Fashion designer Daria Zhukova (R), artists Ilya (2nd L) and Emilia (L) Kabakov, and curator Joseph Backstein attend the opening of the Garage art gallery in Moscow September 16, 2008
Jeff Koons, Baroque Egg with Bow, 1994-2006
Courtesy of Gagosian Gallery
Barbara Bush (daughter of George W Bush) with Baroque Egg
Chris Jackson/Getty Images
Aaron Young's Arc Light motorcycle performance during the opening
Chris Jackson/Getty Images
Sam Orlofsky, Victoria Gelfand, Larry Gagosian
Sam Orlofsky, Piotr Uklanski, Takashi Murakami
It was clear that the Moscow openings of the Garage and the Gagosian exhibition at the Red October Chocolate Factory were going to make for a few days that would be heady, even by the credit crunch-defying standards of the Upper Art World. The Garage, a Contemporary art space funded by Dasha Zhukova, the significant other of Roman Abramovich, and Larry Gagosian had their opening dinners on consecutive evenings. And this attracted a pool of art world movers - from museum folk like Robert Storr, Gary Tinterow and Nicholas Serota to artists like Takashi Murakami - which would be unusual anyway, let alone this freshly minted art capital. Meanwhile, non-art world events were flickering around us like thunderheads but were only in fits and starts deflecting attention from the intense art action
The Garage was buiit in 1926 by the Constructivist, Konstantin Melnikof, who also built Lenin's Mausoleum, and it is so called because in Soviet times it saw service as the Bachmetevsky bus depot. Restored, it is currently one of five Moscow spaces to be showing the work of the great Ukrainian Conceptualist, Ilya Kabakov. Kabakov often works with his wife, and this was their triumphant return to their home-town after a self-exile of some twenty years.
The Kabakov pieces at the Garage were paintings, sometimes ascribed to an elder mentor, "Charles Rosenthal," sometimes to a younger artist, "Igor Spivak," sometimes to I. Kabakov himself. One "Rosenthal" was a canvas showing an art auction. The wall label said it had been inspired by a visit to the auction house, Parke Bernet, in London in October 1931. The artist is quoted to the effect "I saw art as money ... money and nothing more."
I ran into the Kabakovs later at the Winzavod art district, where three of their shows, including the wondrous Flies sequence, were to be found, and mentioned to Emilia Kabakobv that Parke Bernet had actually been a Manhattan auction house. "Of course," she said, with a delighted smile. "These are fictions." Ilya Kabakov may be the most Borgesian of visual artists ever.
At the Chocolate Factory, a mid-19th century building, which used to be just that, Gagosian is sating 'For what we are about to receive', a show that loosely addresses the theme of Art and Spirituality, something bound to resonate with the Russian soul. It was organized by Victoria Gelfand, a director of Gagosian London, who herself left the Soviet Union aged twelve. She and the curator Sam Orlofsky of Gagosian New York have put together a show the likes of which Muscovites have never seen.
It contains Picasso and four Giacometti figures. Four! Also Pollock, de Kooning, David Smith and post-war artists who have fairly recently ascended to glory like Francis Bacon and Lucio Fontana. Also pure abstractions by Robert Ryman and Brice Marden, and work such mid-career Po-Mo artists as Koons, Mike Kelley, Christopher Wool and Richard Prince. A chair and a shelf represent the Design artist Marc Newson.
But the show also contains younger artists, and relatively little-known ones, like Wade Guyton, Goshka Macuga, Florian Maier-Aichen, and a young New Yorker Aaron Young, who had organized a performance piece in which art would be made by bikers on wheels. He was showing a chain-link fence which had been destroyed, gilded and graffitied.
One of the aims of this, the second Gagosian group show in Moscow, is to establish the gallery as a trustworthy go-to brand for museum-quality work rather than just another dealership pushing wares, so care has been taken to include such non-gallery artists as Sherrie Levine.
Not everything is for sale. "Of the bigger ones, the Jeff Koons Egg, the Manzoni and the de Kooning aren't for sale," Gelfand says. "The David Smith, one of them, is not for sale. The Pollock is for sale."
The show is provocatively displayed. A puddled bronze by Picasso seems to be sizing up the Giacomettis. Along one wall you see savagely ripped panels by the late Steve Parrino, a Banks Violette of a mirror-topped table with a shattered corner - perhaps by intention or perhaps by an accident which got accepted as a part of the piece - and a photograph of rubbish by Andreas Gursky.
Did many Russians wonder to see the design pieces by Newson in a fine art show? "No." Gelfand said. "Because, frankly, a lot of the people are looking at these works for the first time. They don't know most of the artists that we're so familiar with in the West. So for them they're kind of looking at everything as an art object full stop.'
Was some work made for the space? "Certainly. The Murakami painting was made for the show. Anish Kapoor made the work for the show. Aaron Young didn't make the piece on the premises but he made it for the exhibition."
When did you make the first sales? "We made the first sales the day before the show opened. It's going very well. We have sold as of today approximately 16 pieces."
I noted that the timing of the opening could scarcely have been worse.
"I know!" Gelfand said. "With the Georgian crisis and the financial meltdown it was a very tricky time. You know, on Monday the New York Stock market melted down and Lehman announced that they were going bankrupt. But I think, strangely enough, what happened with the Hirst sale [in London] set the precedent for our show"
She said they had been "very relieved" to learn that Damien Hirst's night sale was to go before their opening.
"And the Hirst sale went extremely well. But we've had such good sales that it would be difficult for me to say had the world been perfect what the sales could have been like. But so far we have had a record turn-out for an openings all over the world. We had a record number of people come through this weekend to see the show."
By Tuesday, which was when I last checked, the Chocolate Factory had had 5,000 visitors.
Anthony Haden-Guest
Anthony Haden-Guest is a writer, reporter and cartoonist. He writes for leading magazines in Britain and America, most recently in Esquire, GQ (UK) the Financial Times and Britain's Observer Magazine. You can email him directly with your comments at anthonyhaden.guest@yahoo.co.uk and/or post your views on the Saatchi Online public blog, making sure to put the title of this article as your header.
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