Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

Before taking over as director of Sotheby’s Europe, Simon de Pury had been private curator to Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza. Traveling with him to the Soviet Union, de Pury had picked up word of the contemporary art scene there. He also gathered that a great deal of important work by the avant-garde of the 1920s in the Soviet Union remained in private hands, as well as precious eighteenth- and nineteenth-century furniture and objects. He was eager to get off on the right foot with Gorbachev’s new government with its policy of glasnost, or openness, so that Sotheby’s would be in a favorable position if financial straits pushed the Soviets who owned these treasures into selling them. Lenin had sold some of the best works from the Hermitage Museum to underwrite his new government; perhaps Gorbachev might do something similar. The new art was a glorified bargaining chip. The “contemporary” sale that I had come to witness included a number of important works from the twenties—including major pieces by Aleksandr Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, and Aleksandr Drevin. “Wait and see how long it takes before we have an office in this country saying SOTHEBY’S MOSCOW over the door,” one of de Pury’s colleagues remarked. But de Pury soon saw that the contemporary art could be valuable in itself. “This is all a wonderful, giant risk,” he said to me. “We know so little about this work we are buying—except that we know it’s worth buying.”

The night of the auction, July 7, 1988, brought together people no previous circumstance could have assembled. At six thirty, the Sotheby’s tour group began to file into the great conference chamber of the Mezhdunarodnaya Hotel. After stopping at the registration desk to collect paddles, each guest walked to his or her reserved seat at the front of the room. Elton John’s manager exchanged pleasantries with the sister of the king of Jordan. A retired baseball player escorted a small bevy of titled Scandinavian ladies. A group of prosperous German women, dressed in red in honor of the host country, engaged in cheery banter with a member of the US State Department. “Are you really going to buy that one?” someone asked.

“At any price,” came the response, with a chuckle.

A thin woman with diamonds at her throat and an oversize crocodile handbag flipped back and forth between two pictures by two different artists. “I just can’t decide. I can’t decide,” she moaned, then asked a neighbor, “Which of these do you like better?”

Behind the Sotheby’s entourage came Westerners who lived in Moscow and powerful, overdressed Soviets, who looked fat and easy among Americans abroad and Western Europeans on holiday. American ambassador Jack F. Matlock was there with his wife, his son, and his son’s Russian fiancée. The sons and daughters of wealthy foreign businessmen stationed in the USSR were there. Many missed the habit of Western social events and welcomed this occasion to sport their Adolfo and Valentino. The press was there in spades with notebooks, cameras, and TV equipment—not art press flown in for the event but the political press, with all the Moscow bureaus covering this historic moment.

The back third of the room had no chairs. The space, cordoned off by velvet ropes, was crowded with all the rest of invited Moscow, people with cards that were said to have been sold at amazing prices, cards for which we were apocryphally led to believe paintings and even apartments had perhaps been exchanged. The artists in the crowd—many of whom had been part of the Collective Action at the river—stood in whispering knots, only a sideshow at what was properly their own seminal global event. Behind the ropes were the curators of the Pushkin, the friends of the Soviet artists, the other members of the vanguard. Some artists from Leningrad had come; one artist’s cousin had made the trip from Tblisi, over a thousand miles away. People pushed and shifted toward the front of the throng, only to be borne back again on the waves of people pressed against people, crushed, but redeemed in mid-July by the blissful air-conditioning, which was not exactly a staple of Soviet life.

At seven o’clock the bidding began. De Pury, perspiring despite the air-conditioning, was behind the podium, conducting the sale as though he were the master of ceremonies at the greatest show on earth. The early Soviet work far surpassed its anticipated prices; one painting by Rodchenko, Line, estimated at $165,000 to $220,000, sold for $561,000.

With Lot 19, the sale of contemporary Soviet art began. The works were listed by the artists’ surnames in alphabetical order—alphabetical in the Latin alphabet. So the first was Grisha Bruskin, a tiny, gnarled man who had been at the periphery of things for years, deemed by his peers to be sweet and technically capable but relatively insignificant. All his paintings doubled, tripled, quadrupled their high estimates; then one estimated at $32,000 sold for $415,700.