“Why don’t you collect Russian art?”, — I can’t say how many times I have been asked this question for my short period of studying and collecting art. There have always been two important reasons making me opt out of going into this.

First of all, it is usually way overpriced right at the beginning. Many factors contribute to this: they maybecome a story for a stand-alone article. And the second one is actually what this longread is all about — chances are you buy a fake are rather high. Some say that about 80% of 20th century visual art coming from Russia (or Soviet Union) is likely to have disputable provenance.

Let me digress for a moment and make a caveat here. I have no intention to say that there is something particularly wrong with Russian dealers, artists or people in general that contributed to the unfortunate image of these artworks on the market. These cases happen everywhere across the globe.

The essense of the problem lies in the closed nature of the Soviet Union. This isolationist politics let the whole country with its culture develop under cover in its own reality with almost no contacts with international [art] community.

No wonder that in the first years after the fall of the Iron Curtain myriads of artworks that were produced during that period (or simply kept closed in some private collections) invaded international market. Genuine interest for this art resulted in high demand on the market and dramatically rising prices those years. All that attracted many swindlers and resulted in thousands of fraudulent deals.

The delayed echo of that situation is heard even today.

An interesting investigation emerged today in a high reputation internet media Meduza.io. The comprehensive fact-finding article — “The elusive star of Soviet art brut” — was released recently and now promises to cause a stir on the market of art brut or naïve art.

The case is all about a mysterious self-taught artist called Foma Jaremtschuk [Фома Яремчук, rus.] who is said to be born in the beginning of 20th century, been a political prisoner and then spent many years in a mental clinic where he had painted numerous artworks in his unique powerfull and crazy manner.

Foma Jaremtschuk was born in a remote village in Siberia. He never learned to draw and finished only three grades in a rural primary school. No facts about his life until the age of twenty-nine are known. He became a victim of the Stalin-regime and after being arrested for ”slandering the USSR“ in 1936, he was sent to a labor camp. In 1947, he was found to have a mental disorder and moved from the labor camp to a closed mental hospital. During his eleven-year stay in that hospital, Jaremtschuk made his ink and pencil drawings in which with the use of strongly expressive figures, harmonious space scenes, and dark creatures from some alien world were depicted. After being moved to another mental institution for severely mentally ill patients, the artist died in 1986. [Information from the artist page at Delmes & Zander gallery website.]

Perfectly selling artistic legend, isn’t it?

When his works were first introduced to the market in late 2006 his unconventional manner immediately caught the eye of art market sharks. A reputable Cologne-based Galerie Susanne Zander specialising on so-called outsider art met some unknown dealer A.G. [I omit his name intentionally to avoid potantial allegations — the full story with all credentials is available in the original investigation here] who brought a set of 233 drawings on a wall-paper for review and told the above-mentioned story.

Those drawings with almost infernal scenes of an nut-case mind with all those futuristic and imposible details for the period they were said to be drawn (1960') looked really promising and made this German gallery believe that was a real deal. They immediately bought the whole set for €45,000. And the gallery didn’t regret — the next Cologne Art Fair proved that genius of a poor soviet psycho Foma Jaremstchuk was destined to become a success. Well, and a nice profit to the gallery and, of course, this unknown A.G.