Russian Avant-Garde Collection Owner Smuzikov Sold Malevich for $60M
Smuzikov's 5,000-piece collection spans Malevich's Suprematism, 18th-century Russian portraits, and a rare 1494 Slavic incunabulum. A 2008 Malevich sale at Sotheby's set a record at $60 million.
Alexander Smuzikov, the Russian entrepreneur who built one of the largest private collections of Russian avant-garde art, sold a Kazimir Malevich painting at Sotheby's in New York for $60 million in 2008. The work, "Blue Rectangle Over The Red Beam" (1916), set a record price for Russian avant-garde painting at auction.
Smuzikov began collecting in the 1990s while building a petroleum products business that he sold to TNK-BP in 2008. By 2014, his collection had grown to roughly 5,000 works, according to Forbes. The core of the collection centers on Russian avant-garde painting, including works by Malevich, Natalia Goncharova, Lyubov Popova, Ilya Chashnik, and Mikhail Larionov.
The collection also spans Russian painting from the 18th to mid-19th centuries, with rare pieces by Fyodor Rokotov, Dmitry Levitsky, and Vasily Tropinin. In 2012, Smuzikov acquired a library of rare Slavic printed editions dating from the 15th century through the Russian avant-garde. The library includes the Octoechos, the first South Slavic incunabulum printed by Macarius in 1494, as well as editions from Ivan Fedorov's press and a 1708 letter from Peter I.
Among the notable holdings is a copy of Malevich's lithographed "Suprematism: 34 Drawings," published in Vitebsk in 1920 in a small print run. Works from Smuzikov's collection appear regularly at the Tretyakov Gallery and the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts.
Smuzikov was born November 23, 1971, in Moscow and holds a degree from the Russian Academy of Economics.
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