Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

The artists began to look at one another sharply. They were finally getting to see how people from the West spent money. With casual, almost weary gestures, the members of the Sotheby’s tour raised paddles of blanched wood into the air, offering six-figure sums. A difference of $1,000 seemed to move them not at all. Fortunes such as many of these artists had never dreamed were casually handed over for a painting—a Soviet painting. The artists began to understand that changing government policies might ultimately leave them inconceivably wealthy.

After Bruskin came Ivan Chuykov, a highly esteemed elder statesman of unofficial art. If someone would pay over $400,000 for a painting by Bruskin, then surely the work of Chuykov would be worth millions. But his Fragment of a Fence failed to reach its low estimate of $15,000, and Noughts and Crosses didn’t reach its low estimate of $20,000; they barely exceeded their reserves. Thus the sale continued, with high prices that confounded the Soviets and low prices that embarrassed them. Then a remarkably pretty but essentially decorative painting by Svetlana Kopystiyanskaya went on the block; she was a serious woman and a good painter, but not a riveting original, and the bidding for her work was going higher and higher. How could it be? If the vanguard had not been sequestered behind the rope, and if they had understood the ego dynamics of the auction world, they might have noticed a paddle battle. Had they been at the posh official dinner the night before, they might have gathered that Elton John had instructed his manager to bid on the same painting that a glamorous Swiss woman announced that she would have at any price. After that painting realized $75,000, the artists kept repeating, in an uncomprehending drone, “Does that mean that people from the West think Sveta Kopystiyanskaya is a better painter than Chuykov? Than Kabakov?”

Almost every painting sold. The prettiest paintings, or sometimes the most blatantly unusual works, sold for the most money, which threw the Moscow avant-garde for a loop, instilling a dread that the West might create a canon based on standards totally unrelated to their own. They were deeply upset by some of the bidders they met, whose refusal to engage with a Soviet context seemed to imply an inability to recognize that there was a context at all. At one studio, after listening to a highly theoretical painter give a thirty-minute explanation of his work, a woman who ended up placing one of the highest bids of the sale had asked, “Do you paint in black and white and gray because it’s hard to get colored paint in this country?”

Though some of the best work was sold to people who understood it, most went to people who were shopping for souvenirs. The sale brought in $3.5 million, more than twice the optimistic estimate of $1.8 million. Simon de Pury hugged Sergey Popov, deputy director of the Ministry of Culture.

As they left the great room, one woman pointed to her catalogue and exclaimed to another, “I bought this one.” She frowned slightly. “Or else this one. I don’t remember which.”

“Whichever,” said the other. “As long as you have something to remember tonight by. Wasn’t it exciting?”

Thus the artists were brought into the public eye, an unsettling place to be if your work is based on the most extreme form of privacy. Designed to be meaningless, even boring, to the eyes of the KGB, it was created according to standards so secretive that, paradoxically, it would remain incomprehensible to the West long after it became famous there. When an artwork is cut off from its origins, the easiest thing to lose sight of is its irony. Insistence on the multiplicity of truth, in Soviet art, is as political as is painting, because accepting a single official truth is an old Stalinist habit. The nature of elusiveness—rather than the thing eluded—must be the focus of criticism. This is why sociological examination is the most rational way to proceed. It is valid, in short, to applaud the brilliance of disguise; it is comical to applaud the disguise itself. The Sotheby’s sale catapulted the artists into an ambivalent relationship to celebrity and fortune that was to undermine their entire system of values.

While the bidders’ ignorance was not the fault of the auction house, had the sale been staged less theatrically, some of the souvenir shoppers would have stayed home. Of course, then the paintings would not have brought such enormous sums. And if the sale had not been such a blockbuster, the Ministry of Culture would have been far less likely to stage in the months that followed other, similar events that would help many more Soviet artists. The ministry, which retained a sizable part of the takings, suddenly began looking at the once-detested artists with a self-interested kindness now that they had become a prime source of hard currency.