Review of the documentary “Masterpieces that never happened. Sachs Collection”

This week the documentary film “Masterpieces That Never Happened” was released. Sachs Collection.” An investigation by reporters and several experts they hired exposes one of the persistent legends about private collections of Russian avant-garde works. Art columnist for Kommersant Kira Dolinina believes that this film will not lead to a revolution in the art market, but many of its participants should be concerned.

The film, released by the BBC Russian Service, has already been liked by many. First of all, to those who already knew all this and for whom bringing this antique dregs and dirt into the light of day is a sign of the not very popular thesis today about the victory of justice. Of course, fans of art detectives and all kinds of art conspiracy theories will be happy with this film. For the former, the plot (investigation of a possible crime) is tempting. For the latter, whose vocabulary is dominated by figures of generalization (“in the Hermitage everything has been replaced by fakes”), the clear message of the film’s authors is attractive: one must always be careful with the Russian avant-garde.

The main speakers, who are also the initiators of the investigation, speak about this openly and more than once: the famous fighter against fakes of the Russian avant-garde, art critic and journalist Konstantin Akinsha, St. Petersburg collector Andrei Vasiliev and London art dealer James Butterwick. The company is motley, the roles are distributed gracefully: the sad Vasiliev, who himself suffered a lot from counterfeiters, “in his old age” decides to engage in exposure; the imposing Akinsha with a skipper’s beard says, perhaps, the most important words in the film; Jovial, fast as mercury, with stunning Russian language and absolute fatalism Butterwick, the greatest visual discovery of the film’s authors, is a pure screen star.

All this heavy artillery is being thrown to test a long-standing legend in the history of collecting Russian avant-garde – the so-called Sachs collection, which, according to its current owner Leonid Sachs, contains “more than two hundred masterpieces – paintings by Lissitzky, Rodchenko, Exter, Goncharova and other masters.” Let me give you a spoiler right away – the exposure was a success. At least one painting “from Sachs” – sold by Swiss gallery owner Susan Orlando from Galerie Orlando to Zurich collector Rudolf Bloom for 400 thousand Swiss francs, “Proun” by El Lissitzky (as if from the 1920s) – was checked up and down, and, alas, oh, it turned out to be at least a post-war fake. The film also devotes a lot of time to the dubious “The Watchmaker” by Ivan Klyun from the collection of the Minneapolis Institute of Art – primarily because the picture appeared in two famous films of the last season: in “Oppenheimer” by Christopher Nolan and “The Marvelous Story of Henry Sugar” by Wes Anderson. Several other specific works of the same origin are briefly mentioned in the film: three works by Alexandra Exter (museum in Minneapolis, Cleveland Museum of Art, Albertina Museum in Vienna), “Pictorial Architectonics” by Lyubov Popova (purchased by the Bloom family at Galerie Orlando).

The authenticity of Lisitsky’s “Proun” was verified according to all the rules: visual examination by a specialist, provenance and technical and technological examination. With the first one, as always, there are the biggest problems: they seemed to attract a brilliant avant-garde specialist Tatyana Goryacheva, but she only promised “as soon as she sees it, she will immediately understand whether the work is genuine,” and they stopped there. Butterwick himself managed to study Proun much more beautifully, although his reasoning about the hardness of the lines without showing the lines themselves does not look very good. But the provenance was combed at the highest level: they checked the entire history of the collection, which exists in literature only from the words of Leonid Zaks himself, conveyed to the world by particularly gullible art critics. Just look at the story that Leonida Zaks’s aunt, who was a doctor in Belarus during World War II, received avant-garde paintings as gifts from the “peasants” (!). Of course, as almost always in such cases of obscure provenance, the issue of exporting such a large collection outside the borders of the USSR is not at all clear. Well, there are also a bunch of unconfirmed facts that are absolutely damning for the reputation of the entire collection. Especially good against this background is the phrase said by Sachs himself: “Well, who should I trust: people unknown to me or my own mother?”

Investigative journalism is an extremely popular genre today that requires a lot of time, money and skill, the main one being persistence. Visually, reporter Gregor Atanesyan was responsible for this part of the BBC investigation. It didn’t turn out very well – sitting with a serious look and connecting documents and photographs on the whiteboard with red threads, it was a good thing, but a lot of real threads and leads appearing in the film were abandoned. They searched for Leonid Zaks himself and even found him in Israel. But it was almost impossible to get to those who really made names for these paintings, experts and gallery owners.

The main problem that the film really talks about is the authenticity of most of the Russian avant-garde works that entered the art market sometime after the mid-1980s. Almost every year there are powerful scandals: either the catalog of Goncharova’s works was withdrawn (at least 150 of the 600 published items are fakes), or the director of the Ghent Museum was removed for gullibility. This is purely a powder keg, and all participants in the process know about it and discuss it among themselves. The BBC decided to open the boil publicly, with names and numbers. Now we must continue, otherwise there is no point.