Soviet Union Struggles to Cope With Drain of Contemporary Art : Art: The lack of a home-grown market and the ruble-driven advantage of selling abroad help to keep Moscow’s gallery scene short of product.

“We are the only Soviet art collectors,” chides Konstantin Khudiakov, founder-artist of MARS Gallery of Contemporary Art, pointing at his fellow painter. “We swap pictures for meat and potatoes, you know, a sort of early feudalism.”

Beyond the jest, Khudiakov nails two fundamental issues in the Soviet art world today: the lack of an indigenous art market, and the extremes to which artists and galleries must go to function “normally” and reach a modicum of success.

Many MARS artists have achieved acclaim and sales abroad since the advent of perestroika , but at home in the Soviet Union their paintings remain largely inaccessible to the public. The most obvious reason is the unconvertible Soviet currency, which pits Soviet buying power at an incomparable disadvantage against major world, or “hard,” currencies. The result is that an artist like MARS painter Nicolai Smirnov must sell his works to those who can afford them: foreigners living abroad or in the Soviet Union.

Lamenting the massive contemporary art drain that this financial reality has engendered, Smirnov says softly: “My works are almost all abroad, in the United States, Paris, Germany. I console myself with the old adage that a shoeman should have no shoes.”

The art drain precedes perestroika , as the Communist Party eventually tolerated but never encouraged contemporary art that didn’t fit its aesthetic doctrine. From 1977-1987, the biggest art patron in the Soviet Union, the government itself, neglected to purchase contemporary Soviet paintings for Moscow museums. The result was that contemporary artists, most formerly underground for political reasons, sold to friends or quietly to foreigners.

A pioneer of about 60 contemporary art galleries in Moscow, MARS set the precedent for hard currency sales when it opened its hard-currency-only annex to its three gallery rooms of ruble sales. Khudiakov explains that the gallery needs rubles to pay local taxes and to purchase works from the nearly 1,000 painters in the Soviet provinces whose work they cull. They also need hard currency to gain access to materials and travel opportunities otherwise unavailable.

One MARS painter was recently heard trying to persuade the gallery to sell his works in the visually inferior hard currency room in order to gain the coveted profit. Disturbed by this trend, Khudiakov comments: “We’re trying to offer conditions that can encourage artists not to paint for the foreign market, but the reality is that we can’t afford a collection of the same magnitude as American or European galleries. We need a whole different system here to function competitively.”

While the eventual convertibility of the ruble will surely ease the situation, Khudiakov notes a less tangible but perhaps more penetrating factor in the lack of an indigenous contemporary art market. “The local cultural district is accusing us of pornography and abstractionism. They say all art belongs to the people, and the people don’t need what we’re showing.”

Absurd as it is that the formidably executed figurative paintings in MARS, from Bosch-like realism to historic still lifes, could be construed as pornography, state-led ideology still runs deep in Soviet culture. After the initial euphoria of the early glasnost days when MARS opened, the progressive segment of the public has responded well to MARS shows but with few purchases. The wider audience, first exposed publicly to Soviet contemporary art 15 years ago, is still overwhelmingly traditional in its taste. Again, the ready audience is foreigners.

To counteract the art drain from the Soviet Union, MARS is forging ahead with plans to open the first Soviet contemporary art museum, in a race against two other Moscow galleries with similar ambitions. MARS has already acquired space in central Moscow to house permanent and temporary shows, a small library and cafe.

In the meantime, since art sales alone aren’t covering costs, MARS publishes popular-fiction books and produces electronic music albums with cover design by Khudiakov, himself an accomplished surrealist painter. The gallery is negotiating to put sales annexes in the major tourist hotels of Moscow. “I think we’ll keep the MARS name off them, though,” Khudiakov says with a smirk, “because I’m too embarrassed about selling those church and landscape paintings that foreigners seem to love so well.”

The ingenuity of a gallery like MARS in the midst of the Soviet Union’s economic and political turmoil is matched only by the wits of its artists. Like so many basic goods in the country today, essential art supplies are either scarce, unavailable or drastically overpriced. Most artists rely on the thriving black market, occasional trips abroad, and the generosity of foreign friends. A recent delivery of red sable brushes from Finland, paid for in hard currency, drew a circle of MARS artists like religious zealots around an ancient icon.

Downing an afternoon swig of Russian vodka, Khudiakov remarks on the future of MARS: “We have Napoleonic ambitions. We want a unique museum that promotes a special mentality, where the problems of modern culture can be explored and even resolved.”

Regarding the larger question of contemporary Soviet art in the world art scene, he concludes: “ Perestroika was a short-term success in terms of exposing our art to the West. The political interest in Soviet art has declined, which I think is more as it should be. Soviet art has to be evaluated objectively in terms of its inherent quality, like any other art. That’s why we’re trying to cultivate art that represents relations with eternity, not transitory political concerns.”