SMArt Talks: Faking Russia: "Avant-Garde", Misconceptions, Forgeries

The works of Russian and Soviet modernists began attracting the attention of Western art historians and the international art market in the aftermath of World War II. During the 1950s, the first paintings by so-called "formalists"—artists whose works were banned in the Soviet Union—were smuggled into the West by diplomats and foreign journalists. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the growing influx of these illicitly exported artworks led to the establishment of the broad and often ambiguous classification known as the “Russian Avant-Garde.”

Radical modernism from both the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union soon became a powerful cultural brand, embraced by ideological groups across the spectrum. The European and American left viewed it as the authentic artistic expression of revolutionary ideals, tragically suppressed by Stalinist censorship. Meanwhile, right-wing intellectuals seized upon Soviet anti-modernist policies as evidence of artistic repression under communist rule, using them to highlight the regime’s broader suppression of freedom.

However, the clandestine origins of many of these artworks, combined with the lack of established expertise and the inaccessibility of crucial archives and museum collections behind the Iron Curtain, resulted not only in widespread misinterpretations but also in the emergence of a vast industry of forgeries. Counterfeit works flooded the international art market on both sides of the Atlantic, and many even found their way into the collections of prestigious Western museums, further complicating the already fragile discourse surrounding Russian modernism.

Given this complex and often murky history, contemporary art historians now face an urgent challenge: to critically reassess both the terminology and the historical narrative of early 20th-century radical modernism in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. Only through rigorous scholarship, comprehensive archival research, and advancements in forensic art analysis can the field untangle decades of misconceptions and expose the intricate web of authenticity, forgery, and ideological appropriation that has shaped the perception of so-called Russian Avant-Garde art over the past seventy years.