10 Russian Art, Culture and Luxury Highlights, from Fabergé to Pussy Riot The Soviet Union’s, and now Russia’s, place as a political bogeyman in the 20th and 21st centuries doesn’t obscure its position at the forefront of art and culture. Indeed, some of the most shockingly modern and revolutionary art movements have come from modern Russia, perhaps as much as anything in reaction to its imperialist past. Heritage The repository of over three million works...
Christie’s Magnificent Jewels auction in Geneva on 15th May 2019 offered a superb selection of pieces, many of which, including a Russian Imperial Emerald, achieved well over their estimates. The Imperial Emerald of Grand Duchess Vladimir of Russia is a pear-shaped emerald of 75.61 carats, with pear, circular and marquise-cut diamonds on a necklace of platinum and gold. On an estimate of CHF 2,300,000 – CHF 3,500,000 (£1.8m-£2.7m) it realised CHF 4,335,000 (£3.4m). The second...
A week of impressive Russian art sales at Sotheby’s concluded on Wednesday (28 November 2018), realising a combined total of £23 million. All three sales reached totals above their pre-sale estimates, but the Russian Pictures sale alone raised £13.4 million and set two artist records. The first, for Konstantin Makovsky—whose epic canvas Blind Man’s Bluff (c.1839-1915) sold for £4.3 million. The second, for Georgian primitive painter, Niko Pirosmani. Georgian Woman Wearing A Lechaki tripled its...
Sotheby’s reaches a milestone this week, celebrating a decade since it opened its office in Moscow. To mark the event a public exhibition of nearly 70 artworks will be displayed on Wednesday 24th May at the Ivanovsky Hall, Russian State Library, the first private museum established in Moscow. Sotheby’s history with Russia began in the year of 1988 when the game-changing sale of avant-garde and Soviet Contemporary Art in Moscow; the first international auction held...
A new exhibition at the Royal Academy examines the radical, deeply political russian art that flourished in the first years of the Russian Revolution. Emerging across Europe from the early 1850s onwards, avant-garde art prized originality and radical experimentation. Unorthodox by design, it sought to challenge received notions of art, culture and society, whether it was cubism’s innovations of form or futurism’s revolutionary social vision. In Russia it was a diverse and multi-layered movement with...
Jewellers to six generations of the Royal Family, as well as a having a clientele of celebrities, it was Wartski, the London Fabergé egg specialists, who also made the headlines in 2014 by discovering the lost Third Imperial Fabergé Egg, valued at £20 million. The family-run business of Wartski gained mass media attention in 2014 when the company made history by identifying the long-lost Third Imperial Fabergé Egg, a masterpiece of peerless craftsmanship and inventive...
