Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

Sotheby’s saw all these perspectives. The auction house knew it was tapping a new wellspring of profit, but at the same time it transcended its usual pedestrian commercialism. At the farewell dinner the next night, even the most cynical of the Sotheby’s staff—and the most skeptical officials in the Ministry of Culture—appeared to be on the brink of tears. The two sides had long stood in emblematic opposition to each other, and if one accepts that the function of art is ultimately communication, then this sale was itself a work of art, a miraculous engagement. In the years that were to follow, critics, curators, collectors, and artists variously credited the auction house with discovering a movement, inventing a movement, or destroying a movement. To some extent, all of them were right.

The artists had mixed feelings about the sale and were perhaps unable to see all the motivations and reasons behind it. The day after it took place, they organized a trip on a large boat to protest Western commercialism. The avant-gardists were all there, arguing fiercely, as we sailed to a resort area, about the likely effects of Western commercialism. Then everyone disembarked to walk in the woods, sit in the sand, or rent rowboats or little paddleboats. I ended up in a rowboat with Viktor Misiano, the curator of contemporary art at the Pushkin, and Zhora Litichevsky, a painter with incredible staying power as an oarsman. Everyone was at play, affirming once again the strength of the avant-garde community. As paddleboats tried to bang into us and laughing people tried to splash us, Misiano would nod toward this or that one and say, “There is an important Leningrad conceptualist. There is a true Communist painter. There is a Soviet formalist.” Like the Action in the woods, it was a chance to see this madcap community at play, which was a good way to begin to understand their coded work.

Only after the sale did one of its organizers describe to me the first meeting at which Sotheby’s had discussed individual artists with the Ministry of Culture. At that time, it was exceedingly difficult to get information about artists, and Sotheby’s put forward a list of underground artists whose names they had obtained from Western contacts inside the USSR. The culture commissars told the auction-house contingent rather peevishly that every Westerner who came for a meeting brought exactly the same list—and that it could be identified as exactly the same list because one of the names on it was of a pianist rather than a painter.

The sale marked a turning point in Soviet art history. In the two years that were to follow the event, some artists who had been dominant figures in the avant-garde sank into obscurity. Others grew accustomed to life in the jet set; they were invited to the penthouses and palazzi of collectors and had dinners thrown in their honor in apartments at Trump Tower in New York. Their work came to be mentioned regularly in the press, but even when it was unpopular, they themselves were often popular. They appeared on morning television shows and were profiled in glossy magazines. Their strongest work came to reflect the certainty that the West could understand the will to communicate, if not their specific acts of communication. That they would look forward to a certain celebrity with cautious ebullience never meant they were beyond reflecting bitterly on what was past.

The poetics of meaning for these Soviet artists lies partly in their nostalgia, and it is perhaps a greater mercy than they realize that the tendency to homesickness is among their cultural attributes. When they recognize in their work that a dream realized is also a dream forsaken, they resuscitate both their purity of purpose and the sense of humor that we in the West find so beguiling. Time and inevitable failures have started to restore to these artists the subtle gift for self-reference they employed so effectively in the pre-auction years. In rediscovering their country and their former lives of oppression from a salutary distance, they have rediscovered their original reasons for telling, secretly or otherwise, what they perceive as inalienable truth. The strength of their beliefs convinces us. Truth-telling gives this work its high moral and aesthetic standing—the ultimate gift the artists provide not only to museums and collectors, but also to the world. As these Soviet artists and their body of work move West, how they change will change how we think about art.