What is the artistic value of Mark Rothko's painting "Orange, Red, Yellow" (1961)? Mark Rothko: A simple expression of a complex thought Orange red yellow 1961.

Rothko. White center (yellow, pink and purple on pink)

Written by the owner of my beloved Pantry Levkonoi http://levkonoe.livejournal.com/2798573.html
Levkonoe:
“All of you here don’t understand anything about art!
And I am the least of all:

RIA News":
in May last year, Rothko's work entitled "White Center (yellow, pink and purple on pink)" was sold at Sotheby's for $72.8 million.

I don’t believe that everyone at Sotheby’s is idiots. Probably this washed towel really costs 73 million...

Update:
I didn’t put this here at all to rage noisily on the topic of “swindlers, fooling the people,” etc. - I don’t claim this myself, and I don’t advise others.

I have written here several times that for me, in addition to the talent of the painter and other merits of the painting, the important question is “do I want to go there.” Therefore, nothing like Goya and much else, genius and so on, appears here. Because personally I don’t want to go there.
So, somehow I don’t want to wear Rothko’s towel either (unless I’ve read Flatland).

I read about him. As usual, he was poor, and first painted portraits and landscapes. He painted some ecumenical chapels. He became famous. Became rich and famous. And suddenly he began to write squares and stripes. First in different colors. Then only black and white. Then he cut his wrists.

Update2
Apparently, there is still some kind of negative energy or evil spirit in this picture, if all those who peacefully exchanged comments about lawns here became furious or scowled. To be honest, the discussion brought nothing good. Even if someone tried to sincerely understand what is the matter and what we do not understand, they received nothing except clicks on the nose and pokes in ignorance. None of the supporters said anything intelligible FOR.

* Maybe this picture was hung incorrectly (upside down, for example). So we didn’t understand;

*Cannot be upside down. It's a cake. There is marshmallow at the bottom and apricot jam at the top. It's soft. It will smudge.
In addition, the artist’s diagnosis explains everything. At first he was in a manic phase of TIR, and wrote cakes. In the picture this is orange jam, and it is quite natural that there is less of it than marshmallows. Pastila is a depressive phase. From the depths of the marshmallow, the artist stopped distinguishing the multicolored world, he was overcome, and he hanged himself.

However, when the artist painted this particular picture, he did not yet know what it would be like in the marshmallow, but only had a presentiment. Otherwise he wouldn’t have painted her so pink. And he called the picture “white center” because he hoped, poor fellow, that the neutral white center was really in the middle, and a balanced MDP would not allow him to drown in the non-colored world of depression.

But the artist’s instincts forced him to nevertheless record the true state of affairs, namely: the depressive phase prevails. By the way, this is consistent with doctors’ data on the course of typical MDP. I also suggest looking at the white layer: it looks somewhat unnatural in the cake, inedible, I would say, especially the black line between it and the jam.

Undoubtedly, the artist thereby emphasized his hope for the impenetrability of this border, the hope that the inedible impenetrable white layer, the “white center,” will create an obstacle to his fall from jam into depressive marshmallow, and will allow him to avoid the inevitable...

*When I see such paintings, it always seems to me that this is a provocation on the part of the artist....
Once, two girls from our designers at work looked at an illustration of some spots and admired them, I asked what was wrong with this and how these spots differed from the spots of a 5-year-old child, they said: in order to understand this, you need to study for 5 years.

Levkonoe: Perhaps that’s what we need. I don’t believe in too simple versions: provocation (this would work once), money laundering, the “naked king” effect, etc. All this is too simple and would have stopped working long ago even with Malevich;

*So what's the problem? On the way home from work, we buy some pastel paints, whatman paper, brushes and paint this towel. We hang it on the wall and try to feel like millionaires who have just spent 70 green pounds;

* I understand that Leonardo's autograph can be worth millions, although there is nothing special written on it. But we know why we love him. But I didn’t know anything about this Rothko, and now I just read it. By the way, the sequence of events is not encouraging: normal pictures - mystical pictures - colored stripes - black stripes - suicide. Doubts arise...;

Chris Chapman

* It seems to me that something has broken in the world and in people. At the beginning of the last century. Rapid scientific and technological revolution, revolutions, wars. Something so destructive was in the air. And he couldn’t help but get into the paintings. Maybe from all this chaos you wanted to escape into the utter emptiness? Hide, close yourself, or vice versa - let it all go to your soul and then cut your wrists.

I don't think that these paintings are "liked", they just can touch something inside. This is more psychology than art. And it’s good if you manage to hide, but what if you then want to cut your veins after looking at this emptiness on the wall?

No, I don’t think at all that everyone who likes this is crazy. It’s just that everyone has their own problems, and perhaps for some, going into this nothingness is the solution to the problem.

Well, okay. Let him like it. Although I don't think this is all good. Too much of a destructive start. The world is crazy, but no one has canceled the laws of harmony in it. And the flowers are beautiful!

Something else makes me angry - when only this is called art, and everything else is vulgarity. And some people begin to listen and feel ashamed that they like the rugs. That is, they begin to move away from what is truly beautiful, towards this chaos and emptiness. They even begin to be afraid of the word “beautiful”. As if it could disrupt their striped world. And they begin to impose this snobbery of theirs. Make it normal!
Still, something clearly broke in people;

*This rag makes me feel depressive and claustrophobic.
It has something of a corridor in a Soviet clinic. Yellow is the wall, purple is the floor, in the middle is a banquette;


Chris Chapman
* Dear Levkonoe, I myself am now an art student and when I was a psychology student.
And I noticed this thing in everyday life: people in relation to art are of two types - those who do not perceive abstract art and really love realism (“so that you want to go there”) and those who are in awe of abstraction, but realism, although they are respected for its skill , is not considered the peak of Art.

Observing this clear division and vaguely remembering classes about the structure of the brain, I began to suspect that it had something to do with the work of different hemispheres and their relationship (not exactly left-handed/right-handed, but everything is more confusing there). Or these are structural features of some area of ​​perception in the brain. Because these two categories of people differ not only in their attitude to art, but also in a number of other values.
This, of course, is not a strict classification, but, in my opinion, there is definitely something like that.
I wrote all this because I love and respect Rothko very much.

Levkonoe: I guess I don’t have the right hemisphere AT ALL, because even after all the work that the experts did for me here, I see no more meaning and emotion in this picture than in the wall of a Soviet clinic painted with oil paint.

And I can’t shake the feeling that if art critics didn’t know where Rothko was and where the wall was, they would have been equally resistant to both;

Chris Chapman
* Irina, I apologize for invading someone else’s territory... but this question has been on my mind for a long time: Do you really believe that if a person doesn’t like “rugs” at all or is unable to read Dontsov, this is necessarily out of snobbery? Or do you still admit the possibility of another option?

On the sidelines of the discussion: I perceive painting from what is called the stomach, according to the principle of “like it or not.” I can’t stand Dali (like LNT:), but I love Kandinsky, Klee and Miro; I have seen Rothko in museums and I join the testimonies of his incredible energy; so-called contemporary art includes not only the “incomprehensible”, but also anything, including hyperrealism and pop art, which I hate; one may have a bad attitude towards the vector of development of modern music and modern painting, but the narrowing of their audience is a given; no one persuades you to go to exhibitions that are not close to you and listen to music that you don’t like, but believe me, what gave me goosebumps of delight at the Guggenheim Gallery (and complete bewilderment in my companion), or what makes me every year looking forward to “Two days and two nights of new music” has nothing to do with snobbery.

Good day, dear readers. Today we will come into contact with the world of creativity, in our case, meaningless and merciless. We will talk about one of the most expensive artists in the world, whose paintings cost a fortune.

Mark Rothko(English) Mark Rothko, birth name -Markus Yakovlevich Rotkovich; September 25, 1903, Dvinsk, Vitebsk province, now Daugavpils , Latvia - February 25 1970, New York ) - American artist, leading exponent of abstract expressionism , one of the creators of painting color field . (Believe me, the creator of such fields lives in each of you. Author’s note)

Let's not drag the raccoon for too long and move on to getting acquainted.

"Orange, Red, Yellow" (1961) Mark Rothko- sold 05/08/2012 at Sotheby's auction86 882 500 $. The painting belongs to the bright period of the American expressionist's work. However, at the end of his life, when fame had already come to him, the artist fell into deep depression.

№ 10

1958

Price - $81,925,000

White center

Price - $72,800,000

I hope you have not yet died of envy, and are not angry with God for depriving you of such a talent. I will not convert the prices of the paintings into rubles so that the text contains more letters than numbers.

Royal red and blue

Price - $70,100,000

At this point, you are already able to distinguish Rothko from Van Gogh, Rubens or Picasso, even if you have not seen their paintings.

Blue and gray

He could not accept being called an abstractionist, because he considered his paintings to be a reflection of real life, living organisms seeking contact with the viewer. [I hope you have already established contact?]

Art is a complex thing that, apparently, I am not given the opportunity to fully understand. This is like the salary of the players of the Russian national football team; it is not clear why it is so huge.

Mark Rothko was so gifted that most of his paintings do not have titles.

Untitled (yellow and blue)

I’ll stop at this piece because many people are probably already bored. But almost everywhere has its advantages, now you can distinguish Rothko from other artists, you have the opportunity to speak out on the topic of art, and someone, inspired, will go for an easel and paints.

Let's slow down for a minute and think, who "rewards" a person with status - the artist? The author himself? Advertisers who are trying to sell a masterpiece (read the word with a Caucasian accent) as expensive as possible? People who are willing to pay a fortune for a piece of canvas? How to find experts who evaluate such works? How to get into this sect? I'm sure you know the answers to these questions.

We live in a funny world, where a painting can cost hundreds of millions and attract just as many admirers, a world in which urns cost practically nothing, and accordingly, they attract no one’s attention, except perhaps our respected readers.

Unfortunately, the ballot boxes were never installed at Zelenstroy, but, like Mark Rothko, I will not give up my work, I will not give up under the yoke of those who do not understand and condemn.

Good mood to everyone, take care of yourself and your loved ones.

– Now I will explain using an example from my monograph. Here look. The end of the last century. Tunnel socialist realism, as we classify it today. Soviet Union at the last breath. A young and fashionable St. Petersburg artist in the company of friends, having smoked weed, approaches the trash heap, takes out some shiny piece of iron from it - either a bicycle handlebar, or a crankshaft - raises it above his head and declares: “Dudes, for a bet: tomorrow I will I’ll sell this motherfucker to a company for ten thousand dollars.” Then there were dollars. And he sells it. The question is this: who and when gave the sanction to consider this heroine an object of art worth ten thousand?
- Artist? – I suggested. - No. Hardly. Then everyone would work as an artist. Probably... the one who bought it?
- That's it! – Marukha raised her finger. - What a great fellow you are - look at the root. The one who bought. Because without it, we will see only a crowd of hungry curators like me around this artist. Some will shout that this is not art, but just a piece of metal from the trash heap. Others say that this is art precisely because it is just a piece of hardware from the trash heap. They will also scream that the artist is a pervert and is paid by other rich perverts. They will certainly say that the CIA, during the so-called perestroika, invested in non-conformist anti-Soviet trends in order to raise their social rank among young people - and the ultimate goal was the collapse of the USSR, so various idiots were paid ten grand for a piece of hardware from the trash heap... In general, they will say a lot of things, be sure. There may be some truth in each of these statements. But before the act of sale, all this was just chatter. And after it, it became a reflection on an accomplished fact of culture. The dirty secret of modern art is that the final right to life is given - or not given - by das Kapital. And he is the only one. But before this, the artist must be given formal sanction by those who mediate between art and capital. People like me. The art elite, deciding whether to consider a piece of junk scrap art or not.
“But it’s always been like this,” I said. – I mean with art and capital. Rembrandt is there. Some kind of Titian. Their paintings were bought. So they could draw more and more.
“Yes, but not quite,” Mara answered. – When a savage painted a bison on the wall of a cave, the hunters recognized the animal and shared the meat with the artist. When Rembrandt or Titian showed their painting to possible buyers, there were no curators around. Every monarch or wealthy merchant was himself an art critic. The value of an object was determined by the immediate impression it made on a client willing to pay. The buyer saw a man surprisingly similar to himself in the portrait. Or a woman with the same pink cellulite folds as his wife. It was a miracle, it surprised and did not need comment, and rumors spread about this miracle. Art instantly and effortlessly represented not only its object, but also itself as a medium. Directly in the living act of someone else's perception. He did not need an art history start in life. Understand?
I nodded uncertainly.
– Contemporary art, broadly speaking, begins where naturalness and clarity end – and the need for us and our sanction appears. For the last hundred and fifty years, art has been primarily concerned with the representation of that which is not directly tangible. Therefore, art itself needs representation. Understood?
- Vaguely. I'd better look online and...
- No need, you'll get all sorts of shit there. Listen to me, I will explain everything simply and to the point. If a buyer comes to an artist working in a new paradigm, he sees on the canvas not his own face, familiar from the mirror, or cellulite folds, familiar from his wife. He sees there...
Mara thought for a second.
- Well, offhand - a large orange brick, under it a red brick, and below it a yellow brick. Only it will not be called “traffic light in the fog,” as some simple soul would say, but “Orange, red, yellow.” And when the buyer is told that this traffic light in the fog costs eighty million, it is vital that several serious, famous and respected people standing around the picture nod their heads, because the buyer cannot count on his feelings and thoughts in a new cultural situation. The art establishment gives a sanction - and this is very serious, since it means that the work being sold, if necessary, will be accepted back for about the same money.
- Will they definitely accept it? – I asked.
Mara nodded.
– With the picture I’m talking about, this has happened many times already. She is over a hundred years old.
– How does this sanction arise?
Mara laughed.
– This is no longer a question of eighty, but of a hundred million. People spend their lives trying to get this sanction - and they themselves don’t fully understand. The sanction arises as a result of the Brownian movement of the minds and wills involved in contemporary art around investment capital, which naturally has the last word. But if you want a short and simple answer, you can say this. Today's art is a conspiracy. This conspiracy is the source of the sanction.
“Not quite a legal term,” I replied. – Maybe it would be better to say “preliminary conspiracy”?
– You can say whatever you want, Porfiry. But art historical terms must have the same sanction of capital as a canvas with three colored bricks. Only then do they begin to mean something—and deserve us to delve into their many possible meanings. Sartre spoke about the “conspiracy of art” - and this, by the way, is one of the few clear statements in his life. Sartre was bought dearly. Therefore, when I repeat these words after him, I hide behind the sanction issued to him and look serious. And when Porfiry Petrovich talks about “preliminary conspiracy,” it smacks of rubbish, sorry for my French. And no one will repeat this after him.
“You just repeated yourself,” I said.
- Yes. For educational purposes. But I won’t put this into the monograph, but Sartre’s grandfather will. Because the only way to get approval for my monograph is to stitch it together from sanctions that have already been issued previously for other projects. This is how the conspiracy of art maintains itself. And all the other conspiracies too. Art has long ceased to be magic. Today, as you quite rightly noted, this is a preliminary conspiracy.
– Who and with whom? – I asked.
– But this is not always clear. And the participants in the conspiracy often have to improvise. We can say that from this ambiguity newness and freshness are born.
“Yeah,” I said and twirled my mustache. – Why doesn’t someone who understands contemporary art, but is not involved in the conspiracy, come forward with an exposure?
Mara laughed.
“You didn’t understand the most important thing, Porfiry.”
- What?
– It is impossible to “understand” contemporary art without participating in its conspiracy, because the conspirator’s glasses must be put on in order to discover this art. Without glasses, the eyes will see chaos, and the heart will feel melancholy and deception. But if you participate in a conspiracy, deception becomes a game. After all, an artist on stage does not lie when he says that he is Chichikov. He plays - and the chair he leans on becomes a three. In any case, for the critic who has a share... Do you understand?
“Approximately,” I answered. “I won’t say it’s deep, but I can keep up the conversation.”
– Now, Porfiry, you should have another question.
- Which?
– Why am I explaining all this to you?
“Yes,” I repeated, “really.” For what?
“Then,” Mara said, “so that you won’t be surprised by what you see when we start working.” You will be dealing with very expensive objects. And it may seem strange to you that an electronic copy or video installation, which anyone can make from open cultural material, is considered a unique piece of art and is sold for huge amounts of money. But this, believe me, is the same situation as with the painting “Orange, red, yellow.” If, looking at it, you see a traffic light in the fog in front of you, you are a layman - no matter how convincing your reasoning may sound to other laymen. Remember the main thing: the objects of art with which you will deal do not need your sanction. And they already have the sanction of the art community.
– In what exact form was this sanction issued?
“Porfiry,” Mara sighed, “how inattentive you are.” In the form in which they were purchased.

Rating of auction results of works of Russian art

1. Only public auction results were accepted for participation.
2. Belonging to Russian artists was determined by place of birth. Was born in Russian Empire or in the USSR - that means a Russian artist, without regard to ethnic origin and discounts on how fate developed in the future. For example, the fact that Kandinsky in different years he had both Russian and German citizenship, but he died with French citizenship, there is no reason to doubt that the artist is Russian.
3. Rule: one artist - one painting. That is, the situation when, strictly speaking, all the first places would have to be given to the works of Mark Rothko, is resolved this way: we leave only the most expensive job, and ignore all other results for paintings by this artist.

The rating is based on results taking into account the Buyers Premium, expressed in dollars (figures shown at European auctions, i.e. in pounds or euros, are converted into dollars at the exchange rate on the day of trading). Therefore, neither “The Spanish Flu” by Goncharova, sold on February 2, 2010 for £6.43 million, nor the painting “View of Constantinople and the Bosporus Strait” by Aivazovsky, for which £3.23 million was paid on April 24, 2012, were not included in the rating. in the transaction currency, i.e. in pounds, they are more expensive than the paintings that took a place in the ranking, but they were not lucky with the dollar exchange rate.

1. $86.88 million Mark Rothko. Orange, Red, Yellow (1961)

One of the most mysterious artists of our time. His life path seems to be woven from contradictions - in creative searches, in actions, in gestures... Considered one of the ideologists and, of course, key figure in American Abstract Expressionism, Rothko could not stand it when his work was called abstract. Having known well in the past what living from hand to mouth was, he once defiantly returned to his customers an absolutely fantastic advance in terms of today’s money, leaving himself with an almost completely completed work. Having been waiting for his success and the opportunity to make a living from painting for almost fifty years, he more than once refused people who could destroy his career if they wanted. At the very least, a socialist at heart, who shared the ideas of Marx and was hostile to the rich and wealth, Rothko eventually became the author of the most expensive paintings in the world, which actually turned into an attribute of the high status of their owners. (It’s no joke, the record-breaking “White Center,” sold for $65 million, came from the Rockefeller family.) Dreaming of recognition by the mass audience, he eventually became the creator of paintings that are still truly understandable only to a circle of intellectuals and connoisseurs. Finally, the artist, who sought a conversation with God through the music of his canvases, the artist, whose works became the central element in the design of the church of all religions, ended his life with a completely desperate act of fighting against God...

Rothko, who remembered the Pale of Settlement and the Cossacks, might have been surprised that they are also proud of him as a Russian artist. However, there was plenty of anti-Semitism in America in the 1930s - it was no coincidence that the artist “truncated” the family surname Rotkovich. But we call him Russian for a reason. To begin with, based on the fact of birth. Latvian Dvinsk, present-day Daugavpils, at the time of the birth of Marcus Rotkovich, is part of Russia and will remain so until the collapse of the empire, until 1918. True, Rothko will no longer see the revolution. In 1913, the boy was taken to the USA, the family moved to Portland, Oregon. That is, I spent my childhood and adolescence in Russia, where my life perception and outlook were formed. In addition to the fact that he was born here, Rothko is associated with Russia, we note, both ideological themes and conflicts. It is known that he appreciated the works of Dostoevsky. And even the vices that Rothko indulged in are for some reason associated in the world with Russians. For some reason, depression in the West is called a “Russian disease.” Which is not an argument, of course, but another touch to the integrity of the Russian artist’s nature.

It took Rothko 15 long years to make innovative discoveries in painting. Having gone through many figurative hobbies, including surrealism and figurative expressionism, in the mid-1940s he extremely simplified the structure of his paintings, limiting the means of expression to a few colorful blocks that form the composition. The intellectual basis of his work is almost always a matter of interpretation. Rothko usually did not give direct answers, counting on the viewer's participation in understanding the work. The only thing he definitely counted on was the emotional work of the viewer. His paintings are not for rest, not for relaxation and not for “visual massage”. They are designed for empathy. Some see them as windows that allow one to look into the viewer’s soul, while others see them as doors to another world. There is an opinion (perhaps the closest to the truth) that his color fields are metaphorical images of God.

The decorative power of the “color fields” is explained by a number of special techniques used by Rothko. His paintings do not tolerate massive frames - at most thin edges in the color of the canvas. The artist deliberately tinted the edges of the paintings in a gradient so that the pictorial field lost its borders. The fuzzy boundaries of the inner squares are also a technique, a way without contrast to create the effect of trembling, the seeming overlapping of color blocks, the pulsation of spots, like the flickering of light from electric lamps. This soft dissolution of color within color was particularly achieved in oils, until Rothko's switch to opaque acrylic in the late sixties. And the found effect of electrical pulsation intensifies if you look at the paintings at close range. According to the artist’s plan, it is optimal for the viewer to view three-meter canvases from a distance of no more than half a meter.

Today, Rothko's paintings are the pride of any famous museum of modern art. Thus, in the English Tate Gallery there is a Rothko hall, in which nine paintings from those that were painted under a contract with the Four Seasons restaurant live. There is a story connected with this project that is quite indicative of Rothko’s character. In 1959, the artist was contacted by recommendation from the owners of the fashionable restaurant “Seasons,” which opened in the unusual New York skyscraper Seagram Building (named after the company that produced the alcohol). The contract amount in today's money was almost $3 million - a very significant fee even for an established, recognized artist, as Rothko was at that time. However, when the work was almost completed, Rothko unexpectedly returned the advance and refused to hand it over to the customer. Among the main reasons for the sudden act, biographers considered the reluctance to please the ruling class and entertain the rich at dinner. It is also believed that Rothko was upset when he learned that his paintings would not be seen by ordinary employees working in the building. However, latest version looks too romantic.

Almost 10 years later, Rothko donated some of the canvases prepared for the Four Seasons to the Tate Gallery in London. In a bitter irony of fate, on February 25, 1970, the day the boxes with paintings reached the English port, the artist was found dead in his studio - with his veins cut and (apparently for guarantee) a huge dose of sleeping pills in his stomach.

Today, Rothko's work is experiencing another wave of sincere interest. Seminars are held, exhibitions are opened, monographs are published. On the banks of the Daugava, in the artist’s homeland, a monument was erected.

Rothko's works are not exceptionally rare on the market (like, for example, Malevich's paintings). Every year, approximately 10–15 pieces of his paintings alone are put up for auction at auctions, not counting graphics. That is, there is no shortage, but millions and tens of millions of dollars are paid for them. And such prices are hardly accidental. Rather, it is a tribute to his innovation, a desire to open new layers of meaning and join the creative phenomenon of one of the most mysterious Russian artists.

On May 8, 2012, at the auction of post-war and contemporary art at Christie’s, the canvas “Orange, Red, Yellow” from 1961 went for $86.88 million, including commission. The work comes from the collection of Pennsylvania art patron David Pincus. David and his wife Gerry bought the work, measuring 2.4 × 2.1 meters, from the Marlborough Gallery, and then loaned it to the Philadelphia Museum of Art for a long time. The painting “Orange, Red, Yellow” became not only the most expensive work by an artist of Russian origin, but also the most expensive work post-war and contemporary art sold at public auction.

2. $60.00 million. Kazimir Malevich. Suprematist composition (1916)

For my long life first together with Robert, and after his death in 1941 alone, Sonya was able to try out many genres in art. She was engaged in painting, book illustration, theatrical sketches (in particular, she designed the scenery of Diaghilev’s ballet “Cleopatra”), clothing design, interior design, textile patterns, and even car tuning.

Sonia Delaunay's early portraits and abstractions from the 1900s-10s, as well as works from the Color Rhythms series from the 1950s-60s, are very popular at international and national French auctions. Their prices often reach several hundred thousand dollars. The artist's main record was set more than 10 years ago - on June 14, 2002 at the Calmels Cohen Paris auction. Then the abstract work “Market in Minho”, written in 1915, during the life of the Delaunay couple in Spain (1914–1920), was sold for €4.6 million.

32. $4.30 million. Mikhail Nesterov. Vision to the Youth Bartholomew (1922)

If we evaluate our artists on a peculiar scale of “Russianness,” then Mikhail Vasilyevich Nesterov (1862–1942) can safely be placed somewhere at the beginning of the list. His paintings depicting saints, monks, and nuns in a lyrical “Nesterov” landscape, completely in tune with the highly spiritual mood of the heroes, became a unique phenomenon in the history of Russian art. In his canvases, Nesterov talked about Holy Rus', about its special spiritual path. The artist, in his own words, “avoided depicting strong passions, preferring to them a modest landscape, a person living an inner spiritual life in the arms of our Mother Nature.” And according to Alexander Benois, Nesterov, along with Surikov, was the only Russian artist who came at least partially close to the lofty divine words of “The Idiot” and “Karamazovs”.

The special style and religiosity of Nesterov’s paintings were formed from many factors. He was also influenced by his upbringing in a patriarchal, devout merchant family in the city of Ufa with its typically Russian landscapes, and his years of studying with the Itinerants Perov, Savrasov and Pryanishnikov at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture (from them he adopted the idea of ​​art that touches the mind and heart) and from Pavel Chistyakov at the Academy of Arts (here he took up the technique of academic drawing), and trips to Europe for inspiration, and a deep personal drama (the death of his beloved wife Maria a day after the birth of their daughter Olga).

As a result, by the late 1880s - early 1890s, Nesterov had already found his theme, and it was at this time that he wrote “Vision to the Youth Bartholomew” (1889–1890). The plot of the picture is taken from the Life of St. Sergius. The youth Bartholomew (the future Sergius of Radonezh) met an angel in the guise of a monk and received God's blessing from him to understand Holy Scripture and outperform your brothers and peers. The picture is imbued with a sense of the miraculous - it is not only and not so much in the figures of Bartholomew and the Holy Elder, but also in the surrounding landscape, which is especially festive and spiritual.

In his declining years, the artist more than once called “Bartholomew” his main work: “... if thirty, fifty years after my death he still says something to people, that means he is alive, that means I am alive.” The painting became a sensation at the 18th exhibition of the Itinerants and instantly made the young Ufa artist famous (Nesterov was not yet thirty at the time). P. M. Tretyakov acquired “Vision...” for his collection, despite attempts to dissuade him from, as Nesterov put it, “orthodox Wanderers,” who correctly noticed in the work the undermining of the “rationalistic” foundations of the movement. However, the artist had already taken his own course in art, which ultimately made him famous.

With coming Soviet power for Nesterov with his religious painting the time has come better times. The artist switched to portraits (fortunately he had the opportunity to paint only people he deeply liked), but did not dare to think about his previous subjects. However, when in the early 1920s there was a rumor that a large exhibition of Russian art was being prepared in America, Nesterov quickly decided to participate in the hope of reaching a new audience. He wrote several works for the exhibition, including the author’s repetition of “Vision to the Youth Bartholomew” (1922), called “Vision to St. Sergius in adolescence” in the American press. A new version smaller format (91 × 109) compared to Tretyakov’s (160 × 211), the moon appeared in the sky, the colors of the landscape were somewhat darker, and there was more seriousness in the face of the youth Bartholomew. Nesterov, as it were, sums up with this picture the great changes that have occurred since the writing of the first “Vision...”.

Nesterov's paintings were among the few at the 1924 Russian Art Exhibition in New York that were purchased. “Vision to the Youth Bartholomew” ended up in the collection of famous collectors and patrons of Nicholas Roerich - Louis and Nettie Horsch. From then until 2007, work was passed down in this family by inheritance. And finally, on April 17, 2007, at Sotheby’s Russian auction, the canvas was offered with an estimate of $2–3 million and easily exceeded it. The final price of the hammer, which became a record for Nesterov, was $4.30 million. With this result, he entered our rating.

33. $4.05 million. Vera Rokhlina. Gamblers (1919)

Vera Nikolaevna Rokhlina (Schlesinger) is another wonderful artist of Russian emigration, included in our rating along with Natalia Goncharova, Tamara Lempitskaya and Sonia Delaunay. Information about the artist’s life is very scarce; her biography is still waiting for its researcher. It is known that Vera Shlesinger was born in 1896 in Moscow into a Russian family and a French woman from Burgundy. She studied in Moscow with Ilya Mashkov and was almost his favorite student, and then took lessons in Kyiv with Alexandra Exter. In 1918, she married lawyer S.Z. Rokhlin and went with him to Tiflis. From there, in the early 1920s, the couple moved to France, where Vera began to actively exhibit at the Autumn Salon, the Salon of the Independents and the Salon of the Tuileries. In her painting style, she initially followed the ideas of Cubism and Post-Impressionism, but by the early 1930s she had already developed her own style, which one French magazine called “an artistic balance between Courbet and Renoir.” In those years, Vera already lived separately from her husband, in Montparnasse, had couturier Paul Poiret among her admirers, and chose female portraits and nudes as the main theme in her painting, which may have been facilitated by her acquaintance with Zinaida Serebryakova (even a portrait of a nude Serebryakova by Rokhlina has survived), and the artist’s personal exhibitions were held in Parisian galleries. But in April 1934, 38-year-old Vera Rokhlina committed suicide. What made a woman in her prime, who had already achieved a lot in the creative field, take her own life remains a mystery. Her premature death was called the biggest loss in the Paris art scene in those years.

Rokhlina's legacy is located mainly abroad, where Vera spent the last 13 years of her life and where her talent was fully revealed. In the 1990s and early 2000s, French museums and galleries began holding solo exhibitions of Rokhlina and including her work in group exhibitions of artists from the School of Paris. Collectors found out about her, her works began to be sold at auctions, and quite well. The peak of sales and prices occurred in 2007–2008, when about a hundred thousand dollars for a good format painting by Rokhlina became commonplace. And so on June 24, 2008, at the evening auction of impressionists and modernists at Christie's in London, Vera Rokhlina's cubist painting "Gamblers", painted before emigration, in 1919, was unexpectedly sold at 8 times the estimate - for £2.057 million ($4.05 million) with an estimate of £250–350 thousand.

34. $4.02 million. Mikhail Klodt. Night in Normandy (1861)

35. $3.97 million. Pavel Kuznetsov. Eastern city. Bukhara (1912)

For Pavel Varfolomeevich Kuznetsov (1878–1968), the son of an icon painter from the city of Saratov, a graduate of the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture (where he studied with Arkhipov, Serov and Korovin), one of the organizers of the Blue Rose association, one of the main and, Certainly, the most recognized theme of creativity among the public was the East. When Pavel Kuznetsov’s first symbolist period of the 1900s with semi-fantastic images of “Fountains”, “Awakenings” and “Births” exhausted itself, the artist went to the East for inspiration. He remembered how, as a child, he visited his grandfather in the Trans-Volga steppes and observed the life of nomads. “Suddenly I remembered about the steppes and went to the Kirghiz,” wrote Kuznetsov. From 1909 to 1914, Kuznetsov spent several months in the Kyrgyz steppes, among the nomads, becoming imbued with their way of life and accepting them as his kindred, “Scythian” soul. In 1912–1913, the artist traveled through the cities Central Asia, lived in Bukhara, Samarkand, and the foothills of the Pamirs. In the 1920s, the study of the East continued in Transcaucasia and Crimea.

The result of these eastern travels was a series of stunning paintings, in which one can feel the “Goluborozovsky” love for the blue palette, and the symbolism of icons and temple frescoes close to the artist from childhood, and the perceived experience of such artists as Gauguin, Andre Derain and Georges Braque, and, well, of course, all the magic of the East. Kuznetsov's oriental paintings were warmly received not only in Russia, but also at exhibitions in Paris and New York.

A major creative success was the cycle of paintings “Eastern City” written in Bukhara in 1912. One of the largest paintings in the “Eastern City” series. Bukhara” was auctioned at MacDougall’s in June 2014 with an estimate of £1.9–3 million. The work has impeccable provenance and exhibition history: it was purchased directly from the artist; has not changed its place of residence since the mid-1950s; participated in the World of Art exhibitions, the exhibition of Soviet art in Japan, as well as in all the major lifetime and posthumous retrospectives of the artist. As a result, a record price for Kuznetsov was paid for the painting: £2.37 million ($3.97 million).

36. $3.82 million. Alexander Deineka. Heroes of the First Five-Year Plan (1936)

37. $3.72 million. Boris Grigoriev. The Shepherd of the Hills (1920)

Boris Dmitrievich Grigoriev (1886–1939) emigrated from Russia in 1919. He became one of the most famous Russian artists abroad, but at the same time he was forgotten in his homeland for many decades, and his first exhibitions in the USSR took place only in the late 1980s. But today he is one of the most sought-after and highly valued authors on the Russian art market; his works, both paintings and graphics, are sold for hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars.

The artist was extremely efficient; in 1926 he wrote to the poet Kamensky: “Now I am the first master in the world.<…>I don't apologize for these phrases. You need to know who you are, otherwise you won’t know what to do. Yes, and my life is holy from above-average work and above-average feelings, and my 40 years prove this. I am not afraid of any competition, any order, any topic, any size and any speed.”

Probably the most famous are his cycles “Race” and “Faces of Russia” - very close in spirit and differing only in that the first was created before emigration, and the second already in Paris. In these cycles, we are presented with a gallery of types (“faces”) of the Russian peasantry: old men, women, and children look gloomily straight at the viewer, they attract the eye and at the same time repel it. Grigoriev was by no means inclined to idealize or embellish those whom he painted; on the contrary, sometimes he brings images to the grotesque. Among the “faces” painted already in exile, portraits of Grigoriev’s contemporaries - poets, actors of the Art Theater, as well as self-portraits - are added to the peasant portraits. The image of the peasant “Race” expanded to a general image of an abandoned, but not forgotten Motherland.

One of these portraits - the poet Nikolai Klyuev in the image of a shepherd - became the most expensive painting by Boris Grigoriev. At the Sotheby’s auction on November 3, 2008, the work “The Shepherd of the Hills” from 1920 was sold for $3.72 million with an estimate of $2.5–3.5 million. The portrait is the author’s copy of a lost portrait from 1918.

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