Vereshchagin on the Auction Block

[Michael Makin]

I am very grateful to Margaret Samu for drawing attention to this piece of news, which I am sure I would have missed without her post.

Her comments below the line on the curator's blog post are among several very impressive responses to the announcement of this decision (others, IMHO, include what is currently the last response, by "Daniil", in defence of the sale).  But she identifies very precisely what is surely the most troubling aspect of the curator's announcement -- his apparent almost total ignorance of the history of the visual arts in 19th/early C20th Russia.  If, as his blog seems to suggest, the _peredvizhniki_ and other similar artists were avant-gardists (in the sense that most of us would understand that term), then I will have to restrict further my occasional teaching forays into the Russian visual arts, on the grounds that my understanding of the area does not even reach the amateur level I claim...

Margaret also makes one very cogent objection to the sale that has absolutely nothing to do with the essentially local issue of defending the current holdings of the Brooklyn Museum.  She writes that the painting  "will almost certainly disappear into the collection of a private individual–possibly in Russia, which has not yet established a strong tradition of collectors lending and exhibiting works in museums. If the goal was to give the work exposure and make it available for study, the Brooklyn Museum should have offered it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which already holds Vereshchagins and does exhibit its 19th-century Russian paintings in the permanent collection." 

I'd like to hear the curator's response to that...

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