quote:

Twijfels over Russische kunst in Gent
Tien specialisten hebben grote twijfels bij 26 bruiklenen Russische avant-gardekunst in het Museum voor Schone Kunsten in Gent.

’Een hoogtepunt in de nieuwe presentatie’, noemde het Museum voor Schone Kunsten in Gent de modernistische kunstwerken die sinds 20 oktober in de nieuwe opstelling zitten. Het gaat om een uitzonderlijk pakket van 26 langdurige bruiklenen, overwegend schilderijen. Ze dateren uit de periode tussen 1910 en 1920, toen de Russische kunst een experimentele hoogvlucht kende.

Sinds de opening van de nieuwe opstelling gonst het in de museumwereld van de geruchten. (Standaard).

SPOILER

Russische modernistische kunst staat na recente schandalen met vervalsingen in een slecht daglicht. Uitkijken, is het devies. In ons land sprak niemand zich in het openbaar uit over het statuut van de kunstwerken. De voorbije weken circuleerden internationaal foto’s van de werken onder kunstexperten. Ze bekeken de stukken van onder andere Malevich, Kandinsky, Tatlin, El Lissitzky, Goncharova en Larionov met kritische blik. Enkelen van hen kwamen naar Gent om de schilderijen ter plaatse te bekijken.

Tien specialisten Russische kunst publiceren nu samen een open brief. Onder hen vooraanstaande curatoren die in Londen en New York grote exposities over Russische modernisten maakten. Verder zijn er onderzoekers en kunsthandelaars met specialisatie in Russische kunst. In hun brief noemen ze de geëxposeerde stukken ‘hoogst twijfelachtig’. Ze schrijven dat ‘haast elk geëxposeerd stuk’ dezelfde vragen oproept.

Een demarche als deze is uitzonderlijk. Steunend op hun expertise wijzen de ondertekenaars een erkende museuminstelling openlijk terecht. Hoewel ze nergens het woord ‘vals’ gebruiken, suggereren ze dat het beter is de werken uit de zaal te halen, zodat ze ‘niet langer het publiek dreigen te misleiden’. Van geen van de werken is geweten waar ze voordien geëxposeerd werden. Ze komen niet voor in overzichtscatalogi en er zijn nergens data over vroegere verkopen terug te vinden.

Documentatiemappen
Het Museum voor Schone Kunsten Gent zegt dat het correct en in het volste vertrouwen gehandeld heeft, en zoals gangbaar in de museumwereld bij bruiklenen. Directrice Catherine de Zegher: ‘Er is geen voorafgaand chemisch onderzoek in het labo geweest. Dat gebeurt alleen bij een aankoop waar twijfels over zijn en met het akkoord van de eigenaar. Bovendien is dat het terrein van de kunstmarkt, en in ons geval is er van geen enkel commercieel belang sprake.’

Het museum zegt dat het uitgebreid gepraat heeft met de Stichting die de werken beheert en geïnformeerd heeft naar de herkomst van de werken. De Zegher: ‘De documentatiemappen en de beschrijvingen geven een uitgebreide achtergrond over de geschiedenis en authenticiteit van elk van de werken. Externe experten hebben de collectie bezocht en zullen ze verder blijven bestuderen.’ De vraag is of dat onderzoek niet volledig afgerond had moeten zijn vooraleer de werken het museum binnen mochten.

De 26 kunststukken zijn langdurig uitgeleend door de Stichting Dieleghem. In die kunststichting hebben Igor (51) en Olga Toporovski (45) hun immense collectie ondergebracht, die zowat vijfhonderd kunstwerken bevat. Het echtpaar zegt in een interview met De Standaard dat ze de herkomst van elk stuk kunnen staven met het nodige bewijsmateriaal.

quote:

Fake Kandinskys, Malevichs, Jawlenskys? Top curators and dealers accuse Ghent museum of showing dud Russian avant-garde works
A group of scholars and dealers has signed an open letter criticising the Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent for displaying questionable works purportedly by Russian avant-garde artists, which we are publishing here in full:

On 20 October 2017, the Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent (MSK - Museum voor Schone Kunsten Gent) opened a new display of its permanent collection to the public. However, among the exhibited artworks were 26 pieces that did not belong to the museum—objects attributed to Kazimir Malevich, Wassily Kandinsky, Vladimir Tatlin, Lazar el Lissitzky, Alexei Jawlensky, Natalia Goncharova, Mikhail Larionov and other artists of the Russian avant-garde.

The museum website does not offer any information about how the institution was able to assemble this exhibition: according to the Belgian press—the artworks in question were given on long-term loan by the Dieleghem Foundation established by Mr. Igor Toporkovski, an art collector from Brussels.

All the works exhibited could be defined as highly questionable. They have no exhibition history, have never before been reproduced in serious scholarly publications and have no traceable sales records. The exhibited paintings by Wassily Kandinsky and Alexei Jawlensky are not included in the catalogues raisonné—internationally recognized as the definitive sources for determining the work created by these artists. Objects such as a box and distaff allegedly decorated by Kazimir Malevich have no known analogues and there are no historical records that even mention that the artist ever was involved in the decoration of such objects. Practically every other work exhibited provokes similar questions. The museum did not publish a catalogue and did not provide any information about their provenance or exhibition history on the wall labels other than the name of the owner.

There are other questions that these 26 artworks raise which need to be addressed and debated. Would it not be best, until answers to these questions are forthcoming, that the works are taken off view and not presented in a way that risks misleading the public?

According to the Belgian newspaper La Libre, Ms. Catherine de Zegher, the Director of the Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent is planning to exhibit more works from the Dieleghem Foundation collection in 2018, together with loans from other European museums. According to La Libre, Ms.de Zegher stated that she will try “to rewrite the history of the Russian avant-garde”. This is a bold statement and one must venture to ask, how?

Ms. de Zegher is a renowned curator of contemporary art. She curated the Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art in 2013, but this experience does not make her an expert on Russian avant-garde painting. When Ms. de Zegher became the director of the MSK she declared that her task was to create an “open museum”. Unfortunately, she opened the institution entrusted to her with questionable works.

Dr. Konstantin Akinsha, art historian, curator
Vivian Barnett, independent scholar
Julian Barran, art dealer
Ivor Braka, art dealer
James Butterwick, art dealer
Jacques de la Beraudiere, art dealer
Alex Lachman, collector
Dr. Natalia Murray, art historian, curator
Richard Nagy, art dealer
Dr. Alexandra Shatskikh, art historian, curator
Ingrid Hutton, art dealer

quote:

Eigenaars Igor en Olga Toporovski zeggen in een vraaggesprek met De Standaard dat zij de authenticiteit van elk werk kunnen aantonen. Veel werken zouden zijn gekocht toen de Sovjet-Unie uiteenviel. „De musea die voordien federaal beheerd werden, hadden veel Russische modernisten in hun depots zitten. Toen bijvoorbeeld Oekraïne zijn eigen nationale musea uitbouwde, waren die niet geïnteresseerd in Russische kunst. De directeuren beschouwden de depots als hun eigendom.” Er zou in die tijd ook onder de tafel zijn verkocht.

quote:

When asked to provide documentation of the works’ provenance, expert examination, or scientific analysis for proof of age, the museum deferred responsibility to the lender, Igor Toporovski.

“It is not the task of a museum to conduct chemical tests which are only done in cases of doubts before making acquisitions, not for loans,” the museum spokesperson said. “We have acted throughout, we believe, correctly in this matter, and in good faith.”

For his part, Toporovski asserted by email to artnet News: “In the international museum practice neither certificates of authenticity, nor chemical conclusions are required. Nevertheless, each art-work belonging to the Foundation has its own file: provenance, history and technical description (condition). The Foundation can provide this information on request, for research, scholars and professionals.”

Asked for more information, Toporovski invited this reporter to view the collection and materials in person, but said the details “could not be discussed by mail.” The collector and his wife Olga are also in the process of developing a permanent home for their holdings in Jette, Brussels, which is expected to open in 2020.

quote:

Andréi Nakov Loses Moral Rights Over Alexandra Exter
The Cours d’Appel de Paris / Appeal Court in Paris ruled on 25 June 2013 (Order 12/21691) that the Alexandra Exter Association and its President, Andréi Nakov, would not hold the moral rights to Alexandra Exter. The order was made in favour of the plaintiff, Igor Toporovsky, of Brussels, who had loaned several of his canvases to the exhibition, ALEXANDRA EXTER, held in the Chateau Musée in the city of Tours, January-March 2009. The order states that Mr Nakov had originally obtained the moral right over the art of Alexandra Exter “in a fraudulent manner” and that as a result the court ordered that the Alexandra Exter Association and its President, Mr Nakov, to each pay 5,000 euros to Mr Toporovsky as well as all court costs. In addition, a decision of the court in Tours on 10 June 2013 officially recognised the authenticity of Mr Toporovsky’s paintings, together with their provenances, and ordered their restitution to the collector. (InCoRM).

quote:

Stated in the ruling of 25 June 2013, the Court of Appeal in Paris withdrew the moral right from the Alexandra Exter Association due to the withholding of information from the judge and so having obtained the moral right over the work of Alexandra Exter “in a fraudulent manner”. The “artist’s archives” consist of less than 10 letters between Alexandra Exter and Simon Lissim, Y. Anziani and Simon Lissim, and Simon Lissim and Andréi Nakov, a copy of the last will and testament of Alexandra Exter, and transport documents of works shipped to Simon Lissim. This case is again in litigation. (InCoRM).

SPOILER

2014
Au cours des deux dernières années la justice française s’est prononcée à quatre reprises sur l’attribution de l’exercice du droit moral. Les trois premiers jugements ont été en faveur de l’attribution de cet exercice à l’Association : en janvier 2012 l’exercice du droit moral a été attribué une première fois à l’Association Alexandra Exter. Cette décision a été renouvelée en janvier 2013. Contesté en 2012 cet « exercice du droit moral » a été reconfirmé une troisième fois en 2013. La même décision a été rendue encore en 2014.

La dernière – 4ème décision, (cf. arrêt de la Chambre d’Appel de mai 2013) – a été contraire aux 3 premières. Cette action a eu lieu suite à une n-ième demande en « rétractation » introduite par Igor Toporovsky, infatigable pourfendeur de la respectabilité de l’Association Alexandra Exter et, comme il a été dit plus haut, propriétaire de plusieurs peintures qui faisaient partie de l’extravagante entreprise de Tours 2009.

Cette dernière décision étant susceptible de pourvoi en cassation, nous réservons, comme il se doit, notre commentaire à la justice. Il serait par ailleurs inapproprié d’étaler en public nos arguments.

Au-delà de la surprise que l’on imagine, le moindre des commentaires serait néanmoins d’indiquer que la décision de la justice s’appuie sur des principes exclusivement matériels, reconnaissant « le droit d’agir » au propriétaire de quelques ½uvres (de surcroit contestées) face aux arguments moraux mis en avant par l’action de l’Association Alexandra Exter, une association qui déploie des vastes activités de conseil (universitaire, muséal etc.) et de recherche, activités fort éloignées des considérations commerciales du marché de l’art.

2013
On se doit aussi de signaler que l'exercice du droit moral de l’artiste s’est vu attaqué en justice par un certain Igor Toporovsky, une des personnes fortement impliquées dans l’exposition de Tours en 2009. L’affaire a été plaidée une première fois au Tribunal de Grande Instance de Paris en octobre 2012 et une décision rendue le 26 novembre 2012. Le contestataire s’est vu débouté et fut condamné aux dommages aussi bien par rapport à l’Association Alexandra Exter que par rapport à Andréi Nakov, son Président, qui a été directement attaqué dans cette action.

Cet incident ne mériterait pas de plus amples commentaires, si ce n’est qu’Igor Toporovsky, prêteur de plusieurs tableaux dont nous contestons l’attribution à Alexandra Exter, et ainsi impliqué dans l’exposition de Tours 2009 dès son origine, a présenté un dossier étayé par des « documents » qui jettent une singulière lumière sur l’environnement de l’entreprise de 2009.

Si parmi les documents sur lesquels s’appuyait « l’action de rétractation » d’Igor Toporovsky on n’est pas étonné de trouver les noms de certains marchands et prétendus « experts » (entre autres de l’association Incorm) et, qui, depuis des années, sont engagés dans la promotion des imitations d’Exter, on a eu néanmoins la surprise de trouver le nom du directeur d’un musée bruxellois qui côtoyait celui d’un ex-universitaire français… Y figuraient également des « fondations » fantaisistes et autres.

2012
Suite à la contestation de l’exposition Alexandra Exter présentée en février et mars 2009 au château de Tours, et suite à sa fermeture par l’autorité judiciaire, la question de l’exercice du droit moral d’Alexandra Exter a été soulevée de façon récurrente par les propriétaires des ½uvres litigieuses.

Face à la dramatique dégradation du marché de l’art qui se trouve infecté de faux, l’Association Alexandra Exter, partie civile dans la procédure de Tours, a demandé à la justice de lui confier la défense du droit moral de l’artiste. Dans ce but, une requête « afin d’autorisation de poursuivre les violations du droit moral de l’artiste Alexandra Exter sur ses ½uvres » a été introduite auprès du Président du Tribunal de grande instance de Paris. Après examen du dossier, et vu l’article L 121-3 du Code de la Propriété intellectuelle, le Tribunal de grande instance de Paris a désigné l’Association Alexandra Exter fondée le 29 septembre 2000 et représentée par son président M. Andréi Nakov, « en qualité de mandataire ad hoc afin de défendre le droit moral de l’artiste Alexandra Exter »… et « autorisé l’association Alexandra Exter à poursuivre en justice toute personne susceptible de porter atteinte aux ½uvres de l’artiste Alexandra Exter ».

Cette ordonnance, délivrée à Paris le 10 janvier 2012, semblait mettre un terme à la contestation élevée de manière autant violente que spécieuse contre les motivations des auteurs de la plainte déposée le 13 mars 2009 devant le Doyen des Juges d’Instruction de Tours. On pouvait espérer à ce moment que la voie d’un débat judiciaire libéré des obstacles de procédure serait ouverte. Le débat judiciaire s’en trouvera soulagé puisqu’il ne resterait qu’à débattre de la nature des ½uvres litigieuses, suspectées d’être des imitations vulgaires.

quote:

The Faking of the Russian Avant-Garde
With invented provenances, unreliable certificates of authenticity, and “rediscovered” works by artists who are lost to history, forgers are flooding galleries and auction houses with Russian avant-garde fakes. A six-month ARTnews investigation reveals that inauthentic works now outnumber authentic ones.

An exhibition of 192 Russian avant-garde paintings was shut down abruptly in March, three days before its scheduled closing, when a well-known art expert claimed that 190 of the works were fake. The exhibition, in the Château Museum in Tours, France, was devoted to Aleksandra Ekster, a major figure of the avant-garde. A native of Ukraine, Ekster (or Exter) settled in France in 1924 and lived there until her death, in 1949.

The whistle-blower was Andrei Nakov, who was himself at the center of a scandal in the 1980s, when he was accused of certifying more than 1,000 questionable pastels and drawings by another Russian avant-garde luminary, Mikhail Larionov. (Nakov sued the Geneva Tribune for its coverage of a traveling exhibition he organized of works attributed to Larionov and won the case when the court found that he did not knowingly promote fakes.)

The organizer of the Ekster show—and the owner of 130 of the paintings—was another well-known expert, the Paris dealer Jean Chauvelin. He told the French press he had bought the paintings in Russia 30 years ago. Chauvelin was not able to furnish the authorities with authentication certificates for the works, but there was no need for them, he said, because “l’expert, c’est moi.” (ARTnews).

SPOILER

Nevertheless, the Office Central de lutte contre le trafic des Biens Culturels—the Central Office for Combatting Traffic in Cultural Goods—seized the paintings, which remain in police custody. A police spokesperson said that an investigation was in progress.

This wasn’t the first time a museum found itself embarrassed by allegedly fake Russian avant-garde pictures. Last year the Bunkamura Museum of Art in Tokyo removed five works attributed to Chagall, Kandinsky, and Ivan Puni from an exhibition lent by the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, although the Moscow museum insisted they were genuine.

A six-month ARTnews investigation and interviews with scholars, dealers, and other sources in the United States, Russia, Germany, France, and Spain reveals that the number of Russian avant-garde fakes on the market is so high that they far outnumber the authentic works. “There are more fakes than genuine pictures,” said Alla Rosenfeld, curator of the Norton Dodge Collection of Soviet Nonconformist Art at Rutgers University from 1992 to 2006 and former vice president of the Russian art department at Sotheby’s New York. It’s impossible to put a number on them, said Natalia Kournikova of Kournikova Gallery in Moscow, but “we can say that almost every artist whose prices have risen has become the victim of fake makers.”

Peter Aven, president of Alfa-Bank in Moscow and owner of one of the world’s best collections of Russian avant-garde art, called the quantity of fakes “colossal.” It affects the market, said Rosenfeld, “because people are becoming reluctant to acquire Russian works.” The situation has gotten worse since 1996, when ARTnews published its first article about Russian avant-garde fakes, according to Aleksandra Shatskikh, one of the world’s leading scholars on the Russian avant-garde. “Russian buyers have entered the market, and the new demand has provoked a wave of fakes that is many times greater than the production of forgeries in the first half of the 1990s,” she said.

Fake icons and “fauxbergé” trinkets have bedeviled the art market for generations, but the escalating demand for Russian art in the last two decades has led to more ingenious abuses. For a while, “Russified” pictures—minor 19th-century European landscapes or portraits doctored to look Russian—flooded galleries and antique dealerships in Moscow and made their way to the West, appearing even at major auctions. But it has been Russian modernism—art from the first three decades of the 20th century—that has attracted the most Western collectors and consequently the most forgeries.

Hundreds of works have appeared in recent years at auction houses and in galleries all over Europe, from Munich to Madrid. These works have very sketchy provenances in which certain assertions are repeated again and again: the works are said to have come from hitherto unknown private collections or to have been smuggled to Israel by immigrants in the ’70s or to have been deaccessioned by provincial museums in the former Soviet republics—although this practice was strictly forbidden—or to have been confiscated and hidden for a half century by the former KGB (the secret police), although experts say there is not a single documented case of avant-garde works emerging from KGB vaults.

The Nagel auction house in Stuttgart, Germany, for example, at its Russian sale of April 26, 2007, offered six paintings from the collection of the late Baron Ciancio Villardita—a collection unknown to experts in Russian art. According to the auction catalogue, the baron acquired the paintings—by Natan Altman, David Burliuk, Natalia Goncharova, Ivan Kliun, Boris Kustodiev, and Nadezhda Udaltsova—from a member of the Italian Communist Party during the ’60s and early ’70s. The party member, according to the catalogue, bought Altman’s canvas from a Soviet functionary in 1938, when the Soviet Union was convulsed by Stalin’s bloody purges, and foreign Communists—officials of the Communist International, or Comintern—lived in fear for their lives. All foreigners in Moscow were under close surveillance; it would have been quite a feat to buy a forbidden “formalist” painting, experts said.

The only information the auction house had about Baron Ciancio Villardita was that he died in the ’90s. Was he the same Baron Ciancio Villardita who is mentioned in the deposition of Antonino Calderone, an underboss of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra who fled to France in 1983 and cooperated with the authorities? According to Calderone, Ciancio Villardita was a phony aristocrat who served as secretary for a member of the Italian parliament, collecting money from Sicilian mafiosi for the Christian Democratic Party.

Another group of seven works by important artists offered in the same sale came from the collection of Józef Kecsmár and Janos Kecsmár of Budapest, according to the catalogue. Budapest is a small city where people in the art world are very aware of one another’s activities, but several members of Hungarian art circles—including Tamás Kieselbach, a leading art dealer and owner of the Kieselbach auction house—told ARTnews they had never heard of a Kecsmár collection.

A large number of Russian 19th-century and avant-garde works that have turned up in European auction houses have been certified by Russian art historians or institutions. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the major Russian state museums and conservation institutes—including the Tretyakov Gallery and the Grabar Restoration Center—went into the business of issuing certificates of authenticity.

In 2004, however, a landscape advertised as a masterpiece by the famous Ivan Shishkin (1832–98) was put up for sale at Sotheby’s London with an estimate of £700,000 ($1.28 million), only to be unmasked as the work of the Dutch painter Marinus Koekkoek. The canvas had been purchased at Bukowskis auction house in Stockholm a year before for $56,000, slightly repainted, given Shishkin’s signature, and then certified by the Tretyakov Gallery’s department of expertise. It was withdrawn the day before the auction.

In 2005 two dealers in Moscow, Tatiana and Igor Preobrazhensky, were arrested for selling Russified pictures (they have since been convicted and sentenced to prison), and it became public that hundreds of such pictures had been sold and that the Tretyakov Gallery, the Grabar Restoration Center, and other institutions had issued certificates for a number of them. An internal Tretyakov investigation established that 212 Russified paintings had been examined by the museum’s department of expertise, which had recognized 116 of them as fraudulent and mistakenly certified 96 as genuine. In 2006 the Russian ministry of culture belatedly prohibited institutions under its control from being involved in the commercial certification of artworks. Yet European auction houses continue to sell paintings certified by the Tretyakov Gallery and other Russian institutions.

A number of prominent art historians who began their careers as academic scholars are authenticating Russian avant-garde works. According to Shatskikh and others, the authenticators often claim to be compiling catalogues raisonnés and promise to include the works they certify in future publications, which gives additional weight to their certificates. These documents are often short—a page or two stating that the work in question can be attributed to a certain artist. They rarely contain specific information about a work’s genesis or detailed comparisons with other similar works by the artist.

Another device, Shatskikh said, is to reproduce questionable artworks in academic books. “This practice is connected to the laundering of fakes in exhibitions. The dubious works appear in exhibition catalogues prepared by serious museums, and sometimes find their way to the covers.”

Considering the number of fakes and the sparseness of documentation, experts say, buyers should be cautious. Aven said he buys only works with “a 100 percent provenance. When sellers say they can’t disclose the provenance of a work, I refuse to even discuss it.” Unless a work has an “ironclad provenance or was reproduced and exhibited during the lifetime of the artist,” Aven won’t touch it.

Rosenfeld endorses that kind of caution. A good provenance, she said, means that a work can be traced back to the artist or the artist’s family. It was “published in an old catalogue—new catalogues are not really proof—and there is documentary evidence, for example, a photo of the artist with the work in the background. But the combination of all of these—family, early documentation, exhibition during the artist’s lifetime—that’s very important. Strong documentary evidence that the work existed during the artist’s lifetime.”

Dmytro Horbachov, a well-known art historian in Kiev who claims expertise in the fields of Ukrainian and Russian modernism, has created a Web site on which he posts his attributions (www.keytoart.org.ua). Horbachov organized the exhibition “Crossroads: Modernism in Ukraine, 1910–1930,” at the Chicago Cultural Center and the Ukrainian Museum in New York, in 2006.

Among the works Horbachov has certified as genuine is Suprematic Composition, attributed to Kazimir Malevich, which was included in the “Crossroads” show. The work was never reproduced during the artist’s lifetime and is unsupported by documentary evidence. According to the technical analysis, it was painted in oil and tempera. Malevich experts say they know of no other use of tempera by Malevich in a Suprematist painting (he used it for fresco designs). But a photo of it is posted on Horbachov’s Web site under the category “Attributed Works of Art” with the comment, “I assumed that this work painted by a sure hand and with a great mastery is an authentic Malevich.”

A large group of unknown Eksters with unclear provenances have turned up on the art market in the last few years. Most have been certified by Chauvelin or Georgii Kovalenko of the State Institute of Art History in Moscow.

In April 2007 both Kovalenko and Horbachov participated in the conference “Ukrainian Modernism in Context, 1910–1930,” organized by Harvard University’s Ukrainian Research Institute, and they engaged in a heated exchange over a painting by Ekster that was in the “Crossroads” exhibition and is said by the catalogue to come from a private collection in Kirovograd, Ukraine. Kovalenko told the audience that he had never seen the painting. Whereupon Horbachov asserted that Kovalenko had told him he had gone to Amsterdam to see the work and had certified its authenticity before its sale to a private collector in Ukraine. Kovalenko changed his mind and admitted that he had seen it in reproduction.

Moscow art historian Svetlana Dzhafarova, who has certified many avant-garde works, was recently accused by Aven in the Moscow newspaper Kommersant of knowingly certifying fakes. Aven told ARTnews that in the early ’90s he had bought a still life certified by Dzhafarova as an Altman. It was shown in the acclaimed 1995–96 “Berlin-Moscow/Moscow-Berlin 1900–1950” exhibition. However, when he was preparing the recently published catalogue of his collection, Aven said, he decided to have all his artworks analyzed. Lab tests showed that the still life attributed to Altman was painted during the ’90s, he said.

“When Dzhafarova offered me this piece, she said that she knew which collection it belonged to, but she insisted that she couldn’t disclose this information,” Aven told ARTnews.

“It’s a lie!” Dzhafarova responded. She said she had not sold anything to Aven. “I worked with Aven during the ‘Moscow-Berlin’ exhibition in 1995–96. During that time he exhibited a still life by Natan Altman, which he purchased. By the way, I can assure you that the still life is authentic,” she said.

Aven and others charge that many of the Russian experts are involved in the sale of the works they authenticate. Shatskikh described the situation as “tragic.” Unfortunately, she said, “art historians have not only proved to be unable to struggle with the forgers, some have become their accomplices.” She made it clear she was describing the situation generally, not pointing a finger at anyone in particular.

Chauvelin said, “Kovalenko, my colleague in Moscow, who is also an expert on Ekster, asks ¤5,000 for a certificate. This is his right. But if you don’t want to pay ¤5,000, you have no chance that a work will be recognized as an original.” Kovalenko declined to talk to ARTnews. Chauvelin and Kovalenko are both preparing Ekster catalogues raisonnés.

A new organization of experts was formed in 2007 to authenticate Russian avant-garde works. Called the International Chamber of Russian Modernism, or InCoRM (www.incorm.eu), the group, which is based in Paris, consists of more than a dozen experts from Western Europe and Russia, including Chauvelin, Dzhafarova, Kovalenko, French scholar Nadia Filatoff, and German scholar Ariane M. Hofstetter. Its president is Patricia Railing, a British art historian. Paris resident Jacques Sayag was a member of the group but resigned after ARTnews interviewed him.

ARTnews interviewed Chauvelin in his art-filled Paris apartment not far from the Opera. He introduced himself by asking if the interviewer was aware that he was known to his colleagues as “the sharp eye.” A former ballet dancer who was trained by Russian teachers, Chauvelin became an art dealer and an expert on a wide range of Russian avant-garde art. “I hope the new organization will be able to change the climate,” he said, “because the climate has become intolerable.”

Sayag, the former general secretary of the organization, said, “It is a group of experts who met and decided to work together because, before the establishment of InCoRM, everyone was working in his own corner and we had a lot of contradictory information.” Sayag described the market for Russian art as polluted. “Today, when you talk about the Russian avant-garde with collectors or even with simple art lovers, you get the impression that you’re offering them cocaine.”

“Of course the experts will receive money for their work,” Sayag said of InCoRM. “If you have a painting, you have to become a member of the organization and only after this can you show your painting to experts. We are talking about expertise, not about authentication. InCoRM will provide its opinion, positive or negative, only if four experts agree. The opinion will be provided in writing.”

This method of collective expertise was demonstrated in Nagel’s April 26, 2007, sale—the one that included works from the Ciancio Villardita collection. According to Sayag, Nagel “heard that we established InCoRM and they needed the names” of experts. Most of the lots were certified either by individual InCoRM members or by the group collectively. Of the 55 lots offered, 14 were certified by Chauvelin, Filatoff, Hofstetter, and Sayag. The artists—Altman, Ivan Bilibin, Ilya Chashnik, David Shterenberg, and Udaltsova, among them—represented a wide range of styles and schools.

Hofstetter, liaison officer of InCoRM, works for Nagel auction house and several German art galleries. In an e-mail, she described her work as “art historically advisory.” She earned an M.A. in art history with a thesis on a French medieval manuscript, but, she wrote, has been “engaged with Russian Avant-garde art for quite a few years” and is working on a doctoral dissertation on Ivan Puni at Humboldt University in Berlin.

Hofstetter explained in an e-mail that she, Filatoff, and Sayag examined a number of paintings for Nagel’s April 26 sale. “As a team we have evaluated those works thoroughly and afterwards worked out detailed art historical reports composed of: l. Analyses of material and technique by means of the visual descriptive method. 2. Stylistic analyses using a comparative method. 3. Art-historical classification. 4. Conclusion.” Hofstetter wanted to emphasize that “those reports have nothing in common with so called photo-expertises in the sense of judging a piece of art by a photo.” That “the reports done for Nagel were declared in the auction catalogue as photo-expertises was neither in our power nor in our interest,” she added.

Sayag, a former book dealer, stated repeatedly that he is not an expert on art and cannot tell a fake from an original. He said that he had never provided certificates to Nagel. “They showed me photographs and said, ‘Here are the certificates of people who already saw these paintings. What do you think about the subject of the painting?’ I wrote that if this work is attributed to Popova, I don’t think that it is not Popova. It was not me who established attributions,” he said.

Beate Kocher-Benzing, press manager at Nagel, said, “We didn’t have any contact with Mr. Sayag.” His name may have come into the catalogue through an expertise furnished by the consigner, she said. But certificates written and signed by Sayag for Nagel that were obtained by ARTnews do authenticate specific artworks; they do not merely endorse other people’s certifications.

One of the sale’s offerings was Construction spatiale, attributed to Popova by Chauvelin. It is very similar to a well-known painting in the Tretyakov Gallery called Construction with White Crescent, except that the forms in the Nagel painting seem to be upside down and a second crescent appears at the bottom of the composition. The Tretyakov picture was mistakenly reproduced upside down in the catalogue for Popova’s exhibition in Moscow in 1990. The Nagel work didn’t sell.

The Nagel sale also included three watercolors attributed to the architect Yakov Chernikhov and said to come from the collection of the family of Igor Borisovich in Saint Petersburg (Lots 640–642). None made its reserve. All were certified by Chauvelin. But Andrei Chernikhov, the architect’s grandson and a recognized authority on his works, emphatically rejected all three. They “have nothing in common with Yakov Chernikhov,” he said.

An expert who asked not to be identified pointed out that an unusually large number of the hitherto unknown works in the sale were very similar to known works. A portrait of the photographer Miron Sherling attributed to Yuri Annenkov by Chauvelin, Sayag, Filatoff, and Hofstetter (Lot 605) is a “variant” of the well-known work in the Russian Museum in Saint Petersburg, according to the catalogue, which illustrates both of them. It was sold for 200,000 ($272,000). Other works also have “twins,” but the catalogue doesn’t mention them. Two works attributed by Chauvelin to Altman, Nature morte (Lot 609) and Logan, Revolutionnaire (Lot 610), are also very similar to pictures in the Russian Museum. They sold for 150,000 ($204,000) and 80,000 ($108,000) respectively. One of the Villardita pictures, Nature morte au guéridon (Lot 635), attributed to Udaltsova by the four experts, is strikingly similar to the artist’s Blue Jug (1915) in the Tretyakov Gallery. It fetched 110,000 ($149,000). Nature morte au homard (Lot 646), attributed to Larionov by Chauvelin and Anthony Parton, is extremely like Larionov’s Still Life with Crayfish (ca. 1910–12) in the Ludwig Museum in Cologne. It sold for 150,000 ($204,000).

Generally, Russian avant-garde artists fetch much lower prices at Nagel and other small auction houses than these artists would be expected to bring at larger houses. “The consignor agreed to the prices,” said Nagel’s Kocher-Benzing. “For higher prices, such as realized in the salerooms of Christie’s and Sotheby’s, we do not have the customers. But we take in what we can, naturally.”

Many of the works certified by Chauvelin and other experts have been analyzed by conservation scientists Elisabeth Jägers, vice dean of the Faculty of Culture Sciences of Cologne University of Applied Sciences, and her husband, Erhard Jägers, of Bornheim, Germany. The pair test large numbers of Russian avant-garde works offered in smaller auction houses and in galleries throughout Europe.

Erhard Jägers told ARTnews that he authenticates a work if “nothing speaks against” the attribution—if he can find no reason not to authenticate it. He said he almost never attributes works firmly, and then only in very well documented cases.

The Jägerses certified, for example, a mixed-media work on paper by Popova—from a Swiss private collection, according to the catalogue—that was offered for sale at Hampel Art Auctions in Munich last July 4 (Lot 776). Art experts, however, see several problems in this painting. One of its motifs is the back of a bentwood chair visible behind a table. The name of the chair’s manufacturer, Thonet, is written in letters of different sizes and fonts, and it also contains a chronological anomaly. The cubistic style of the painting dates it very early in the century, but Thonet’s name is written in the new orthography adopted in Russia after the revolution: the letter yer, which was in use until 1918, is missing. Another anomaly, according to experts: the composition is signed with Popova’s initial and her last name in a script the artist never used elsewhere for her signature. The work didn’t sell.

Director Holger Hampel told ARTnews that he couldn’t discuss past sales. He said that the firm relied on its own art-historical and technical experts.

The earliest Russian avant-garde fakes to flood the West were Suprematist paintings and drawings, which began turning up in the late ’60s and ’70s, experts say. Suprematist compositions, which are built up from simple geometric elements, attract imitators because they look as if they would be easy to replicate. According to Shatskikh, author of Vitebsk: The Life of Art (Yale University Press), commercial interest in Suprematism increased after Malevich’s centenary, in 1978, and “large numbers of Suprematist works attributed to Unovis members appeared in European galleries and auction houses.”

Suprematism was generated in Vitebsk in the circle of Malevich, a charismatic teacher who gathered around him a group of students and disciples who called themselves Champions of the New Art, or Unovis. These artists shared a strikingly similar fate, according to Shatskikh. All died young and without heirs. Contemporaries and witnesses to their lives and artistic personalities had disappeared. Although their names were known, and although they appeared in group photographs, their works were completely unknown. Add what Shatskikh calls “the apparent ease with which geometric abstract art can be forged,” and the circumstances arise for a flood of forgeries.

When the works appeared on the market, explanations were required. “As a rule,” according to Shatskikh, “the canvases were found ‘accidentally,’ their former owners or possessors either not indicated, or else it was said that ‘it has proven impossible to name them.’” One “suitable figure for this kind of falsification” was Nina Kogan.

In 1985 Galerie Schlégl in Zurich organized an exhibition of 26 works attributed to the hitherto unknown Kogan. According to the biography published in the catalogue, Kogan was born in Vitebsk, became Malevich’s pupil, followed him to Petrograd (Saint Petersburg) after the breakup of Unovis, and died in the gulag. Fortunately, the catalogue stated, Kogan’s works had been hidden by devoted friends and then spirited abroad. Watercolors and gouaches attributed to her were beginning to flood the market at the time of the Schlégl show.

Shatskikh published a very different account of Nina Kogan’s life, based on her own investigations. She discovered that Kogan was born in Saint Petersburg into an elite circle of converted Jews. The daughter of a high-ranking military doctor, she studied at the exclusive School of the Order of Saint Catherine. She returned to Leningrad (Saint Petersburg) in the late ’20s and took up residence in a single room in her family’s former apartment, which she shared with 20 other people and a pet white rooster. She died in the winter of 1942, during the German blockade of the city.

Kogan’s devoted friends who, according to the Schlégl catalogue, saved her works and smuggled them to the West were strangely ignorant of the true facts of her life, according to Shatskikh. They embellished her biography with such details as a childhood in Jewish Vitebsk and death in Stalin’s concentration camp.

Kogan created many “Cubist constructions” on paper and canvas, according to Shatskikh, but only three known works, all of them minor, survived. Her artistic legacy was destroyed. She undoubtedly never imagined the posthumous existence that awaited her in the auction houses of the West, where Suprematist-style watercolors and oil paintings signed with her name would appear regularly.

Auction houses have sold more than 150 works attributed to Kogan since the late ’80s. Chauvelin has certified some of them. Asked to comment on many experts’ belief that Kogan’s heritage has been grossly falsified, Chauvelin replied, “I was in Moscow once during the 1980s. I was offered a crate of her works, which contained 100 or 150 works—watercolors, gouaches, et cetera. They were asking $20 to $50 for a work. I didn’t buy because nobody here knew her. Until 1995 she was not known here at all.”

Works attributed to Kogan have appeared not only at smaller auctioneers in Spain, Germany, and France, but also at Sotheby’s and Christie’s. Sotheby’s London sale of March 15, 2007, included a watercolor attributed to Kogan (Lot 324); Christie’s offered another (Lot 1186) on November 27, 2007. Neither was sold. Sotheby’s did not respond to requests for comment. Christie’s responded with a statement saying, “Christie’s will not sell any work of art that we know or have any reason to believe is inauthentic.” Christine Stauffer, a partner at Galerie Kornfeld in Bern, said that she relied on experts in the field.

Anna (Khaya) Kagan (or Kogan) is another artist who remains an enigma to art historians. No work by Kagan (1902–74) is in any Russian museum, nor was a single work of hers published during her lifetime. According to Shatskikh, a painting in the Kawamura Memorial Museum of Art in Sakura, Japan, which appeared in the exhibition “Kazimir Malevich: Suprematism,” at the Menil Collection in Houston and the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2003, is not a Malevich. She conjectures that it is a work by Kagan. Another painting by this artist is in the Ernst Schwitters collection in Norway.

Despite her obscurity, however, Kagan is another veteran of the art market. Works attributed to her or to Anna Kogan started appearing in Western galleries and auction houses at the beginning of the ’80s and are still appearing.

Abstract Composition, attributed to Kagan, was offered (but not sold) at Kunsthaus Lempertz in Cologne on June 2, 2007. Ulrike Ittershagen, a Lempertz modern-art specialist, agreed that it was difficult to attribute works to artists who were so little known. “We are not experts in the Russian avant-garde,” she said. “We trusted the consignor” and two prominent experts who had certified the work, Andrei Nakov and Vasily Rakitin. Ittershagen pointed out that paintings attributed to both Nina Kogan and Anna Kagan had appeared in museum exhibitions.

Today, works attributed to other forgotten artists who worked in Vitebsk during the ’20s are popping up on the international market. On June 12 of last year, for example, MacDougall’s in London offered a painting called Portrait of a Woman in a Blue Dress by Nadezhda Liubavina (Lot 81), an artist for whom only fragmentary information is available.

According to Shatskikh, who was not familiar with the painting at MacDougall’s and did not comment on it, Liubavina was in the first wave of Petrograd artists to come to Vitebsk. “Although her rise in Russian art was meteoric,” Shatskikh wrote, “Liubavina’s disappearance was just as rapid, leaving almost no trace.” At the beginning of the ’20s, she married a professor from India and returned with him to his native country. Only two works by Liubavina are in Russian museum collections. The painting offered by MacDougall’s is the only known canvas attributed to the artist that is executed in the Cubo-Futurist style. The catalogue provides no information about its provenance. The painting failed to find a buyer.

The auction house’s codirector, William MacDougall, said that attributing works to such little-known artists was “a very big problem. We’re very cautious with avant-garde works.” This painting, he said, “was signed by the artist and viewed by our experts, who felt it was genuine.”

Shatskikh added that it is not only Malevich’s Suprematism that is being faked. Today, she said, there are fakes of his early Impressionist landscapes and his post-Suprematist figurative works as well.

There is one major artist of the Russian avant-garde whose heritage has been well protected, and that is Vasily Kandinsky, who died in France in 1944. Plenty of pictures attributed to Kandinsky are available for sale, as a search of the Internet shows, but an experienced collector will be wary of them unless the Kandinsky Society in Paris has given them its imprimatur, experts say. Neither Sotheby’s nor Christie’s will accept a painting or drawing attributed to Kandinsky for auction unless the society has accepted the work for its catalogue raisonné.

The society, which is based in the Pompidou Center, was established in 1979 by the artist’s widow, Nina, to protect and promote Kandinsky’s legacy. Its current president is former French prime minister Edouard Balladur. The directors of the three museums that hold the major part of Kandinsky’s works in the West—the National Museum of Modern Art at the Pompidou Center, the Lenbachhaus in Munich, and the Guggenheim Museum—are also members. The society does not hand out certificates; it informs owners that it will—or will not—list their works in its ongoing multivolume catalogue raisonné. Its services are free.

Some critics have accused the Kandinsky Society of monopolizing the right to authenticate the artist’s works and have charged that its assumption of absolute expertise is unwarranted. Chauvelin, for example, can hardly restrain his bitterness when talking about the society. “You come to the society, which is like a tribunal of the Holy Inquisition, and leave your work there,” Chauvelin said. “Two weeks later, you come back to pick it up and get the answer—positive or negative. Usually the answer is negative. If you don’t have a photograph of the painting in Kandinsky’s hands, it’s the end.”

More recently, a challenge to the Kandinsky Society has come from the East. In the last few years, dozens of previously unknown paintings and watercolors attributed to Kandinsky have turned up in Moscow and Saint Petersburg and then made their way abroad. Many of these works appeared on the market with authentication certificates from the Tretyakov Gallery or other Russian institutions.

About a dozen hitherto unknown paintings and watercolors, most of them from private collections, were illustrated in a monumental monograph, Kandinsky in Russia, written by Valery Turchin, a prominent art historian and professor at Moscow State University, that appeared in simultaneous Russian and English editions in Moscow in 2005. It is a lavish volume whose publication was supported financially by the Russian government. None of these recently discovered works appears in the Kandinsky Society’s catalogue raisonné.

Turchin is a member of the Society of Admirers of the Art of Wassily Kandinsky, which was established in Moscow in 2004. The organization has no headquarters. Its activities have been limited to the publication of Turchin’s monograph and the installation of a memorial plaque on the house where Kandinsky lived in Moscow. According to Turchin, the Moscow society has no membership restrictions. “Everybody who likes the art of Kandinsky can consider himself a member,” he said.

Turchin is as bitter as Chauvelin about the Kandinsky Society, which has declined his invitation to cooperate with the Moscow society. He believes that the Paris society treats Kandinsky as a European artist, not a Russian one. “Their main problem is that they don’t like the idea that Kandinsky is a Russian artist,” he said. “French or German, okay, but not Russian. It’s a tradition. I want to change it. That’s why they are not enthusiastic about me.”

To Turchin, the main problem is not Kandinsky’s nationality but what he considers the Paris society’s monopoly on attributing his works. He said that he was frequently approached by private collectors who owned works by Kandinsky and wanted his opinion of them, but “there is always a big problem because there is always a concern about what the Paris society will say.” Who decided, Turchin asked, “that they are the standard-bearer?”

A painting attributed to Kandinsky, he said, “can be sold in a Western auction only if it is authenticated by the Paris society. That’s very sad because, for example, if a person has a Kandinsky and Paris does not authenticate the work but the person knows for sure it is a Kandinsky, he is in a gray zone, he is almost illegal.”

Kandinsky in Russia is similar to a number of lavishly produced monographs and exhibition catalogues published recently in both Europe and Russia, in which unfamiliar works are reproduced in color along with known works. In almost all cases, the unfamiliar works were not exhibited, described, or reproduced during the artist’s lifetime.

Asked where so many unknown paintings by Kandinsky came from, Turchin gave an answer often heard from experts and art dealers who deal with unprovenanced Russian artworks. “We cannot exclude the possibility that certain Kandinsky paintings were lost or went missing during the revolution,” he said. “It was complete chaos. Others may have been lost during World War II. Were these missing paintings destroyed or saved?”

The Kandinsky Society doesn’t comment on works it rejects for its catalogue raisonné. Christian Derouet, the society’s treasurer and a co-organizer of the Kandinsky exhibition on view at the Pompidou Center through August 10 (it is opening at the Guggenheim Museum in New York on September 18), is responsible for its invaluable archive of Kandinsky’s papers and correspondence. Derouet met Turchin in Paris a few years ago. “I was surprised that the Russian art historian didn’t express any interest in seeing our archival collection,” was his only comment.

Konstantin Akinsha is a contributing editor of ARTnews. Sylvia Hochfield is editor-at-large of ARTnews. Additional reporting by Zakhar Artemiev, Nora Fitzgerald, and Gerhard Charles Rump.

quote:

Minister Gatz laat echtheid Russische avant-garde­schilderijen controleren
Er komt een laboratoriumonderzoek naar de echtheid van de Russische avant-gardeschilderijen in het Museum voor Schone Kunsten in Gent. Daar was de jongste dagen twijfel over gerezen. Minister van Cultuur Sven Gatz, het Museum voor Schone Kunsten en de stad Gent richten een expertencommissie op. Mogelijk is er over een maand al duidelijkheid over de echtheid van de kunstwerken.

Een twintigtal werken van Russische avant-gardisten (waaronder werken van Kandinsky en Malevitsj, foto boven) in het Museum voor Schone Kunsten (MSK) in Gent doen de jongste dagen stof opwaaien. Er heerst twijfel omtrent de echtheid van de collectie die eigendom is van Igor en Olga Toporovski.

Het onderzoek wordt bevolen en betaald door minister Gatz. Hij heeft dat afgesproken met het Museum voor Schone Kunsten en met de stad Gent. De eigenaars van de werken gaan er ook mee akkoord. Normaal gezien gebeurt voorafgaand onderzoek in een laboratorium enkel bij nieuwe aanwinsten van erg hoge waarde en met toestemming van de eigenaar. (VRT).

SPOILER

“Het is niet aan de overheid om te bepalen welke werken in een museum tentoongesteld moeten worden", zegt minister Gatz (Open VLD). "Maar aangezien de discussie omtrent de echtheid van de collectie van Toporovski grote proporties aanneemt, lijkt het ons raadzaam om snel voor klaarheid te zorgen. We moeten weten of die werken echt zijn of niet. De expertencommissie zal een aantal kunstwerken van Toporovski onderwerpen aan een technisch materiaalonderzoek. Ik zal hiervoor in de nodige middelen voorzien.”

"Het museum heeft wel degelijk de nodige voorzorgen genomen", benadrukt Gatz in een gesprek met VRT NWS. "Maar de controverse is zo groot dat we bijkomende stappen moeten zetten en ik denk dat het maatschappelijk wel verantwoord is omdat in de toekomst misschien ook andere musea met dit soort ervaringen geconfronteerd kunnen worden."

Minister Gatz heeft het Russische koppel trouwens zelf in contact gebracht met musea, iets waar hij zich nu wel ongemakkelijk bij voelt. "Ik ben te goeder trouw door mijn burgemeester in Jette (Hervé Doyen, nvdr) met hen in contact gebracht. Het enige wat ik gedaan heb, is aan hen zeggen dat ze met de musea moesten overleggen, dat hier de minister niet bepaalt welke tentoonstelling er in welk museum komt. Daarna is het de volledige verantwoordelijkheid van het museum. Maar dat het contact ook via mij gelopen is, daar voel ik me op dit moment relatief oncomfortabel bij."

Een commissie experten zal nu bepalen aan welke technische analyses de werken in het lab worden onderworpen. Mogelijk is er over een maand al duidelijkheid. Het gaat om 26 werken uit de Russische avant-garde. Eerst waren noch het museum, noch de eigenaars bereid tot verder onderzoek. Voor een aantal werken kan het bedrag van het onderzoek oplopen tot 50.000 euro, maar dat hoeft niet zo hoog te zijn, stelt minister Gatz.

“Het MSK is ongewild in het oog van een storm terechtgekomen, we hopen dat de rust nu weerkeert en het museum zich opnieuw kan concentreren op zijn kerntaken", reageert schepen van Cultuur van Gent Annelies Storms (SP.A).

Het MSK Gent benadrukt dat "het wel degelijk de gebruikelijke procedures voor inkomende bruiklenen heeft gevolgd". "Het museum voerde een grondig kunsthistorisch en vergelijkend onderzoek naar de werken. Het won ook het advies in van enkele internationale kunsthistorici-experts. Aangezien het om een bruikleen gaat, is er geen materiaaltechnisch onderzoek gebeurd. Het museum beoordeelt bruiklenen op basis van vertrouwelijke informatie van de bruikleengever voor wat betreft authenticiteit en bewijs van herkomst."

quote:

The Art Newspaper's exposé helps close dubious Russian avant-garde art display in Ghent museum
Heirs of George Costakis, Naum Gabo and leading scholars disputed provenance claims of works on show at the Museum voor Schone Kunsten

In a shock U-turn on 29 January—the day our article was published in the February issue of The Art Newspaper—all 24 Russian avant-garde works loaned by the Dieleghem Foundation to the Museum voor Schone Kunsten (MSK) in Ghent were removed and placed in museum storage.

When the works’ authenticity was first publicly questioned by ten dealers, curators and art historians in an open letter released on 15 January, the museum’s initial response—at the prompting of Flemish Culture Minister Sven Gatz—was to announce the creation of an "expert committee" to examine half-a-dozen works, with all the others remaining on display until the committee’s findings (slated for the end of February) were released.

But a museum statement issued (in Flemish) at 17:10 on January 29 – four hours after Flemish Culture Minister Sven Gatz was forwarded a copy of The Art Newspaper’s 3,000-word exposé – acknowledged that, because "discussion of the authenticity of the Toporovskys’ collection has taken on great proportions", the committee would now be granted "unlimited access to all works... so that research can be conducted smoothly and in complete serenity". (Art Newspaper).

Here is our article in full:

SPOILER

On 20 October 2017, a display entitled Russian Modernism 1910-30 opened at the Museum voor Schone Kunsten (MSK) in Ghent, Belgium. It consists of 24 works attributed to Larionov, Goncharova, Tatlin, Filonov, Kandinsky, Malevich, El Lissitzky, Exter, Popova, Rozanova, Rodchenko, Udaltsova and others. The provenance of all of the works is given as the Dieleghem Foundation, which was set up by the Russian Igor Toporovsky and his wife, Olga.

On 15 January, an open letter was published in the Flemish daily newspaper De Standaard, signed by ten art-world figures with specialist knowledge of the Russian avant-garde, describing the works on show in Ghent as “highly questionable” and calling for them to be taken down pending further research. Among the signatories are the dealers Julian Barran, James Butterwick, Richard Nagy, Ivor Braka and Jacques de la Béraudière, and curators and collectors including Natalia Murray, the co-curator of the 2017 exhibition Revolution: Russian Art 1917-32 at London’s Royal Academy of Arts, and Alex Lachmann, a regular presence at London’s Russian art sales and one of the biggest hitters in the field. The letter goes on to say: “They have no exhibition history, have never been reproduced in serious scholarly publications and have no traceable sales records.” The museum “did not provide any information about their provenance or exhibition history…other than the name of the owner”.

This prompted an early-morning crisis meeting at MSK. Museum staff were told not to comment on the affair. At 3.30pm, a statement was issued declaring that the institution had assessed the loans on the basis of “confidential information from the collector” and that “the documentation folders and the descriptions in the possession of the Dieleghem Foundation provide a background to the history and authenticity of each of the works”. None of this background material has been released.

The statement, drafted at the initiative of the Flemish culture minister, Sven Gatz, also announced that a committee of experts would be established “to further research the Russian artworks currently on view at the MSK”. It concluded with the unsubstantiated assertion by Ghent’s alderwoman for culture, Annelies Storms, that the museum had “unintentionally ended up in a debate between art dealers and merchants, most of whom also have a financial interest in the matter”.

Storms’s allegation riled four of the letter’s signatories: Konstantin Akinsha, Vivian Barnett, Natalia Murray and Alexandra Shatskikh, who are all academics and/or curators. Speaking on their joint behalf, Akinsha tells us that they will be responding after taking legal advice.

Although Gatz had first advised the owners of the Russian works to approach the museum, he was now doing his best to distance himself from the affair. “In our country, directors and curators are responsible for what their museums exhibit,” he told De Standaard.

On 18 January, after a new article in De Standaard revealed that the director of Luxembourg’s National Museum of History of Art, Michel Polfer, had also been approached by the owners but “received no assurances about the works’ provenance or how they entered Belgium”, Gatz ordered that the Ghent pictures undergo laboratory analysis.

The director of MSK, Catherine de Zegher, refused to speak to The Art Newspaper, but referred us to the Toporovskys, who say that they are “open to analysis and discussion” of their works, and that “experts can come and consult our archives, look, and give a public and scientifically justified opinion”.

Igor and Olga met at Moscow University, where they were both history students. After graduating in 1988, Toporovsky says he joined the European Institute think-tank recently launched by the future Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev and “helped arrange his visit to the Vatican” in 1989. He then worked as an “independent consultant” for another Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, and was also in charge of Russian MPs’ visits to Europe, the United Nations and Nato, meeting the former European Union president Jacques Delors along the way.

Toporovsky stood unsuccessfully for the Russian parliament as an independent in 1995, and was axed as a Yabloko party candidate before the 1999 elections for not submitting the necessary documentation. According to Russian tax records, he was registered as an employee of the presidential administration from 2003 to 2006, although the only taxable income he declared was payments from the culture ministry for the last five months of 2005.

After The Art Newspaper Russia published an article including material on Igor Toporovsky’s time in Russia, we asked the couple for their reaction. “The author will be prosecuted,” Olga said. Igor added: “The article is largely unfounded. It is defamatory in every detail.”

In 2006, the Toporovskys left Moscow for Brussels in the wake of a “disagreement” with Vladimir Putin’s administration. A member of Russia’s art-crime squad from 2002 to 2008 offers a different perspective, however. The former prosecuting lawyer Nikita Semyonov came across Toporovsky while investigating the so-called Preobrazhensky Affair in 2005 and 2006; this led to the conviction of Igor and Tatiana Preobrazhensky, who ran the Kollektsia Gallery in Moscow, for selling fake Russian paintings. During the course of this investigation, Semyonov says, the police found a handwritten receipt for almost $3m, signed by Toporovsky, for two paintings by Malevich and Kandinsky that the Preobrazhenskys had sold on his behalf to a “powerful oligarch”.

“When we began to verify their provenance, we had doubts about their authenticity,” Semyonov says. Toporovsky said that the works came from the family of Iosef Orbeli, the director of St Petersburg’s State Hermitage Museum from 1934 to 1951, through a certain Camo Manukyan. The unnamed oligarch did not collaborate with the investigators or allow the paintings to be examined. Toporovsky “emigrated from Russia shortly after the interrogation”, Semyonov says. When we asked him what he remembered of the Preobrazhensky Affair, Toporovsky said: “I visited the gallery once; I had some information about the affair, but with many gaps and imprecisions.”

Semyonov, who now works as an art consultant and legal adviser, encountered Toporovsky’s name again in 2013, when he was approached by an artist claiming to have sold around 50 paintings “in the style of Russian avant-garde artists”, each priced at around ¤1,500, to Toporovsky and a Russian dealer with galleries in Paris and New York. When the dealer refused to pay, Semyonov says, the artist went to the police, providing them with photographs of the works. “Comparing the photos of these paintings with photographs from the Ghent exhibition, I can see similarities,” Semyonov says.

In 2009, Toporovsky lent several works to the exhibition Alexandra Exter and Friends in Tours, France. This was closed down by police, who impounded a number of works suspected of being fakes. A court cleared Toporovsky of suspicion and his works were returned.

In 2017, the Toporovskys registered a foundation in Belgium called Dieleghem, after the Château de Dieleghem, which they own and aim to turn into a museum to house their collection by 2020. The foundation’s declared goal is the “disinterested promotion of works and artists of European art from the period 1850-1930 and Russian Modernism 1900-30”, but it reserves the right to sell “any element it owns if it does not fit into the collection as defined by the founder”. The collection consists of around 500 works, two-thirds of which are paintings.

Toporovsky says that he decided to show some of the works at MSK “so as not to lose time. We approached several museums in Belgium—La Boverie in Liège, the Musée d’Ixelles and Bozar in Brussels—then I talked to the Flemish culture minister, Sven Gatz, about what we could do. Antwerp is the biggest Flemish museum, but still under restoration; that left Ghent, so I contacted Catherine de Zegher.” De Zegher is not a specialist in Russian Modernist art but she was the curator of the 2013 Moscow Contemporary Art Biennale. Nonetheless, the works on show at MSK were selected jointly with De Zegher, Toporovsky says.

The case of the altered exhibition catalogue
The Toporovskys have explained the history of the undated Goncharova Evangelists, which are on show in Ghent, by producing the well-worn catalogue to an exhibition called Beautiful Image, staged by the Kharkov Art Museum/Kharkov Collectors’ Club, and dated 1992. It reproduces the Evangelists with a caption that translates as “N.S. Goncharova, Angel with Creatures, private collection”. But Valentina Myzgina, the director of the Kharkov Art Museum since 1993 and an employee of the institution since 1970, says that the show never happened. She says that the document is a reworking of a catalogue from 1998. The Kramskoy portrait on the 1998 cover has been replaced, and the year altered from 1998 to 1992. “Neither the Goncharova nor the Rozanova on the opposite page were in the 1998 show,” Myzgina says. She says that the two pages concerned have been doctored, the images replaced and part of the text altered. She also says that, although the works are paintings, the “1992” catalogue lists them under “graphics”, with “false museum inventory numbers with the cipher GR used for graphic works”: N° 1256-GR for the Goncharova and N° 1235-GR for the Rozanova. Myzgina says that the Goncharova is captioned “private collection”, yet “items entering the museum temporarily do not receive inventory numbers”. When asked to comment on the allegation that their catalogue is a fake, Olga Toporovskaya referred to it as “material proof”, adding: "Since 1991-93, 27 years have passed. I think that the [Museum] Director has also changed."

The Toporovskys’ claims examined
The Museum voor Schone Kunsten (MSK) plans a show of works from the Dieleghem Foundation on the spirituality of Russian Modernism in 2019, with loans from other European institutions “such as the Ludwig Museum”. Toporovsky says that the scholars Magdalena Dabrowska and Noemi Smolik will be involved.

Dabrowska says that she has met the Toporovskys in Brussels but “will not be involved in any capacity. As a scholar of a given period, you don’t walk into a house filled with works of that period, never seen, published or reproduced before, without asking yourself ‘why?’ and ‘where do they come from?’”

When we asked him how the works left Russia for Belgium, Toporovsky said they “were stored in Ukraine and the Baltic states, where I have always had family”. (He was born in Dnipro, Ukraine, and says he has longstanding family ties in Latvia.) Asked if export permission had been an issue, he declined to comment.

Exporting cultural goods from Ukraine is at least as complex as it is from Russia, and Latvia also requires export permits to Belgium, despite being a fellow member of the European Union.

A wall panel at MSK declares that the Dieleghem Foundation’s collection is “closely associated” with Antoine Pevsner and his brother Naum, better known as Naum Gabo. Olga Toporovskaya says that “Antoine and Naum had a brother who lived in Leningrad; my great-grandfather was a cousin.” She says that her great-grandfather acquired the avant-garde works owned by Naum and Antoine after moving to Moscow, which the brothers left in 1922/23.

Naum Gabo’s daughter Nina tells The Art Newspaper that she has “never heard of Olga Toporovskaya” and that, as far as she is aware, Naum Gabo did not leave a collection of Russian avant-garde art in Russia.

Toporovskaya says her father got to know George Costakis, the celebrated Greek collector of avant-garde art, in Moscow in around 1952, when her father was just 15, and that, when her father was later on the board of the International Philatelist Committee, he exchanged drawings with a Pevsner provenance for philatelic materials from Costakis. Toporovskaya adds that her father also acquired a “couple of pictures” from the widow of the artist Alexander Kuprin, and bought the archives of the actor Mikhail Astangov, which included the Tatlin nude on show in Ghent.

Aliki Costakis, George’s daughter, says that she does not know of any Olga Toporovskaya, nor has she heard about any co-operation between their fathers. Olga says the fact that Gabo’s and Costakis’s daughters “are not aware of my existence… does not prove that my father didn’t know Costakis and didn’t exchange [the drawings] with him”.

Toporovsky says that he began to buy paintings in the early 1990s. One source, he says, was Camo Manukyan, who, he claims, came to Moscow with avant-garde works that his uncle, Iosef Orbeli, the director of the State Hermitage Museum from 1934 to 1951, had saved from Stalinist destruction by sending to Armenia. Manukyan, Toporovski says, sold the Ace of Clubs by Ivan Puny to the State Tretyakov Gallery and a Lentulov to the oligarch collector Piotr Aven.

Andrei Sarabyanov, a leading Russian expert on the Russian avant-garde, is sceptical about the idea of a museum director being able to sneak works out of his museum and secretly dispatch them from Leningrad to Erevan, the capital of Armenia. “If this had happened, the museum leadership would have been arrested immediately,” he says. It should also be noted that Iosef Orbeli was a scholar in the field of antiquities before becoming the Hermitage’s director.

Toporovsky says that after buying a Rodchenko (not in the Ghent show) from the Moscow auction firm Alfa-Art in 1993, he established links with Manukyan and was able to buy “a good part” of the Orbeli collection.

Maxim Boxer, a board member of the Russian art dealers’ federation, the International Confederation of Antiquaries and Art Dealers, was an expert at Alfa-Art in 1993. He remembers Manukyan because he “regularly visited our auction house. But by 1994, we had begun to have serious doubts about the works he offered us for sale, and we ceased to deal with him.” The Toporovskys say that the Dieleghem Foundation “would like to produce a publication on the Orbeli collection, a very important part of our holdings, with an article about its history written by Manukyan”.

Orbeli’s daughter-in-law, Tatiana, tells The Art Newspaper Russia that he never had a private collection. “He did not even have a home,” she says. Marina Bunatyan, the director of the Orbeli Brothers Museum in Tsaghkadzor (near Erevan), which she co-founded in 1982, says: “I know all Iosef Orbeli’s descendants and have talked to them countless times, but I have never heard this story.”

The provenance of four works in the Ghent show—Woodcutters (1912) and Suprematist Composition (1922/23) by Malevich, a Rodchenko constructivist composition and a 1917 Kandinsky composition—is given as the State Committee for the Arts, but no such body appears to have existed, although there was an arts committee of the USSR Council of People’s Commissars, renamed the Arts Committee of the USSR Council of Ministers in 1946. It was disbanded in 1953 and its operations transferred to the ministry of culture. Its archives can be consulted in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts in Moscow.

The art historian Konstantin Akinsha, who has worked extensively on the archives, says: “There is no information about sales of avant-garde works from Soviet museum collections being authorised by this arts committee either before or after 1946. Anyone brave enough to claim such a provenance needs to provide documentary proof.”

Toporovsky talks of other sources for the works, mainly “museum stores outside the USSR”. There were “two types of store: those in republics outside what is now the Russian Federation—Ukraine, Belarus, Uzbekistan etc—and, above all, the stores administered by the defence ministry and the KGB”. He says that Lenin’s commissar for education, Anatoly Lunacharsky, created a museum network across Russia showing Modernist and other works, but “all were abolished by Stalin, and some works were burned or disappeared. Others were stored away by the services in charge of the liquidation, the military and the KGB.”

Alfa-Art’s founder, Mikhail Kamensky, the head of Sotheby’s Russia from 2007 to 2016, says: “The idea that the KGB created a secret fund to store the works of Russian avant-garde artists is ridiculous, and the idea that the ministry of defence controlled or created specially designated stores with paintings of avant-garde artists is totally absurd. The military never interfered with the inner life of Soviet art museums—they simply didn’t care. Ideology was not their field.”

Igor Toporovsky TELLS The Art Newspaper that he started buying Russian Modernist works in the early 1990s, when he was “almost alone” in the field, and able to buy such works “because I was working in the political world and had insider contacts. The prices were extremely low.”

Kamensky is adamant that “the hunt for masterpieces started in the 1970s following the fame of George Costakis. The Russian avant-garde quickly became a popular vehicle for investment”.

Experts comment on other works
The Rozanova 1915 Futurist composition features a scarlet 25-kopeck stamp with the profile of Tsar Nicholas II ringed by the Cyrillic inscription “Pochta Rossiiskoy Imperii” (post of the Russian Empire), but Nicholas II’s head never appeared on 25-kopeck stamps. His profile was used only on coins, and the inscription was never used, either.

A Mountainscape ascribed to Roerich is entitled Tibet and dated 1922, a year Roerich spent entirely in the US. Kenneth Archer, the author of Roerich East and West (1999), confirms that Roerich did not set eyes on the Himalayas before the end of 1923, did not paint any known views of the Himalayas before 1924, did not set foot in Tibet until 1927 and listed all the paintings he executed there in his travel diary Altai-Himalaya (1929). Archer has never seen this painting nor any reproduction of it. “It does look rather suspect to me,” he says, “as if some other artist may have compiled it more recently by incorporating features from authentic Roerich works and adding various features of his own.”

Willem Jan Renders, the curator of Russian art at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, and secretary of the Lissitzky Foundation, tells The Art Newspaper: “The two works supposedly by Lissitzky in the Ghent show resemble two well-known Proun paintings: Proun P23 n°6, in the collection of the Van Abbemuseum, and Proun GBA, created in 1923, in the Gemeentemuseum, the Hague. Both are well documented and we believe they were painted by El Lissitzky. Seeing these two paintings now in Ghent, many questions arise. Why would Lissitzky have painted a different version of these two works? And why would he do so in a different format? In our archives, there is no historic photograph or description of the Ghent paintings. So why were they never published? Moreover, has there been chemical analysis or x-ray examination of them? Until these questions are answered satisfactorily, the two works in Ghent will remain highly questionable.”

quote:

Commissie die Russische kunst moest onderzoeken zet werkzaamheden na dag 1 al stop
De expertencommissie die klaarheid moest scheppen of de Russische werken die tentoongesteld waren in het MSK Gent al dan niet echt waren, laat weten dat het onmogelijk is om haar taken uit te voeren. Advocaten van het echtpaar Toporovski gaven enkele voorwaarden vooraleer de kunstwerken onderzocht mochten worden. De commissie besloot daarop om de werkzaamheden al na dag 1 stop te zetten.

De expertencommissie werd samengesteld door minister van Cultuur Sven Gatz (Open VLD) en de schepen van Cultuur Gent Annelies Storms (SP.A) .

De Stichting Dieleghem van het Russische echtpaar Toporovski, die eigenaar is van de kunstwerken, had principieel ingestemd om vijf werken in het labo te laten onderzoeken. De bedoeling was dat de commissie klaarheid zou scheppen in de discussie over de authenticiteit van de Russische werken die in het MSK Gent werden tentoongesteld. (VRT).

SPOILER

Vanmorgen was er een eerste werkvergadering gepland in het MSK Gent. Daar zou de commissie de directeur van het museum en enkele naaste medewerkers spreken. Bij aanvang van de vergadering waren het weliswaar de advocaten van respectievelijk de Stad Gent en de museumdirectie die aanwezig waren. De advocaat van de eigenaars van de kunstwerken stelde in een brief bijkomende eisen. Daar waren een aantal voorwaarden bij die voor de commissie onaanvaardbaar waren zodat ze de werkzaamheden niet konden opstarten.

Thomas Leysen, voorzitter van de commissie, liet in een persbericht weten dat deze voorwaarden "neerkwamen op een vetorecht om de werkzaamheden op te starten. In deze omstandigheden kan de commissie niet anders dan concluderen dat haar opdracht onmogelijk is geworden, en beslist ze haar werkzaamheden stop te zetten."

Minister Gatz: "Dit is de wereld op zijn kop"
Sven Gatz, die het initiatief voor de oprichting nam, bekrachtigde de ontbinding van de commissie: “Ik heb geprobeerd als minister van Cultuur een constructieve scheidsrechterrol op te nemen met de instelling van een expertencommissie. Aangezien deze scheidsrechterrol niet langer gewenst is door beide partijen, heeft het voortbestaan van de commissie geen concreet doel meer.”

"Er waren twee vragen die voor ons onmogelijk waren om aan tegemoet te komen vanuit de Russische verzamelaars", legt de minister uit aan VRT NWS. "Wanneer wij van de 24 werken die er hangen er 5 materiaaltechnisch wilden laten onderzoeken, moesten wij als overheid aangeven waarom we over die werken twijfels hebben. Ja, dat is natuurlijk de wereld volledig op zijn kop en die stond al voldoende op zijn kop. Wij wilden er gewoon ad random 5 werken uit kunnen halen. Wij moesten aangeven waarom onze twijfels gegrond waren. Ik onderhandel niet met dergelijke mensen. Zij wraakten ook bepaalde personen van een wetenschappelijk instituut met wereldfaam dat in het MSK in Gent ook het Jan Van Eyck-retabel aan het restaureren is. Dan houdt het op. Men onderwerpt zich aan een onderzoek met de bedoeling om klaarheid te scheppen. Als men daarna met vertragings- of andere manoeuvres komt, dan is het gedaan. De stad Gent wilde in die omstandigheden ook niet meer meewerken, waarvan akte."

"Het kon echt niet dat de commissie in deze omstandigheden moest werken. Ik heb een overleg gehad met de voorzitter van de commissie Thomas Leysen. Uit zijn relaas bleek dat het geen zin had om verder te gaan. Ik betreur dat het zo is gelopen. Het is nu opnieuw de verantwoordelijkheid van het museum en van de stad, dan is het terug naar af. De stad is nooit een grote fan van de commissie geweest, ik heb hen moeten overtuigen. Maar ik heb van hen recent ook een brief gekregen waarin de commissie in vraag werd gesteld. Dat kan ik ook niet echt de volle samenwerking noemen. Het is nu hun verantwoordelijkheid, de werken zijn intussen verwijderd, we moeten er niet veel meer van maken dan het is. Het is een zeer spijtig incident. Dit doet zich jammer genoeg ook vaker dan we denken voor in het buitenland. Het is niet alleen hier in Gent gebeurd."

quote:

De Zegher loog Gentse politici voor
De twee internationale experts die Catherine de Zegher opvoerde, hebben de collectie-Toporovski nooit onderzocht.

'Zes maanden lang heeft het museum onderzoek gedaan naar de collectie’, zei Catherine de Zegher, de directrice van het Museum voor Schone Kunsten, maandagavond in de cultuurcommissie van de stad Gent. ‘In die periode waren er twee externe experts volop bij betrokken. Magdalena Dabrowski en Noemi Smolik waren zo enthousiast dat ze een expositie met de werken wilden maken. Ik heb daar concepten van en kan u de documenten tonen.’ (Standaard).

SPOILER

Nochtans zegt geen van beide specialisten ooit een vraag voor een expertise te ­hebben gekregen, laat staan dat ze die uitvoerden. Meer zelfs, beiden hebben De Zegher geadviseerd haar handen niet te verbranden aan deze collectie. Eén element in de verklaring klopt wel. ‘Ik ken Catherine al lang’, zegt Noemi Smolik aan de telefoon vanuit Duitsland. ‘Voor haar tentoonstelling in de Moskou Biënnale schreef ik teksten. We zaten te broeden op een tentoonstelling over Russische avant-garde. Dat plan ging al een drietal jaar mee. Mogelijk zag Catherine de collectie-Toporovski daar deel van uitmaken. Misschien is dat oude plan het concept waar ze naar verwijst.’

Van voorafgaand onderzoek is er evenwel geen sprake. ‘Ik heb nooit een vraag voor een expertise gekregen’, zegt Smolik. ‘Ik heb de collectie pas voor het eerst gezien toen ze al geëxposeerd was in het museum. Daar had ik meteen twijfels bij. Nadien, een poos voor Kerstmis, werd ik met enkele andere mensen bij Toporovski thuis uitgenodigd. Daar hing nog meer kunst. Toen hij begon te vertellen over de herkomst van die werken, vond ik sommige verhalen weinig geloofwaardig. Het viel me op dat hij de ­details van sommige verklaringen schuldig moest blijven. Toen dacht ik: dit kan niet waar zijn.’

Geschandaliseerd
Magdalena Dabrowski, die in New York 24 jaar bij het Moma werkte en tien jaar bij het Metropolitan Museum, zegt ‘meer dan geschandaliseerd’ te zijn dat ze en plein public is opgevoerd als experte. ‘Zei ze dat? Voor al die politici? Ongelooflijk dat iemand zulke foute gegevens de wereld instuurt’, zegt ze aan de telefoon vanuit Parijs. ‘Ik ken Catherine van in New York, maar we hebben mekaar zeker tien jaar niet gezien. Zij heeft me nooit over deze tentoonstelling ingelicht. Ze heeft me ook nooit een expertise gevraagd. Ik heb de collectie in mei 2017 gezien, omdat een vriend me geïntroduceerd had bij de Toporovski’s thuis. Het museum had zijn selectie toen al gemaakt.’

‘Ik stond perplex van al die kunst in dat huis’, zegt Dabrowski. ‘Nooit eerder had ik driedimensionaal werk van Malevitsj gezien. Dat vond ik al raar. Dan kwam er een verhaal over de kunstenaarsfamilie Pevsner, die verwant was aan Olga Toporovski en halsoverkop het land verlaten had met zijn kunst. Mijn grootmoeder is in 1924 Rusland uitgevlucht. Geloof me, zelfs geen porseleinen kopje kon ze meenemen. Ik zag al die kunst en dacht: hoe komt dat ik nog nooit van die werken heb gehoord? Niemand is de jongste decennia met een collectie van die omvang naar buiten gekomen.’

Beide internationale specialistes hebben Catherine de Zegher afgeraden om met de collectie-Toporovski te werken. ‘Catherine wist dat er in het kunstcircuit veel mensen waren die twijfels hadden’, zegt Noemi Smolik. ‘Ik was verbaasd dat ze deze werken toonde. Maar ze was zo zeker van haar zaak. Na dat etentje bij de Toporovski’s heb ik haar gezegd dat ik er niet in geloofde. De expositie liep op dat moment al twee maanden. Toen begon ze precies ook te twijfelen.’ Voor de buitenwereld bleef De Zegher koppig haar gelijk volhouden.

Dabrowski heeft op 28 november de opstelling in Gent bezocht. ‘Het was een fait accompli, de werken hingen aan de muur’, zegt ze. ‘Er werden nog meer genodigden rond­geleid door Toporovski, dus bleef ik liever discreet. Ik heb Catherine toen gezegd dat de werken gecheckt moesten worden op herkomst en een chemische analyse moesten ondergaan. Dat had ze eigenlijk vooraf moeten doen.’

Niet de laatste verrassing
Het was voor Dabrowski niet de laatste verrassing met de collectie. ‘Op 11 januari stuurde een vriend me vanuit Moskou een persbericht door. Hij deed dat omdat mijn naam erin stond, vlak na die van Toporovski nog wel. Toen ging ik door het dak. Ik stond er vermeld als lid van het wetenschappelijk comité van de Dieleghem Stichting. Zonder dat me dat ooit gevraagd was. In januari kreeg ik een pak kopieën van schilderijen opgestuurd, van nog andere werken dan die van Gent. Samen zullen het er zo’n negentigtal geweest zijn. Het waren allemaal schilderijen die sterk leken op bekend werk van die kunstenaar. Ik nam ze door en dacht: er is er niet één bij dat in orde is.’

Igor en Olga Toporovski hebben altijd beweerd dat ze niets met de kunstmarkt te maken willen hebben, maar alleen wetenschappelijke bedoelingen hebben. Dat blijkt alvast niet overeen te komen met de getuigenis van Noemi Smolik. ‘Nadat ik bij de Toporovski’s te gast was geweest, kreeg ik een foto doorgemaild van een schilderij van Franti¨ek Kupka. Met de vraag of ik niemand kende die het wou kopen.’

quote:

Ook huiszoekingen bij Gentse cultuurschepen in Toporovski-onderzoek
Er zijn dinsdag op verschillende plaatsen in België huiszoekingen uitgevoerd na een klacht van een collectief van kunsthandelaars en een afstammeling van een kunstenaar. Dat gebeurde onder meer op het kabinet van Gents schepen van Cultuur Annelies Storms en in het Gents Museum voor Schone Kunsten. (Standaard).

SPOILER

De federale gerechtelijke politie van Oost-Vlaanderen voert een onderzoek naar de echtheid van de Toporovski-collectie die in het Museum voor Schone Kunsten Gent (MSK) geëxposeerd werd. Vier internationale kunsthandelaars zeggen schade te hebben onvervonden door de zaak, en hebben samen met advocatenbureau SQ een klacht ingediend met burgerlijke partijstelling. Bij hen voegde zich een afstammeling van een Russische avant-garde kunstenaar van wie het werk in Gent getoond werd.

Maandagmiddag werden huiszoekingen in het MSK bevestigd. De onderzoekers verzegelden computers, vroegen documenten op en ondervroegen museumdirectrice Catherine de Zegher. Maandagavond werden ook huiszoekingen bij Gents cultuurschepen Annelies Storms bevestigd.

‘Nieuwe elementen’
In de Gentse gemeenteraad vroeg de oppositie eerder al meer uitleg over de maandenlange kritiek op het MSK, nadat twijfel opstak over de echtheid van de werken. Schepen Storms verzette zich evenwel tegen de kritiek. ‘We zijn steeds geconfronteerd met nieuwe elementen’, zegt ze. ‘Het is achteraf makkelijk om te zeggen wat iemand moet doen.’

Begin maart werd MSK-directrice Catherine de Zegher tijdelijk geschorst uit haar functie, nadat ze in de Gentse cultuurcommissie verklaard had dat ze twee externe experten had aangezocht om de bruiklenen voor de tentoonstelling te onderzoeken. Desgevraagd door deze krant bleken de twee experten die vraag nooit gekregen te hebben.

Het onderzoek in Gent heeft betrekking op de 26 bruiklenen Russische avant-gardekunst die tot voor kort in het museum hingen. Nadat de stad Gent op 21 februari de bruikleenovereenkomst had stopgezet, kon eigenaar Igor Toporovski opnieuw beschikken over zijn schilderijen. Daaronder werk van Malevitsj, Kandinksy, Tatlin, Gontsjarova en Larionov.