Moscow Art Fair Postponed as Russia’s Rich Curb Purchases

By John Varoli

Feb. 18 (Bloomberg) -- Art Moscow, one of Russia’s biggest contemporary-art fairs, has been postponed to September to tap a crowd headed for a larger exhibition, as falling oil prices and squeezed credit quell art purchases among the nation’s rich.

The 13th Annual Art Moscow will now be timed to coincide with the state-run Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, which starts Sept. 24, said organizer Expo Park Exhibition Projects Ltd. Art Moscow was originally planned to open May 14.

“By September, everyone will have gotten used to the new reality of the crisis,” said Vasily Bychkov, Expo Park’s general director. “Foreign galleries will be more willing to come to Art Moscow when they know it coincides with the Biennale, which attracts leading international curators and collectors.”

The New York benchmark crude-oil prices have fallen more than 40 percent the past six months, causing Russia’s economic growth to hover at near zero. Stock-market declines and the credit squeeze are also ailing the nation’s richest. According to Moscow’s Finans magazine, the number of Russian billionaires declined in the past six months from 101 to 49.

Expo Park’s decision comes a month after the Geneva-based Art Culture Studio canceled the Moscow World Fine Art Fair planned for the last week of May. Last year, it brought to Moscow about 1 billion euros ($1.26 billion) of art from 70 international galleries.

At the peak of crude-oil prices last year, Russia’s rich drove contemporary-art prices to records.

Abramovich, Freud

In May, billionaire Roman Abramovich bought a 1995 painting by Lucian Freud at Christie’s in New York for $33.6 million, a record for the most expensive work by a living artist, according to a Sunday Times report.

The Russian art market has been plagued by bad news since December when Sotheby’s in London moved the date of its annual March sale of Russian postwar and contemporary art to fit in with its week-long sales of Russian art in June.

Also in December, Russia’s first private museum of postwar art, Art4ru, owned by Moscow millionaire Igor Markin, said it would only be open one day a week, on Fridays from noon to 8 p.m., to cut costs.

“As long as the price of oil stays low -- and this looks to be the case for the next few years -- then Russians won’t be able to spend the large sums of money on art like over the past few years,” said Emelyan Zakharov, a Russian art collector and owner of Triumph Gallery, a contemporary art gallery in Moscow.