Russian Art:  Centre stage in London – at Saatchi and the Auction Houses – Huffington Post – Simon Hewitt

London, not Moscow, has long been the global center for Russian art — but the twice-yearly batch of specialist auctions at Sotheby’s, Christie’s, Bonhams and MacDougall’s (who specialize exclusively in Russian art) attract a clientele that is essentially Russian — not British, or even Western.

Ignorance is one factor: there has been little to raise the profile of 20th century Russian art for the British museum-goer. Now the Saatchi Gallery is seeking to change that with two blockbuster exhibitions: one devoted to Non-Conformist Art of the 1960s-80s (through February 24), the other to art since the fall of Communism in 1990 (through May 5).

The Non-Conformists spurned the political dictates of Socialist Realism, often working clandestinely. The Saatchi show reveals that a handful of them — led by Vladimir Neumukhin and Lydia Masterkova — were already, by the 1960s, producing abstractions worthy of their European and American contemporaries. Abetted by the visual ingenuity of Kinetic artist Francisco Infante, they give the exhibition a powerful, somewhat intellectual start.

Then it is suddenly and sensuously hijacked by Oleg Tselkov and his bald-headed men in a variety of gap-toothed grimaces, drenched in hues of saturated color so dense you can almost chew them. Tselkov (born 1934) is destined to be acknowledged as the greatest Russian artist of his era. The process has already begun. In London this November a shock-pink Tselkov greeted you at MacDougall’s as soon as you walked through the door; a green Tselkov lorded it over Christie’s main showroom like a giant icon; and a red Tselkov, wrapped up in bandages, lurked at the back of the Aktis Gallery like a cursing Egyptian mummy.

Tselkov can dominate any setting and, in the low-ceilinged galleries on Saatchi’s top floor, he is overpowering. His sensational 6 x 9ft reinterpretation of The Last Supper is a shimmering, port-red sea of twilit faces, clamoring for a drink like eager punters in a 1970s disco. Owned by the artist, and last shown in public in his adopted Paris by Galerie Le Minotaure in 2007, it would be worth the admission price alone (if there was one — entrance, admirably, is free). Tselkov’s Last Supper ranks alongside Picasso’sGuernica as the most powerful group image of the 20th century. It should be bought for the nation and hung in Tate Modern.

Oleg Tselkov “The Last Supper.” (Photo courtesy the artist)
Little-seen works from private collections constitute the Saatchi show’s greatest strength. Several offer new insight into artists’ early careers, like Dmitri Krasnopevtsev’s Landscape with Fanza — a desolate, moonlit snowscape from 1947, stylistically at daggers drawn with the monochrome still lifes of the 1960s and 70s that underpin his reputation.

It is good to see the show’s section on Moscow Conceptualism downplay its intellectual side — as exemplified by the torrent of Cyrillic verbiage espoused by the movement’s perceived leader, Ilya Kabakov. His status is challenged here by Dmitri Prigov, for flair and originality; by Victor Pivarov and Grisha Bruskin, for graphic wit; and, for historic importance, by Mikhail Roginsky — who, in 1965, conjured up the forlorn world of the Communist apartment with his battered Red Door, and plain-colored panels randomly arrayed with electric sockets.

Ivan Chuikov also deserves to be represented in this Conceptualist context — as does Sergei Shablyavin alongside the optical games of Bulatov and Vasiliev, and Sergei Shutov in a spurious section on ‘Russian Pop Art’ that would have benefited immeasurably from works by St Peterburg’s New Artists of the 1980s, led by Timur Novikov, Afrika and Oleg Kotelnikov — all admired by Andy Warhol (and the recent subject of a superb retrospective at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art).

True, the Saatchi exhibition is subtitled Moscow Art 1960-80s — but to most visitors this is a Russian art show, and they will walk away with the mistaken impression that Soviet artistic rebels were based exclusively in Moscow.

Saatchi’s second show of Russian art takes over, chronologically, where the Non-Conformists left off, but is light years behind in terms of quality: a curatorial hotch-potch whose second-rate artists struggle to fill Saatchi’s gigantic ground-floor halls — with the honorable exception of Valery Koshlyakov’s epic architectural monuments in acrylic on sheets of cardboard, arranged one to a wall like altarpieces in some Palladian chapel.

The galleries to either side house monumentally repulsive photographic parades of tattooed prisoners (Sergei Vasiliev) and naked, aged down-and-outs (Boris Mikhailovsky) that might look better in a morgue.

Like the Non-Conformist show, dubbed Breaking the Ice, this second exhibition has been given a silly, patronizing title: Gaiety is the Most Outstanding Feature of the Soviet Union. This 1930s Stalin quote is of scant relevance to Russian artists active since 1990 — other than to enmesh them in ignorant, time-warped cliché.

Russian Contemporary — In Need Of A Boost

Albeit for different reasons, both Saatchi shows catch the eye and have been getting people talking, so the London auction houses will be hoping they boost international interest in Russian post-war art — which, believes William MacDougall, offers “the best value in the world at the moment: cheap relative to both classic Russian art and international contemporary art.” The reason, he suggests, is that the market is “segmented between Russians buying to impress Russian friends with Russian classic, and Russians buying to impress foreign friends with international contemporary. Neither have been much interested in Russian contemporary.”

The market for Russian post-war art at auction has proved erratic. It peaked back in 2008 with total sales of £20.6 million in London (from 1350 lots). But in 2009 the market caved in, with sales plummeting to £3.9 million and has yet to recover.

In November 2012 just 129 lots were offered in the field; sales totalled £2 million, with a top price of £229,000 for Vladimir Weisberg’s Reclining Nude (1973) — an atypical subject for this master of the Morandi-esque still life — at Sotheby’s. Krasnopevtsev led at MacDougall’s with a 1971 still life at £75,000, while Tselkov’s green ‘icon’, Person with Fork, justified its star billing at Christie’s with £127,000.

That’s still cheap.

In contrast to the market for Russian Contemporary Art, that for Russian Art from the 19th and early 20th century remains robust — yielding total sales of £85 million in London in 2012. According to James Butterwick, a dealer in Russian art now based in London after several years in Moscow, London has “consolidated its status as the undisputed global center of the Russian art market.” Sotheby’s, who enjoy 40 percent of the market, no longer sell in New York, while the doddering Moscow market has slumped still further since Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian return to the presidency, with the country’s business elite fleeing the country in ever-denser droves — preferably to London.

The spate of London sales in late November saw eight sessions in the space of four days (November 25-28). Christie’s landed the week’s top price: £4.4 million for Boris Kustodiev’s ruddy-cheeked, blond-bearded Coachman emerging from the snow in a blue kaftan, first shown at New York’s Russian Art Exhibition of 1924.

After fun in the snow, Vasily Vereschagin (1842-1904) served up hell in the heat with Transporting the Wounded – part of a 100-work Vereschagin exhibition that toured the U.S. from 1888-91 before being auctioned in New York. This was one of the finest Russian paintings seen at auction for years — and not seen in public since 1891, when New York businessman Samuel Ullman snapped it up for $705. Here it sold for for £937,000.

Vereschagin had two brothers killed at Plevna yet, as in all his war paintings, his approach is dispassionate, the moral outrage implicit. The scene, he noted, features “primitive carts” and “execrable roads” that made the “agonies of the wounded horrible beyond description.” His portrayal of these is neither gory not sentimental. Some of the wounded stumble along, heads bowed; others are in carts drawn by emaciated oxen. A dead cow lies by the side of the road, and the whole scene is shrouded in golden dust. Did anyone ever paint better dust than Vereschagin?

After the heights of their sale in May 2012, when they landed a world record £2.3 million for Petrov-Vodkin, MacDougall’s were hampered this fall by some overly aggressive estimates, although they still posted week’s top price for the ubiquitous seascapist Ivan Aivazovsky: £1.01 million for a View of Venice.

Auctioneer Charlie Ross maintained admirable wit and humor during MacDougall’s second session, which ran to 400 lots and lasted six hours. Yet his pronunciation faltered at times… rhyming Dniepr withwiper and Riga with tiger. Wishful-thinking for the Latvian economy, perhaps! Riga usually rhymes withmeager.

While demand for the big names remains high, prices for mainstream 20th century Russian art have not greatly progressed in recent years. Alexei Gritsai’s Power Station at a Collective Farm (a landscape a thousand times more bucolic than its title suggests), sold for £67,900 in June 2008, was here re-offered by MacDougall’s with a slightly lower estimate (£50,000-70,000) — and made £63,500. A stupendous kaleidoscopic work by Filanov’s student Vladimir Luppian, Revolution as a Stage of Evolution, was unsold here against an estimate of €250,000-400,000 — after selling for £270,000 in 2008.

And Pavel Tchelitchew’s La Dame Voilée (1954), an important work from his final ‘dancing box’ period featuring heads so stylized as to resemble glowing spider’s webs, also remained unsold against a modest estimate of £120,000-180,000. But works by Tchelitchew, in very different styles, found takers elsewhere: three Exter-like stage designs for Rimsky Korsakov’s opera The Golden Cockerel totaled £82,350 at Bonhams, and a somber 1928 Male Portrait brought a top-estimate £49,000 at Sotheby’s.

Tchelitchew’s saleroom appeal could benefit from a new, 336-page book, Pavel Tchelitchew — Metamophorses, launched during MacDougall’s pre-sale viewing. Author Alexander Kuznetsov skillfully navigates the stylistic shifts of an artist who fled Soviet Russia aged 20, to Berlin then Paris, where he abandoned his youthful neo-Cubism for monochrome portraits and Surrealist landscapes before moving to the U.S. with his partner Charles Henri Ford in 1934. His style morphed again in the late 1940s with his ‘dancing boxes’. Not for nothing did Gertrude Stein dub Tchelitchew (pronounce Chel-lee-cheff) the ‘New Picasso.’

Like the Non-Conformists, his talent has yet to be fully appreciated. There is much still to discover in Russian 20th century art, and much to enjoy — including the prices.

For a video of the exhibition:-

http://rbth.ru/articles/2012/12/17/gely_korzhev_bible_as_seen_by_socialist_realism_artist_21185.html

“The contemporary-art bubble

Blake Gopnik has an excellent piece on the art bubble in the latest Newsweek (where he was sadly laid off last week), which has been met by a predictable rubbishing from Marion Maneker. Both men agree on the symptoms: prices unrelated to quality, and artists who can go from hot to not in a very short amount of time. But they disagree on what those symptoms mean: Gopnik thinks that they mean “today’s contemporary market is due to deflate”, while Maneker sees art-market ups and downs as just part of what happens in any healthily-functioning market, and nothing to get particularly excited about.

The point that I think Maneker misses — and that he consistently misses in his attacks on people who are “complaining about the art market” — is that this particular market is qualitatively different from what you would consider a healthy market to be, not least because the prices are quantitatively completely bonkers. That was the main thrust of my Occupy Art post, and of the pieces by Dave Hickey and Sarah Thornton and Jerry Saltz and Charlie Finch that I linked to: markets, in general, are good and useful things. But sometimes they go crazy, and this is one of those times, and that’s a bad thing, not a good thing.

Collectively, we have managed to spark at least the hint of a debate — or, as Patricia Cohendescribes it while quoting a slew of dealers and collectors at Art Basel Miami Beach, a “backlash against the backlash”. (One hint to people talking to the New York Times: saying things like “I’m grateful to Bugatti” is not likely to attract readers to your cause.) Debate is good! But I do still feel that everybody’s talking past each other. For instance: if the critics complain about the prices that some contemporary art is selling for, responding by saying “but other art is cheap”, as gazillionaires Don Rubell and Marc Glimcher do in Cohen’s article, does seem to miss the point.

Similarly, saying “look, some art is going down in value”, as Maneker gleefully did in November, also misses the point. Yes, Damien Hirsts are worth less today than they were in 2008. That was entirely predictable (I called the top of the Hirst market exactly when it happened), and it’s entirely in line with the way in which Hirst has graduated himself out of the art market and into the luxury-goods market. As I said in March, Hirsts have not been a speculative investment since 2008, and the fact that Hirsts are dropping in value does not, to use Maneker’s word, “confound” those of us who have a beef with the upper levels of the contemporary-art market.

Rather, what is uniquely troubling about today’s contemporary art market are two things: absolute values and relative values. Gopnik runs down a list which could have dozens of different names:

A Richard Prince “nurse,” hung amid Picassos and Miros, selling for $6.5 million; a Damien Hirst “medicine cabinet” priced at $4 million; Julie Mehretu squiggles, barely a decade old, for $2.6 million—all for sale at Art Basel, and all with prices so high they are bound to crash-land…

An unproven artist such as Wade Guyton, now showing at the Whitney Museum in New York, can fetch more than a legend of pop art like Richard Artschwager, on view downstairs from Guyton’s work.

These numbers are scarily high in absolute terms, and relative to anything you might want to name: Old Masters, vintage cars, four-bedroom houses. And there’s real delusion behind them. In a passage which didn’t make it into the final version of Gopnik’s article, he writes:

The market for art is unlike any other, because it’s built on some notion of true, underlying value – on the idea that you buy art not because of its price (because of how much others might want to pay for it) but because of some real cultural worth that it represents. “We would not be mistaken for taking Richter’s abstractions as retroactively analogous with Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, or Yves Klein,” says the auction text for a glitzy, record-setting abstraction by Gerhard Richter – a genius figurative painter whose abstract work could be mistaken for mall-gallery schlock. The auction copy for Koons’s $34 million “Tulips” compares the sculpture to a Brancusi and says that Koons has “tapped into the canon of the history of art by taking flowers as his subject for this still life colossus, introducing ideas of the memento mori as well as romance and beauty.” Yet if these judgments about cultural worth turn out to be wrong, then so is any big price they bolster.

The real forces driving the seven- and eight-figure prices in the contemporary market are not art-historical importance, so much as what Gopnik characterizes as the souk-like atmosphere surrounding both fairs and auction houses — the places where most big-ticket contemporary art is now sold, and places where the act of spending money is more important than the art it’s being spent on. Maneker is absolutely right about this: “Of course it’s not about the art,” he writes. “An auction is an event about the buyers, not the art.” And exactly the same thing can be said about an event like Art Basel Miami Beach — an event where Kelly Crow’s curtain-raiser can include this photo caption:

New York artist Wade Guyton earned a reputation for using a large inkjet printer to create images of the letter ‘U.’

Those “U” panels now sell for upwards of $200,000 apiece, brand new, and one early X painting recently sold for $782,500.

Without art-historical importance, there’s no way that these artworks are going to hold their value for more than a few years. And even with art-historical importance, there’s no reason why they should cost orders of magnitude more than art which genuinely has stood the test of time. As Sean Kelly tells Gopnik, you can buy 10 or 20 Marcel Duchamps for the price of one Jeff Koons, which just doesn’t make any sense at all.

To quote Herb Stein, if something can’t go on forever, it won’t. And as Gopnik says, “someone, someday, will be left holding the bag”. Narrowly, that group of people will be the collectors who are currently spending obscene sums on churned-out artwork: it just doesn’t make sense to drop millions of dollars on a Christopher Wool, say, when no one has a clue how many thousands of the things there are in existence. More broadly, however, the bursting of the bubble is likely to mean a very nasty recession across the whole of the art world, causing serious damage to a slew of curators, gallerists, artists, museum professionals, and other non-rich people. Spectacular busts are born of overconfidence, of the idea that this time is different. And the signs of overconfidence are hard to miss:

Every time you thought the world was ending,” Kelly says, “this market has confounded that prediction.” After 9/11, he asked himself, “Who’s ever going to buy art again?” only to discover that his clients were more eager than ever to nest at home with precious things.

A crash of the market’s biggest players might still bring everyone down, but Kelly feels that today’s art world has probably—probably—become such a broad river, as he puts it, that a whirlpool in one place might not disturb currents elsewhere. (Every gallerist I spoke to insisted that the market for their particular, singularly talented artists was bound to be stable, even if their colleagues were clearly at risk—precisely the kind of bulletproof thinking that’s typical of boom times.) This fall, Kelly almost quadrupled the size of his gallery; our interview ended so he could vet yet another applicant to his growing staff.

Sean Kelly has for decades been one of the most respected gallerists in New York, with a small space showing beautiful, austere work at high-but-not-bonkers prices. His shows are often curated better than those at major museums, and he has neatly sidestepped the trendy in favor of the timeless. Until now. Kelly clearly can’t sustain that modest practice any more: the art market has become a world of “go big or go home”, and Kelly now represents glitzy and trendy artists like Terence Koh and Kehinde Wiley. When even Sean Kelly can no longer resist the gravitational pull exerted by the weight of money chasing shiny objects, and instead sounds like Ben Bernanke circa March 2007, then that’s a sign that the whole art market has become hollow at the core, in a way it never used to be. Like all hollow things, bubbles included, it’s liable to implode at any time.”

Let’s Talk About Sex

For centuries our attitudes towards female artists, and the art they produce, has been prejudiced and biased. Is that at last starting to change, asks Ivan Lindsay?

SINCE ANTIQUITY, WOMEN artists have been creating artworks alongside men, but their achievement has often been belittled and the value of their work is still only a fraction of that of male artists. The record for a sculpture made by a woman is the $10.7 million paid for Spider (2003) by Louise Bourgeois at Christie’s in November 2011, and the most valuable artwork in any medium by a woman is Natalia Goncharova’s Les Fleurs (1912), which fetched $10.8 million at Christie’s in June 2008. These prices are roughly a tenth of what the most valuable male artists sell for, such as Picasso or Munch, who have sold for $106 million and $120 million respectively.

Why is women’s art only worth a tenth of that of male artists? Is their art only a tenth as good, or are their prices held back by gender bias? Some assert that the reason is one of quality. Linda Nochlin, for example, in her 1988 work on the subject, Women, Art and Power and Other Essays, says: ‘The fact of the matter is that there have been no supremely great women artists, as far as we know, although there have been many interesting and very good ones… That this should be the case is regrettable, but no amount of manipulating the historical or critical evidence will alter the situation; nor will accusations of male chauvinistic distortion of history. There are no women equivalents for Michelangelo or Rembrandt, Delacroix or Cézanne, Picasso or Matisse, de Kooning or Warhol.’

Others maintain that the best of women’s art is often reattributed to their male contemporaries to make it more valuable — Judith Leyster turning into Frans Hals and Camille Claudel into Rodin, for example — and that women’s art production has always been underappreciated because most art buyers are men and many men have traditionally not believed women capable of creating masterpieces.

The role of women in art has changed over the centuries and a survey of their changing status is worth reviewing. There were times when women were highly appreciated for their artistic production. In Neolithic times, cultural anthropologists believe, women were mainly responsible for much of the artistic production, including cave paintings, pottery, textiles and jewellery.

Ancient references by Homer, Cicero and Virgil mention the prominent roles of women in artistic production. Pliny the Elder talks highly of painters such as Helena of Egypt, the daughter of Timon of Egypt, and there are glowing references to other painters in ancient Greece, such as Olympias, Iaia, Kalypso and Timarete. Since they didn’t sign their works, we don’t know what they created.

Above: Judith Leyster (The Concert, 1931-1933) lived in the shadows of Frans Hals. Below: The 20th Century saw doors open for the likes of Tamara de Lempicka (Jeune Fille en Vert, 1930)

IN THE EARLY medieval period, women, particularly nuns in convents, were leaders in the production of illuminated manuscripts, embroideries and carved capitals. They ran several embroidery workshops such as those at Winchester and Canterbury. The Bayeux Tapestry, the most famous embroidery of this period, is believed to have been made in a convent. From the 12th century, women were allowed to be part of artisan guilds and run their husbands’ businesses if widowed (the Wife of Bath in Chaucer’s 14th-century Canterbury Tales, for example). In England they created the rich textiles with gold and silver thread known as the Opus Anglicanum that were used in both ecclesiastical and secular settings. However, the arrival of printing meant artistic production became mechanised and increasingly under the control of men.

The Renaissance saw the arrival of a few named women as artists, such as Lavinia Fontana and Sofonisba Anguisciola. Humanism helped raise the status of women. Baldassare Castiglione’s text The Courtier was influential and maintained that both men and women should be educated in the social arts. However, in the late Renaissance the training of artists moved from the master’s workshop to the academy; women struggled to gain access and thus began their artistic decline. Study required working from male nudes and corpses, and women were barred from this, making it difficult for them to paint large, multi-figure religious compositions.

By the 18th century, women had been banned from most academies. In the Academy in Paris, for example, between the 17th century and the French Revolution there were only fifteen women out of 450 members, and these were all related to existing members. A few women managed to become accomplished at portraiture, such as Rosalba Carriera and Louise Elisabeth Vigée-LeBrun.

In England, the only female founding members of the Royal Academy were Angelica Kauffman and Mary Moser, and its first full female member was Laura Knight, who joined in 1936. During the 19th century, the possibilities for women gradually began to open up again and the Royal College of Art admitted women from its founding in 1837 but only allowed them to participate in ‘life’ classes that drew a man wearing a suit of armour. Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt and Susan Valadon became involved in the Impressionist movement; in 1894 Valadon was the first woman admitted into the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in France.

In the 20th century, a surge of innovation and discovery questioned traditional views and the perception of women artists. Women made further gains, such as Georgia O’Keeffe, Louise Bourgeois, Camille Claudel, Sonia Delaunay, Laura Knight, Zinaida Serebriakova, Tamara de Lempicka and Natalia Goncharova. In 1993 Rachel Whiteread became the first woman to win the Turner Prize.

THERE IS A sense now that women artists have made considerable gains in terms of perception of their worth and their value. However, they are still battling against a deep-seated male bias that, due to centuries of cultural prejudice, maintains they are not really capable of artistic greatness. There is a belief that in the same way as the aristocracy has never produced great artists due to having too many social distractions, women also have too many distractions, such as having to fulfil society’s expectations of what it means to be a mother and raise a family and also, increasingly, to make a wage.

Women are attracting more gallery representation and museum exhibitions, although they have a long way to catch up: art museums present an average of 15 per cent of work by women in curated exhibitions, and only 4 per cent of their acquisitions are works by women. Perhaps there is a female Titian or Picasso out there, and it would be wonderful if one were to emerge to take her place in the exalted heights of the artistic pantheon and prove wrong the entrenched male bias against female artists that has been built up over the past 500 years.

Ivan Lindsay’s forthcoming book, ‘The History of Loot and Stolen Art’will be published by Unicorn Press in 2013

If the recent discovery of the colourful Renoir landscape in a West Virginia flea market sounded to good to be true….it was…as the picture turned out to be stolen from the Baltimore Museum of Art.   On the Shore of the Seine, a colourful flickering landscape, was reputedly painted by Renoir for his mistress in 1879 on a linen napkin at a restaurent.  It was acquired by the Baltimore collector Herbert L. May from Bernheim-Jeune Gallery in Paris in 1926.  It was then lent or given to the Baltimore Museum by May’s wife Saidie in 1937 before being stolen in 1951.

The trail then goes cold until a woman found the painting recently in a West Virginia flea market on Route 340.  On being told what she had found she consigned the painting to the Alexandria based Potomack Co. auction house who estimated it at US$100,000.  The woman was quoted as saying, “I was just glad that while I had the painting for so long my house didn’t catch on fire and I wasn’t rear ended by a tractor-trailor or that the birds didn’t tear it up.”

Potomack checked the painting with the Art loss Register to make sure it wasn’t stolen.  The Baltimore Museum of Art claimed no knowledge of the painting and all was set for an auction on 29th Septemeber until a diligent Washington Post reporter did some research in the Baltimore Museum of Art library.  There, in a box of Saidie May’s letters was a card showing that she had lent the painting to the Museum in 1937.  There was also an old museum loan registration document revealing that the tiny painting measuring only 5 1/2 x 9 inches had been stolen from the museum on Nov. 17th 1951, shortly after May’s death.

The sale has now been cancelled and a legal fight is developing as to who owns the painting.  Although the museum had forgotten the painting and never reported it stolen they now badly want it back with Museum Director Doreen Bolger saying, “We want the painting back.  That painting was associated with her (Saidie May), and she is one of the most important donors in the museum….It was her decision that it would come to us.”  Then there is the Insurance Company who paid out US$2,500 for the painting in 1951 and the woman who bought the painting at the flea market.  Elizabeth Wanstein, the President of Potomac Company, is maintaining it is not clear that Saidie May technically owned the painting as it had been bought by her husband Herbert and has asked to see a police report.  The police have become involved as they want to know the paintings history between its theft and its appearance at the flea market.  For the time being the painting is sitting in storage at Potomac gallery and it sounds as if it might be there for some time until a judge decides who is the real  rowner.

For the full Story see the Wasington Post

New York financier Leon Black paid Sotheby’s nearly $120 million for “The Scream,” Edvard Munch’s 1895 pastel of a terrified man holding his head, according to several people close to the collector.

The identity of the buyer—who set a record for a work of art sold at auction—had been one of the art world’s most closely guarded secrets since the dramatic, 12-minute sale in May. Now a new parlor game will begin: guessing where the iconic artwork ends up.

Mr. Black sits on the boards of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, setting up a potential tug of war between two of the country’s most powerful art institutions. Neither owns a “Scream,” aside from lithograph-print versions of it.

Few artworks have the world-wide celebrity of “The Scream,” and it would immediately become a merchandising bonanza and huge attendance draw for any museum that displayed it.

A spokesman for Mr. Black, 60 years old, declined to comment.

It is easy to understand the work’s appeal: Munch, who was Norwegian, created four versions of “The Scream,” all between 1893 and 1910, but Mr. Black’s is the only one not in an Oslo museum and the first to come up at auction. The work depicts a bald, skeletal figure in a blue shirt standing at a popular suicide spot on Oslo’s horseshoe-shaped bay where people could often hear screams from a nearby insane asylum, according to art historians.

Mr. Black is one of a handful of billionaires whose lavish art spending has transformed the international art market in recent years, fueling the proliferation of art fairs and ratcheting up prices for all sorts of artworks. His $750 million collection already includes drawings by Vincent van Gogh and Raphael, watercolors by J.M.W. Turner, cubist paintings by Pablo Picasso and ancient Chinese bronzes. Three years ago, Mr. Black paid Christie’s $47.6 million for a Raphael chalk drawing, “Head of a Muse,” a record auction price at the time for a work on paper.

Because auction houses don’t require winning bidders to divulge their identities to the public, dozens of owners of the world’s priciest artworks are still unknown—including the collector who paid Christie’s $106.5 million two years ago for Picasso’s 1932 portrait of his mistress, “Nude, Green Leaves and Bust.”

The seller of “The Scream” was Petter Olsen, a Norwegian real-estate developer and shipping heir whose father was a neighbor of Munch’s in the small Norwegian town of Hvitsten. Mr. Olsen said he sold the work in order to fund a hotel and museum of Munch’s work near the Norwegian fiord where the artist painted.

Mr. Black gleaned an early interest in art from his mother and his aunt, Grace Borgenicht Brandt, a Manhattan art dealer who represented painter Milton Avery. In the late 1970s, Mr. Black became a buyout executive for Drexel Burnham Lambert and rose to become the billionaire chairman and chief executive of New York firm Apollo Global Management APO +1.93% LLC. His fortune, which Forbes said topped $3.4 billion as of March, got a boost when Apollo went public in March 2011. Apollo said it manages $105 billion in assets.

In 2006, Mr. Black teamed up with collector Ronald Lauder to buy a $38 million Ernst Ludwig Kirchner work, “Berlin Street Scene”—a record for that artist as well. In 2001, Messrs. Black and Lauder jointly paid Sotheby’s $22.5 million for Max Beckmann’s 1938 “Self Portrait with Hunting Horn.” On Wednesday, Mr. Lauder said he has “always had great respect for Leon’s taste and knowledge.”

Unlike Mr. Lauder, who has put much of his collection on public display in his New York museum, the Neue Galerie, Mr. Black has kept his art close to home. Dealers who have visited the Park Avenue apartment he shares with his wife, Debra, say it brims with art from an eclectic variety of styles and periods—from archaic Chinese vessels to Constantin Brâncuşi’s sleek sculpture, “Bird in Space.”

Mr. Black began collecting drawings as a teenager, and his walls are still dotted with clusters of framed sketches by Honoré Daumier, Georges Seurat, Paul Cézanne and van Gogh, dealers say. He also has purchased a few contemporary works by artists such as Andy Warhol. (In March, Mr. Black and his wife gave his alma mater, Dartmouth College, $48 million to build a new visual-arts center adorned with an Ellsworth Kelly wall sculpture.)

“I wish museum directors knew as much about art as Leon Black does,” said Richard Feigen, an Old Master dealer who said he has known the collector for several decades and has sold him art. “Nobody has his wingspan.”

Until recently, Mr. Black was primarily known in the art world as a collector of drawings, a field that has been largely overlooked by the recent influx of billionaire art buyers because these works tend to be smaller and harder to instantly identify. In some ways, “The Scream” represents a perfect hybrid because it is a pastel on board—containing all the chalky immediacy of a work on paper—and yet its imagery is well known by the masses.

Whatever his reasons for wanting “The Scream,” Mr. Black competed hard to win it. During Sotheby’s May 2 sale in New York, auctioneer Tobias Meyer kicked off the bidding for the work at $40 million, and five bidders from the U.S. and China joined in. Among them was Mr. Black, who fielded his telephone bids through Charles Moffett, Sotheby’s executive vice president and vice chairman of its world-wide Impressionist, modern and contemporary-art department. As the price topped $80 million, the fight came down to Mr. Black and another phone bidder, whose bids began to waver as the price climbed higher. Mr. Black’s bids came quickly, suggesting less hesitation.

When the bidding crossed the $100 million mark, an auction first, Mr. Meyer adjusted his tuxedo jacket at his rostrum and said, “Can I say I love you?” The hundreds of people packed into the house’s York Avenue saleroom chuckled. When the gavel finally fell, Mr. Moffett smiled, whispered his congratulations to Mr. Black and hung up.

Edvard Munch

Article by Kelly Crow, New York Times, Thursday 12th July, 2012.

By Patricia Cohen, New York Times, 5th August 2012.

Federal District Court Judge Paul G. Gardephe’s résumé includes many impressive accomplishments but not an art history degree. Nonetheless he has been asked to answer a question on which even pre-eminent art experts cannot agree: Are three reputed masterworks of Modernism genuine or fake.

Judge Gardephe’s situation is not unique. Although there are no statistics on whether such cases are increasing, lawyers agree that as art prices rise, so does the temptation to turn to the courts to settle disputes over authenticity. One result is that judges and juries with no background in art can frequently be asked to arbitrate among experts who have devoted their lives to parsing a brush stroke.

The three art cases on Judge Gardephe’s docket in Manhattan were brought by patrons of the now-defunct Knoedler & Company who charge that the Upper East Side gallery and its former president Ann Freedman duped them into spending millions of dollars on forgeries.

The judge’s rulings may ultimately rely more on the intricacies of contract law than on determinations of authenticity. But the defendants and plaintiffs are busily assembling impressive rosters of artistic and forensic experts who hope to convince the judge that the works — purportedly by Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko — are clearly originals or obvious fakes.

Of course judges and juries routinely decide between competing experts. As Ronald D. Spencer, an art law specialist, put it, “A judge will rule on medical malpractice even if he doesn’t know how to take out a gallstone.” When it comes to questions of authenticity, however, lawyers note that the courts and the art world weigh evidence differently.

Judges and juries have been thrust into the role of courtroom connoisseur. Legal experts say that, in general, litigants seek a ruling from the bench when the arguments primarily concern matters of law; juries are more apt to be requested when facts are in dispute.

In a seminal 1929 case involving the authenticity of a painting purportedly by Leonardo da Vinci, both a judge and jury got the chance to weigh in. The art dealer Joseph Duveen was sued by the owners of the painting, “La Belle Ferronnière,” for publicly calling it a copy. The jury included a real estate agent, a shirt manufacturer and a furniture upholsterer. Two artists were also on the panel and ended up on opposite sides of a hung jury.

With a deadlock on his hands, the New York State Supreme Court judge took the case back. He rejected Duveen’s argument that artistic attribution was not a question of fact that could be decided in a court of law but purely a matter of opinion, and ordered a second trial. Duveen ultimately settled with the owner.

Legal thinking on questions of authenticity has evolved since. Judges now recognize that while their word is law in the courtroom, in the art world their verdicts can be overturned by a higher authority: the market. “A decision by a court in the United States that a work is authentic may or may not have any value,” said the lawyer Peter R. Stern. “It’s totally up to the market.”

The court settlement in the Duveen case did little to alter the market’s opinion of “La Belle Ferronnière,” which remained unsold until 2010, when Sotheby’s attributed the painting to a follower of Leonardo’s and auctioned it for $1.5 million. (The New York Evening Post understood the court’s limitations back in 1929, when it asked in an editorial on the Duveen case: “How can anyone outside of a comic opera expect the authenticity of an old painting to be settled by a lawsuit?”)

Mr. Spencer, who edited the book “The Expert Versus the Object: Judging Fakes and False Attributions in the Visual Arts,” explained the disconnect between the culture of commerce and the courts. “In civil litigation the standard of proof is ‘more likely than not.’ Now picture yourself walking into a gallery and seeing a Picasso. You ask, ‘Did Picasso paint that?,’ and the dealer says, ‘Yes, more likely than not.’ You wouldn’t buy that.”

Just as a woman can’t be a little bit pregnant, a work of art can’t be a little bit real.

The classic example is a 1993 ruling by a federal judge that “Rio Nero,” a mobile ostensibly by Alexander Calder, was the real thing. Despite the decision the owners of this “genuine” Calder could not sell it because the recognized expert, Klaus Perls, had declared it a copy. Nineteen years later it remains unsold.

The judge recognized the problem at the time, noting that Mr. Perls’s pronouncement would make “Rio Nero” unsellable, but concluded: “This is not the market, however, but a court of law, in which the trier of fact must make a decision based upon a preponderance of the evidence,” or what is known as the 51 percent standard.

A 2009 opinion also involving a Calder stated the divide between the court and the market more bluntly. At issue were a couple of stage sets that Calder had designed but did not live to see completed. When the owner, Joel Thome, tried to get the Calder Foundation to authenticate the works so he could sell them, it refused. Mr. Thome sued and lost. The Appellate Division of the New York Supreme Court explained its rejection of Mr. Thome’s appeal by referring to “Rio Nero.” The fate of that artwork, Justice David B. Saxe wrote in his opinion, illustrates “the inability of our legal system to provide a definitive determination of authenticity such as is sought by plaintiff.” Having the court declare the sets to be authentic is meaningless, he told Mr. Thome, “because his inability to sell the sets is a function of the marketplace.”

Neither Justice Saxe nor Judge Gardephe would discuss their cases or the issue. What previous rulings show, however, is that while judges and experts consider the same evidence — provenance, connoisseurship and forensic analyses — they tend to value it differently. For example judges tend to give added weight to the signature of an artist on the work, Mr. Spencer said, whereas experts rely more heavily on the connoisseur’s eye.

Juries have also gone their own way. In deciding the Duveen case in 1929, The New York Times reported, jurors reacted to the expert testimony by concluding that “the connoisseurs had given them little but an exotic vocabulary and a distrust for connoisseurs.”

Even an artist’s own word can be overruled by the court. In a case involving a painting by the French painter Balthus, he denied that he created a work sold by a former wife. The case made its way up to the Appellate Division of the New York Supreme Court and in 1995 the judges ruled that despite Balthus’s fervent disavowals, the painting, “Colette in Profile,” was authentic. In its opinion the court cited testimony that he had previously repudiated some of his works “to punish former lovers or dealers with which he has had disagreements.” It concluded that he seemed to be “acting from personal animus against his former wife.”

In the court’s view both the painting and the desire for revenge were authentic.

THE OLD MASTER MARKET HAS NEVER BEEN STRONGER EXCEPTIONAL RESULTS FOR OLD MASTER WEEK IN LONDON

The most successful season of Old Master auctions in history realised a combined total of £95,485,505 ($149,775,156; €118,714,958). These results demonstrate Christie’s leadership in the category, holding a 62% share in the global Old Master Paintings market against our nearest competitor in 2012. Seven of 2012’s most valuable Old Master Paintings were sold by Christie’s this month in the record-setting Evening Sale on 3 July. The top lot, The Lock by Constable, realised £22,441,250 ($35,210,321; €27,894,474) and was followed with works by Rembrandt, Lorenzetti and Wtewael. The sale made £85,057,100 ($133,454,590; €105,725,975), the highest ever total for the category, and broke 15 artist world auction records. With nine of the top 10 lots exceeding their pre-sale estimates, the Day Sale achieved £4,441,150 ($6,959,282; €5,515,908). The Old Master & Early British Drawings & Watercolours Sale broke further world records realising £4,164,900 ($6,534,728; €5,176,971), and The Andrew Wyld Collection, Part I and II, sold for a combined total of £1,822,355 ($2,826,556; €2,296,104). An increasingly diverse global audience is showing a keen interest in the Old Master category. This season’s sales saw buyers from 22 countries on four continents; many were new to the category and several new to Christie’s altogether. As Christie’s sets records, sells internationally and presents private collections of the highest standard, the demand for masterworks of outstanding quality will continue.

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