Russia's oligarchs snub vulgarity, eye fine art
By David Nowak
Associated Press Writer / September 18, 2008

MOSCOW—Russia's yachting, partying, British football club-acquiring billionaires are, as they mature, refining their tastes, learning the fine art of collecting fine art and breathing new life into a once-struggling Russian market.
Roman Abramovich, Russia's 42-year-old uber-oligarch, jetted into Moscow this week for the opening of a new contemporary art space which he is funding as a pet project for his girlfriend, fashion designer Daria Zhukova.

"I've always thought that Moscow should have a place like this," Zhukova, 27, a former model and famed socialite, told The Associated Press in the cavernous center's cafe on Tuesday, before the opening.
Until recently, Russia's super-rich seemed to splurge on art only when it had the added benefit of pleasing the Kremlin.
Last year, billionaire Alisher Usmanov paid more than $40 million to save an art collection owned by the late Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich from being auctioned off at Sotheby's in London, and handed it to Russia.

He followed the lead of Norilsk Nickel-owning magnate Vladimir Potanin, who bought Malevich's avant-garde Black Square for the government in 2002 for $1 million, saving it from foreign ownership.
According to the summer 2008 edition of ARTnews magazine, Abramovich is one of the 200 top art collectors in the world. He is the only Russia-based collector in the list.

The one-time oil tycoon and owner of the Chelsea soccer club broke records in May when he acquired Francis Bacon's Triptych for $86.3 million and Lucian Freud's Benefits Supervisor Sleeping for $33.6 million.
Abramovich provided the startup costs for Zhukova's project, named the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture. The center, designed by Konstantin Melnikov, is housed in an 8,500-square-meter (91,500-sq. foot) tram shed built in 1927, and located in an old Jewish neighborhood on a northern fringe of central Moscow.

It opened to the public Thursday with the first retrospective of legendary artists Ilya and Emilia Kabakov.
The 74-year-old Ilya Kabakov is considered the founder of the conceptualist art movement in Moscow, which developed during the 1970s in the Soviet Union. He and his wife moved to New York in 1992.
Los Angeles-based art critic Alexander Panov said that, while the gallery may have started life as a billionaire's vanity project, it has the potential for anchoring modern art in Russia.

"Are those in attendance mostly snobs and 'wannabes' who were there simply to show their Gucci bags and Armanis?" he said in an email. "Yes. Is art collecting simply a new expensive toy leading to greater social-cultural status in the hands of Abramovich? Yes again. Finally, is there a chance for good, thought provoking exhibitions to start and support a culture of open-minded, stimulating intellectual discourse? Yes as well."

The center's retro-chic building, its polished wooden floors and lofty ceilings contrast with the far less glamorous gallery spaces at Moscow's renowned State Tretyakov Gallery.
Both Zhukova and Abramovich's spokesman John Mann refused to comment on the cost of the project.
Abramovich, treading the perilous tightrope of trying to show support for the new center without stealing the limelight, took a seat for Zhukova's ribbon-cutting press conference Wednesday and duly clapped as she declared the center open. He was surrounded by a formidable security entourage.

Russian art collecting has rapidly progressed through a series of fads, experts say. For a while decorative art was all the rage, and hit its apogee, perhaps, when magnate Viktor Vekselberg's $100 million bought the complete Faberge egg collection in 2004.
As Russia reasserted what it considers its birthright as a global power, collectors turned their attention to Russian art. Now, they're scouring the earth for anything in vogue, collecting impressionist and contemporary works at lightning speed, wielding devastating whim power that has led some critics to call them the biggest force in world art markets.

Philip Hoffmann, chief executive of The Fine Art Fund, told the Business Standard in August that only 20 individuals account for $2 billion to $4 billion worth of art sold worldwide each year out of a total art market as much as $50 billion.
But the Russian market isn't as hot as it seems, said Ivan Lindsay, a London-based dealer whose collection went on display at the summer's Moscow World Fine Arts Fair.

"The Moscow public is learning very fast but is a bit nervous. Only people like Abramovich are spending vast sums. In the Russian market, $3 million to $5 million is the limit of what a normal buyer will spend," Lindsay said, adding that the market still "has a lot of potential."
The art market here is also handicapped, he said, by Russia's complex customs rules and the high costs of exhibiting in Russia, which have turned many potential exhibitors away.
And forgery, a problem everywhere, may be more of an issue in Russia, where there are reports that experts are sometimes bribed or intimidated into declaring a forgery genuine.
As a result, Linsday said, many Russian buyers prefer to make their purchases in New York or London. "They are slightly suspicious of galleries which come to exhibit in Moscow," he said.

The opening of the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture could help dispel those fears.
Zhukova has no background in fine art, but she is no stranger to wealth. Her billionaire, London-based father, Alexander Zhukov, made his fortune by exporting oil in the turbulent 1990s.

Asked what drew her to contemporary art, she says she "kinda grew up with it."
"My father is really into architecture. Both of my best friends are artists, and I think it has always been around me," she said.
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Associated Press Writer Ayano Hodouchi contributed to this report.



Abramovich's girlfriend opens major Moscow art gallery
by Alexander Osipovich Tue Sep 16, 12:08 PM ET

MOSCOW (AFP) - The celebrity girlfriend of Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich on Tuesday opened a major new Moscow art gallery billed as Russia's answer to London's Tate Modern and New York's MoMA.

A cavernous former bus depot in northern Moscow, the Garage gallery is "the first non-profit arts centre on this scale" in Russia, Daria Zhukova said at the champagne launch party, which was also attended by her reclusive boyfriend.
With gallery space measuring 8,500 square metres (91,490 square feet), Garage was built by avant-garde Russian architect Konstantin Melnikov in the 1920s and is considered a Constructivist masterpiece.

Zhukova was also joined at the launch by New York-based Russian artists Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, whose work was featured in the opening exhibition.
In an interview with the New York Times last month that referred to her as "an art-world It Girl," she compared her gallery to Tate Modern in London.

"It is a great honour to open the centre with these artists," she said at a press conference in the newly-restored depot, which was seen as revolutionary in the 1920s for its unusual angular layout and soaring steel rafters.
Abramovich is a playboy businessman with assets in the Russian metals industry. He is estimated by Forbes to be worth almost 15 billion euros (21 billion dollars) and is the owner of Chelsea Football Club in London.

He divorced his wife last year after reports on his relationship with Zhukova, herself the daughter of a Russian tycoon, surfaced in the media. Apparently inspired by Zhukova, Abramovich recently bought paintings by Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud for a total of 120.2 million dollars. Zhukova did not answer questions at Tuesday's press conference and is known for keeping quiet about her personal life.
Some in the Moscow art community have expressed scepticism that Zhukova, a onetime fashion designer, is much of an art expert.
"So who is this girl? A spoilt young thing with the world's richest sugar daddy for a boyfriend, or the real deal -- a culturally acute, socially adept figure about to make a serious splash?" the Times of London asked in July.
"We discover the brains behind the beauty," the Times said.

For its opening, her gallery recruited one of the top names in the Russian art world: Ilya Kabakov, a Soviet-era underground artist who emigrated in 1988 to the United States, where he began working with his wife Emilia.
In February, a painting by Kabakov sold at auction in London for 2.9 million pounds (5.8 million dollars or 4 million euros), the highest price ever paid for a piece of post-war Russian art.

Emilia Kabakov praised "this wonderful new centre" and called it a fitting use for the 1920s structure, built at the peak of Constructivism, a short-lived movement that sought to embody Utopian communist ideals in architecture.
"Instead of a Utopia, now this construction of Melnikov's is something real: a centre of contemporary art," she said.
Mikhail Shvydkoi, a former culture minister, said a gallery like Garage would have been unthinkable in Soviet times, when Kabakov's works were banned from museums and his fellow underground artists were sometimes locked up.
"This is a gift to the generation of the 1960s... (This is) art which breathes freely, which does not fear censorship," the ex-culture minister said.
"Back in the 1960s and 1970s, who would have thought such a thing would be possible?" he asked.