painting, it is unlikely to have been produced much after the artist's death in 1927; the range of pigments employed is highly consistent with the proposed date; and the signature is contemporaneous with the creation of the Painting."

Aurora's experts confined themselves to stylistic and technical examinations. They didn't consider the painting's provenance. Odalisque belonged to Leo Maskovsky, a Russian who emigrated to Latvia after the revolution. The Russian art historians Natalia Semenova and Vladimir Poliakov found evidence that the picture was exhibited in Riga, the capital of Latvia, in 1932, along with 42 other paintings from the Maskovsky collection, and was reproduced in Russian newspapers published there.

Maskovsky's collection included works by such important Russian painters as Fedor Rokotov, Vasily Surikov, Valentin Serov, and Mikhail Nesterov. In 1939, before he emigrated from Latvia to Germany, he sold most of his collection, taking with him only small paintings, among which was the Odalisque. Maskovsky's widow sold the painting at Christie's in 1989. Its authenticity was not questioned, and it fetched £19,000 ($51,000).

Semenova is a well-known historian of Russian private collections. She is not involved in authentication. "Expertise is not my profession. My arguments are historical and biographical." She believes that Odalisque is a genuine Kustodiev.

"Why forge works that are not expensive?" she asks. "In the 1920s-1930s, prices for Russian art were low. The Odalisque is not even a painting but a sketch produced to earn the artist a crust of bread. Kustodiev died in 1927. Until that year, it would have been cheaper to commission this painting from the artist than to produce a fake."

Semenova says that in the last years of his life Kustodiev was disabled and confined to a wheelchair, but he continued to paint for 12 hours a day, producing endless repetitions of each image. The quality of these works was not very high. "During his lifetime and immediately after his death," Semenova says, "faking his paintings could be quite risky-his works were well known and documented. There is not a single falsified work dated to the 1920s or '30s that is documented and known to art historians."

Semenova adds that the high level of the Maskovsky collection supports the claim that this painting is by Kustodiev. Many of the works Maskovsky left in Riga when he emigrated made their way into Russian museums and private collections. The paintings he took to Germany were eventually sold by major auction houses. None of them has ever been questioned.

The rejection of this painting by Russian museum experts is based primarily on its quality, which doesn't match the quality of the artist's masterpieces. But, Semenova asks, doesn't a good artist ever paint a bad painting? That is a question for scholars, not judges. "I do not think certainty on the point is possible," wrote Justice Newey, "but my task is to determine authenticity on the balance of probabilities and the likelihood, in my view, is that Odalisque is the work of someone other than Kustodiev."

The attempts of Christie's experts to prove that an important Russian painter sometimes produced inferior pictures failed. Official Russian art expertise triumphed. The question, however, remains open in both Russia and the West and the drama continues.

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