Joint Agreement Opens U.S. Market to Soviet Artists

A U.S.-Soviet joint venture to represent and sell artworks by “thousands” of living Soviet artists to American commercial art galleries and private dealers was announced Monday in New York.

The terms of the joint venture also provide for an opening this spring in Moscow of a gallery for contemporary and historic American art.

The American partner in the new venture--to be called Zhivskulparch Soviet Collections Inc.--is Eduard Nakhamkin Fine Arts gallery, which represents Soviet artists in the United States but has not as a rule received serious critical attention in this country. The other partners are the Soviet Ministry of Culture and the 20,000-member Union of Soviet Artists, the only fine artists union in the U.S.S.R., according to dealer Nakhamkin.

Nakhamkin owns and runs galleries of Soviet art in New York, in San Francisco and on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills.

“The main goal (of the venture) is to introduce to the American public Russian art,” said Nakhamkin, by telephone after a news conference announcing the operation. Among those attending the conference were Tair Salakhov, general secretary of the Union of Soviet Artists, Gusev Vladimir Aleksandrovitch, director of the Russian State Museum in Leningrad and Evgeni Kutovoi, charge d’affairs at the Soviet Embassy in Washington, none of whom was immediately available for comment.

The new company will focus on contemporary art but also represent older works from the 20th Century and earlier periods, Nakhamkin said. “Many (American) galleries don’t know anything about Russian art and are not able to go to Russia to buy Russian art.”

Nakhamkin, a Soviet emigre who said he has been representing Soviet artists (both emigres and those working in the U.S.S.R.) in the United States for more than 13 years, said that the new company will have an offices in Moscow and New York, the latter which he will oversee.

Six or seven art historians hired by the company’s partners will travel throughout the Soviet Union seeking “high quality” work by contemporary artists for representation and an “information center” with slides and samples of these artists’ work will be maintained in Moscow and New York, Nakhamkin said.

In New York, American art dealers “can look through slides and select the artists they want to work with,” he said. Then, the company will arrange a contract with the artist, deliver the artworks to the United States and provide other support.

Modeling the company “exactly like any Western type of business,” artists’ percentages will be determined by “how good they are, how famous, how sellable, how respected,” he said. “There will be no restrictions . . . every artist will have an equal opportunity” for representation.

Though the new venture won’t be fully operational for “a couple of months,” the company’s New York office opened Monday on Madison Avenue, said Nakhamkin.

Stephanie Barron, curator of 20th-Century art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where in 1980 she co-curated a major exhibition of Russian avant-garde art from 1910-1930, offered a word of caution about the new venture.

“I know that Nakhamkin has been particularly helpful in getting Soviet work seen in the U.S. One would hope that that is the bottom line, and not necessarily for (the venture) to be individually profitable for one gallery over another.”

Barron also was wary that the art made available through the company would not necessarily represent the “best of contemporary Soviet developments. . . . It is what the Soviets are interested in having made available,” she said. “It may be some of the best and may not be, but it is going through a filtering channel in the U.S.S.R., then going through another filtering (by the Nakhamkin gallery) before its made available here.”

Nakhamkin stressed that the new company is not going to be run exclusively by his gallery, but that it a joint venture with the Soviet entities.

According to David Resnicow, a spokesman for Nakhamkin, all Soviet art sold outside of that country must be done so with the permission of the country’s ministry of culture. There is no formalized gallery system in the Soviet Union as there is in the West.

“We will provide a Western type of understanding” to the Soviets, Nakhamkin said, to make it easier for American dealers to view and purchase Soviet art.

Last July , Soviet contemporary art achieved a new status when Sotheby’s auction house held the country’s first international art auction of contemporary and avant garde art, netting $3.6 million, a total that far exceeded organizers’ expectations.

(The Soviet Ministry of Culture, which had delayed paying the Soviet artists involved in the auction, has finally paid them, according to a Sotheby’s spokeswoman.)

Since that auction, several American galleries have exhibited works by Soviet contemporary artists for whom at least two traveling museum exhibitions are planned.