Experts Say Russian Modernism Show at Ghent Museum Is ‘Highly Questionable’

An exhibition of 26 never-before-seen Russian avant-garde works, purportedly made in the early 20th century by such radical artists as Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, Alexander Rodchenko, and Vladimir Tatlin, is coming under scrutiny this week. A number of prominent Russian art specialists are questioning the authorship of the works in an open letter to the Art Newspaper.

The paintings are on view in an exhibition called “Russian Modernism” at the Museum voor Schone Kunsten (MSK) in Ghent, Belgium. They are on loan from the Dieleghem Foundation, a registered charity owned by Brussels-based Russian businessman and art collector Igor Toporovski. The presentation, which opened at the end of October, is the prelude to a larger exhibition on the subject scheduled to debut at the museum at the end of 2018, according to the Belgian newspaper L’Echo.

The museum in Ghent says that the current presentation highlights “the creativity of the most important artists of the first half of the 20th century,” according to a press release for the exhibition. The display also includes work purportedly by Aleksandra Ekster, Natalia Goncharova, and Lyubov Popova.

In the letter, due to be published online today, the specialists—many of whom are leading experts in the field—describe the works on view in Ghent as “highly questionable.” The signatories include art historian Aleksandra Shatskikh, who has written several books on Malevich; Natalia Murray of the Courtauld Institute of Art, who organized the exhibition “Revolution: Russian Art 1917–1932” at the Royal Academy last year; Vivian Endicott Barnett, the author of the catalogues raisonnés for Kandinsky and Alexej von Jawlensky; and Konstantin Akinsha, an arts journalist and curator.

Other signatories include dealers of modern Russian art James Butterwick (of London) and Ingrid Hutton (of New York); Julian Barran, the former director of Sotheby’s Impressionist and modern art department in London and former head of Sotheby’s France; Impressionist and modern art dealers Ivor Braka and Richard Nagy; and Alex Lachmann, the Russian art advisor and collector.

Although the word “fake” is not used in the letter, it is clear that the experts are suspicious that the works on display in Ghent could be inauthentic.

The paintings, they say, “have no exhibition history, have never before been reproduced in serious scholarly publications, and have no traceable sales records. The exhibited paintings by Wassily Kandinsky and Alexei von Jawlensky are not included in the catalogues raisonnés—internationally recognized as definitive sources for authentication of works of these artists. Objects such as a box and distaff allegedly decorated by Malevich [below, foreground] have no known analogues and there are no historical records that even mention that Malevich ever was involved in the decoration of such objects.”