With Russian art sales ushering in the month, Art+Auction deputy editor Angela M.H. Schuster caught up with Simon Hewitt, the Switzerland-based specialist, to get his read on the market. With international sanctions beginning to take a toll on oligarch pockets, the forecast for the sector might be summed up as anything but stable.Initially it seemed that the March 2014 sanctions had little impact on the Russian art market.It is true that economic downturns — such as that experienced in the wake of sanctions — tend to spawn talk of art’s “refuge value.” And there were hopes that this might be the case last June, with Russian Art Week sales totaling nearly £64 million ($98 million), the highest since 2008. But that success was boosted by a private German collection of 11 avant-garde works at Sotheby’s, which alone brought £11.5 million ($17.7 million). the refuge value theory took a hammering last November, when only 47 percent of the lots found takers.What are your predictions for London’s June sales?As of mid April they do not appear to contain any stellar lots on offer, but we still have several weeks to go. as the London-based collector Igor Tsukanov told me last week, “The market for sellers is tough indeed.” I would be surprised if sales topped the £40.5 million [earned] in november. Right now Russian consignors, who are notorious for insisting on high reserves, are not negotiating from a position of strength. William MacDougall, a shrewd market observer, believes the houses are being stricter about expectations. As a result, he says he would “not be surprised if the catalogues had fewer pages.” Market-fresh works at the top end seem not to have been affected by the crisis. At TEFAF in Maastricht in March, London dealer James Butterwick sold four Cubo-Futurist drawings by Alexander Bogomazov to Holland’s Kröller-Müller Museum. But artists with a specifically Russian appeal — like Shishkin, Aivazovsky, or Korovin — are feeling the salesroom pinch. There are signs, however, that the socialist realists and Postwar Nonconformists are gaining a following, while Russian contemporary art remains unjustly low-profile internationally due to a weak gallery scene. It’s probably a good time to invest in these areas, but only if you are thinking long-term.Do you see a recovery in sight?Although rising oil prices as well as a de-escalation of tensions in eastern Ukraine have fueled hopes of a recovery, the Russian economy is still moribund. Annual inflation is running at 17 percent. the ruble fell 4.5 percent against the euro on April 17, after news that the Russian economy contracted sharply in the first quarter of 2015. Russian wealth is heavily concentrated in Moscow, but these days you can’t set foot in Tverskaya — Moscow’s top street for high-end shopping — without seeing “to let” signs everywhere. From Butterwick’s point of view, “Moscow is dead,” at least for the time being. A version of this article appears in the 2015 June issue of Art + Auction.
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