From Russia with paint

An auction of affordable 20th-century Russian art drew crowds buying for investment and very personal reasons, writes Mary Finn

Last month, an art auction with a difference was held in Dublin, at the Radisson Hotel, Stillorgan. Though auctioneer Garrett O'Connor's "Russian Sale" was heralded in the usual way - ads in the fine arts pages and a lavish website - it drew as many pravda-seekers as Prada wearers, and several virgin bidders for every poker-faced auction room habitué. Buoyed up by catalogue reserve prices that offered a spectrum from €250 to €6,000, the hopeful spilled over into the halls and gardens of the hotel. In the actual bidding area the mercury rose like a Sputnik. Obliging boys walked the line from room to room holding each lot aloft, and two phones were manned throughout. Frisson was everywhere and the thoroughly researched and blessedly free catalogues were as prized as Harry Potter first editions.

"The bidders were out on the lawn waving their paddle cards in the windows at me or phoning up from behind pillars," says O'Connor. "I've never seen anything like it. There were at least 500 people out there on the night and every one of them seemed eager to take something home. There were some Russian journalists there too, dying to get this story out home because they found it of huge interest."

What was on offer were 291 mid to late 20-century Soviet/Russian paintings, a collection built up over the past 30 years by an Irish businessman now based in London. O'Connor faithfully guards his vendor's identity, pointing out that he is now elderly and careful about security issues.

However, since the paintings came from all over the former USSR, from the great Russian cities to Armenia, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Georgia, Ukraine and Siberia, the vendor's former travels are, to say the least, interesting. He is now richer by some €300,000, which O'Connor considers a "fantastic" result for his client.

"He had an eye and he followed it," says O'Connor. "He bought very often straight from the artists themselves. These are not Sunday painters or amateurs. Most are academicians and you would find it very difficult to get their works in Russia now because they are being collected today in a much more purposeful fashion by Russians and international collectors alike."

What drew the crowds was the prospect of buying an interesting artwork for prices that promised to be affordable. In the event, many did go for less than art college sale prices, for far less than the most modest Dublin gallery prices, a few for even less than the Sunday railing prices on St Stephen's Green.

"Irish people were buying because these were good images," says O'Connor, who ran an earlier exhibition of Russian art as long ago as 1994. "Basically, these were very good paintings at a realistic price. You wouldn't get that quality of Irish painting without multiplying the price by a factor of 10 or more. And it's good for buyers to cast their eyes outward and take in another world view. I think we're getting a bit closeted here by the weight of Irish paintings and their prices and all that. There's a lot more going on."

What you got as a gift with your painting was a slice of history. After the establishment of the Union of Artists by Stalin in 1932 (who saw off Modernism and all its pomps, including native-born movements such as Constructivism and Suprematism), many professional Soviet artists found themselves, if not exactly pampered, not overworked either. They were unlikely to starve in either garret or gulag if they suppressed their quirks and embraced clap-happy Socialist Realism. And - this is the interesting thing - as long as these salaried artists produced commissions to order, they were allowed canvas and paint in quantity to produce as many private studies as they wished.

Dachas, or holiday homes, were on offer to the best approved. Thus landscapes, portraits and still lifes flourished, and during the artistic "Thaw" years of Krushchev, a Russian version of Impressionism finally took approved form, 50 years after the great Moscow merchant collectors Morosov and Shukin had built up their still unmatched collections of Impressionists and Fauves. Tacitly, it was accepted that loose brushwork might be an acceptable way to evoke nature, sing the praises of good Russian snow, welcome the return of spring, and paint up a harvest, whether it be of fish, apples or rosy-cheeked children.

Most of the works in the auction were of this type and sold briskly, small-scale gulps of plein-air. There was even a dead-ringer for Monet's pioneering Impression: Sunrise of 1871, called Sunset: Tashkent. There was blossom, there were rivers; there were views of what Stalin called the Virgin Lands, the newly opened up vastness of the oriental USSR. But what drew the oohs and the highest prices were the genre works; the gospel according to Socialist Realism. Trucks full of workers returning at evening time; pipelayers in the desert, even a crowd of critics at The Hermitage looking at - what exactly? The evocatively named Wild Geese, the highest priced painting at €6,500, was a haunting monumental composition that married the heroic and the ephemeral: men of the earth and a skein of geese passing over.

Two academic portraits of Lenin just about fetched their reserve, while a more interesting (if unrecognisable) déjeuner-sur-l'herbe imaging of him in exile fetched a healthy €2,200. No Stalin likeness was on view other than a Che-like photograph in the catalogue, but there was a dashing Pushkin and a copy of the great portrait of composer Mussorgsky by Ilya Repin.

There were war heroes whose medals made money talk louder than anyone had expected. The elephant not in the room was religious art - not a sniff of the great Byzantine tradition, no gold, not a hint of a halo, not even from the latest-born artist (1973). The earliest birth date here was 1907; most were 1920s and 1930s vintage.

"We won't see their like again," said a lugubrious man who was outbid for a Workers of Tashkent by an invisible hand in the foyer. He later bought a boat scene and professed himself happy. He was right of course. Unless 20th-century Chinese - or, perish the thought, Ceaucescan - art takes wing to Dublin, we probably won't. But Garrett O'Connor was quick to report another, and interesting, trend.

"There were lovely people viewing over the weekend. Yes, there were people buying for investment because it was good value and the opportunity won't come round again in a hurry. But some of the most interesting people I talked to were parents who had adopted babies in Russia. They were buying, no matter what the price was, some of them, because they wanted to hand something on to their children. Whatever it was gardens, fields, people, they wanted to be able to give them something and say 'this is something for you, this is your homeland.' I thought that was fantastic."

The good news is that there may be a Russian Sale Part II as Garrett O'Connor's vendor still has some works left in reserve. Details: www.oconnorartauctions.com