How the avant-garde fake ended up in Oppenheimer. History of the Sachs collection

Since the mid-2000s, a large private collection of Russian and Ukrainian avant-garde has been circulating around Europe, consisting of hundreds of masterpieces - paintings by Lissitzky, Rodchenko, Ekster, Goncharova and other masters.

Known as the Sachs Collection after the owner, it sold in Europe for hundreds of thousands of Swiss francs.

Works from the Sachs collection now hang in two important American museums and one in Europe. One of them has appeared in recent Hollywood films, including Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer.

But experts say the paintings may be fakes, and the origin story of the collection is a collection of myths and fantasies.

While three art detectives were investigating this legend of the lost Grail of the Russian avant-garde, the BBC was looking for its mysterious owner and those who helped him sell dubious paintings.

From Belarusian villages to Swiss auctions

In the early 2000s, an unknown private collector showed up in Minsk, hurrying to announce good news: he had found a huge collection of Russian avant-garde paintings, and he wanted to exhibit them in Belarus.

The collection included more than two hundred paintings, including paintings by Lissitzky, Rodchenko, Tatlin, Chashnik, Goncharova, Popova, Ekster, Klyun, Falk and other masters.

Its mysterious owner was Soviet emigrant Leonid Zaks, now an Israeli citizen. He said that the unique collection was assembled by his relatives, who received some of the masterpieces as a gift from Belarusian peasants, and bought the rest either in Moscow or Minsk thrift stores in the 1950s.

Belarusian cultural officials embraced the story with enthusiasm and organized several exhibitions. “These are unique works; they exude warmth, kindness, and spontaneity. We are very grateful to you for saving them for us and for future generations,” the Deputy Minister of Culture of Belarus thanked Zaks.

But art historians were alarmed by the fact that Zaks diligently avoided the National Art Museum of Belarus, and by historical errors in his interviews, and finally by the very quality of the paintings.

“This story is designed for people who are completely divorced from our reality,” said Vitebsk historian Alexander Lisov in an interview with Tut.by.

Lisov drew attention to the hoax: the catalog of one of the Belarusian exhibitions indicated that the authenticity of the work was confirmed by “N. Selezneva”, employee of the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg. But there has never been such an employee in the museum.

After this interview, no more exhibitions were held in Belarus. The article about the Sachs collection has been removed from Wikipedia.

However, this did not stop the collector, but only changed the field of his activity. The exhibitions continued, but in the private Swiss gallery Orlando in Zurich.

At least five major exhibitions of the Sachs collection took place between 2007 and 2014. This is a commercial gallery and all paintings were available for sale.

Most of them were bought by private collectors - sometimes for hundreds of thousands of Swiss francs. For one family, these purchases led to family drama.

Art for the Blind

When Rudolf Blum, the legendary Zurich collector, went blind in 2005, his wife Leonor took up the cause. She began actively buying Russian art through the Zurich Orlando gallery, trusting her friend, its owner Suzanne Orlando. Leonor Blum managed to buy dozens of paintings worth millions of Swiss francs.

Among these things are paintings by the first tier of avant-garde artists: Lissitzky, Rodchenko, Popova, Tatlin, Ekster. One of Lissitzky’s works was bought for 400 thousand Swiss francs, another - for 500 thousand. A painting by Lyubov Popova - also for 500 thousand.

“[Mom] wanted to prove that she understood painting as well as her father, and she believed Suzanne Orlando,” recalls Beatrice Gimpel McNally, the Blooms’ daughter. “Father began to suspect something was wrong, but what could he do?”

By the time she started buying these paintings, Leonor Blum had already been diagnosed with vascular dementia. But when Beatrice shared her doubts with her mother, she not only rejected them with indignation, but was mortally offended.

These pictures ruined their relationship forever.

Beatrice's suspicions were justified. After her parents died, estate appraisers said the paintings in the Sachs collection were worthless. Auction houses in London refused to consider them, but one of them advised her to contact James Butterwick, a British dealer and expert on Russian and Ukrainian avant-garde.

“The power of the Russian economy”

Until 2022, the James Butterwick Gallery specialized in Russian and Ukrainian art, but after that “Russian” disappeared from its name. The art remains largely the same.

Until recently, “Russian avant-garde” referred to the works of artists created in the first quarter of the 20th century throughout the entire space from Vitebsk and Kyiv to Moscow and St. Petersburg, and this concept included such movements as Suprematism, Constructivism, Rayonism, Cubo-Futurism, etc. Now such a generalization is considered inappropriate, and for some - an imperialistic and colonial term. Alternative definitions are increasingly used, for example, “Soviet” and “Ukrainian” avant-garde.

Butterwick’s fascination with the Soviet avant-garde began with a student exchange in the USSR and ended with a move to Moscow in 1994. The trip in a right-hand drive Citroën BX took three days with overnight stays in Hannover, Poznan and Minsk.

At this time, with the advent of the market economy, the art market came out of hiding, and a flood of fakes poured into it. But then, in the early 1990s, it was not about the mass production of fakes, but rather about an uncritical attitude towards old things.

Everything changed in the 2000s, when Russian capital left its native shores. In December 2004, more than a thousand paintings by Russian masters were presented at two London auctions. They were bought mainly by Russians.

The rise in prices for paintings by Russian artists reflected “the high demand for them in Russia and the strength of the Russian economy,” experts said.

Soon the avant-garde came to the fore, pushing academic painting forward. Interest in Shishkin and Aivazovsky gave way to the pursuit of paintings by Malevich and Kandinsky.

“The Russian bourgeoisie, with the increased pace of capital accumulation, began to lay claim to cosmopolitanism,” recalls Mikhail Kamensky, art critic and curator, former head of Sotheby’s in Russia and deputy director of the Pushkin Museum.

“Working on fakes”

In November 2008, at the height of the global economic crisis, Malevich’s “Suprematist Composition” sold at a New York auction for $60 million—a record for Russian art. Ten years later, the same painting will be sold for 86 million.

Soaring prices have led to the emergence of an industry producing and servicing entire counterfeit collections, experts say.

Soon, during police raids in Europe, warehouses with hundreds and sometimes thousands of paintings of unknown origin will begin to be found.

Butterwick recalls how one day in Moscow an acquaintance gave him a lift in his predictably huge SUV:

“The car was filled with dozens of paintings that seemed extremely dubious to me. I asked him about them and he started showing me the certificates of authenticity.”

James began to notice that more and more questionable paintings that his clients showed him were accompanied by articles and opinions from experts.

Such papers were also attached to the paintings that Beatrice approached James with. These were the conclusions of art experts from InCoRM. The abbreviation stands for “International Chamber of Russian Modernism”. Its creators positioned themselves as an association of researchers of the Russian avant-garde.

The set of documents also included articles by Belarusian art critic Tatyana Kotovich and researcher at the Russian Museum Anton Uspensky. The Orlando gallery gave the Blum family translations of their articles to confirm the authenticity of the paintings.

James decided to understand this story together with his comrades, Ukrainian curator Konstantin Akinsha and St. Petersburg collector Andrey Vasiliev.

Back in 1996, Akinsha wrote an article “Falshak” for the New York magazine ARTnews, in which he revealed dozens of works that were mistakenly sold at European auctions as works of avant-garde masters. This was the first investigation to show the extent of the problem in the market. Since then, he has regularly returned to this topic - and advised the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, which recognized many of its Russian and Ukrainian works as fakes.

Vasiliev is the author of the book “Working on Forgeries” about the portrait of Elizaveta Yakovleva. This painting was exhibited in the British Tate Gallery, the Moscow pavilion “Worker and Collective Farm Woman” at VDNKh and a number of European museums as a previously unknown work by Kazimir Malevich - and was sold for 22 million euros. Vasiliev, using archives, proved that this is the work of the forgotten Leningrad artist Maria Dzhagupova.

Disappearing Uncle Moses and Lucky Aunt Anna

The study of the authenticity of paintings is traditionally based on three pillars: expert opinions, technical and technological analysis and provenance, that is, the history of the origin of the thing.

Akinsha is the co-author of the Association of American Museums' textbook on provenance studies, and he offered insight into the collection's incredible history.

According to Sachs, the founder of the collection was his grandfather Zalman, a merchant and tanner from Yekaterinoslav (now Dnieper in Ukraine). Zalman allegedly became interested in radical art after seeing it in a Belgian bank in Yekaterinoslav, and began buying paintings.

Anna (Nechama) Zaks, a military medic, continued her father’s work. In 1944-1945, she treated Belarusian peasants in the triangle between the cities of Lepel, Chashniki and Ushachi. Peasants just liberated from Nazi occupation brought her paintings by Lissitzky and Exter in gratitude for her labors.

And the final contribution to the future collection was made by Anna’s brother Moses, who disappeared at the front in 1941, and in the 1950s appeared in Moscow as an American businessman. At that time, the Central Culture Club of the Ministry of Internal Affairs held seminars condemning “formalist art,” after which the works of the avant-garde artists were handed over to thrift stores.

Moses Zaks, according to family legend, bought several dozen of these masterpieces in 1955-1956 - and took them all to Europe. There they lay until the 1990s, when the collection was inherited by his nephew, an oil worker from Moscow named Leonid Zaks, who told these fascinating stories about his relatives.

As evidence, Zaks presented buyers with a letter from the National Museum of History and Culture of Belarus from 2008, detailing the whole story, but with significant contradictions, strange typos and errors. In this version, Uncle Moses disappears from history, leaving Aunt Anna Zaks as the sole collector of the collection. Instead of the House of Culture of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the “Minsk City Committee of the CPSU” is indicated as the place for anti-formalist seminars.

In response to Vasiliev’s request, the National Museum of History and Culture reported that “no such letter was found in the museum’s archives.” “We also inform you that the numbering of outgoing letters for 2008 was used without the letter “M”,” the letter says.

“That is, in all respects this letter is fake,” Vasiliev concludes.

But the art detectives didn’t stop there. They conducted research in Russian and Belarusian archives, writing dozens of requests to museums and checking all the key facts of this story. The Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation responded to their inquiries that such exhibitions had never been held at the central club of the Ministry of Internal Affairs; Moreover, it was closed in 1949 and reopened only in 1966. The Russian Foreign Ministry responded that they had studied their archives and found no mention of the entry of Moses Zaks during these years.

“We have checked the entire provenance of the Sachs collection, and every element of this provenance is not confirmed by anything; rather, we are able to refute it. This is a classic provenance myth,” says Akinsha.

In museums and Hollywood films

Two works from the Sachs collection are in the Minneapolis Institute of Art. The author of the first was the Ukrainian artist Alexandra Ekster, the author of the second, “The Watchmaker,” was Ivan Klyun.

It was “The Watchmaker” that ended up in two films in 2023 - “Oppenheimer” by Christopher Nolan and “The Marvelous Story of Henry Sugar” by Wes Anderson.

The BBC contacted the Minneapolis Institute of Art and reported on the verification of the provenance of the Zaks collection. The museum promised to conduct its own investigation.

Shortly after our letter, the painting was removed from the exhibition, and the caption on the institute’s website changed. It is now listed as “attributed to Ivan Klyun.”

Another painting from the Sachs collection, attributed to the Ukrainian avant-garde artist Alexandra Exter, is kept at the Cleveland Museum of Art. The museum curators were interested in the results of the BBC investigation, but declined to comment.

We discovered that another work from the Sachs collection is in the world famous Albertina Gallery in Vienna. It was called “Genoa” and was also attributed to the avant-garde artist Exter.

Speaking to the BBC, museum officials said they had carried out their own checks on the painting and that it was not on display.

Flat-screen TV in an 18th-century interior

Beatrice gave the BBC the two remaining paintings in her possession from the Sachs collection - “Proun” (Project for the Approval of a New - the general name for the entire series of works) by El Lissitzky and “Pictorial Architectonics” by Lyubov Popova.

We brought them from Zurich to the Art Discovery laboratory in London, where Gilleen Nadolny, a leading scientist in the field of technical and technological analysis of painting, who has debunked dozens of fakes of the Russian avant-garde, undertook to analyze them for us.

Her analysis revealed in the painting by Lissitzky, who died in 1941, fibers frozen deep in the paint, treated with substances that became widely available only after World War II.

“It's like an 18th-century painting with a flat-screen TV in the background. This is impossible. It can not be so. It doesn’t happen like that.”

The painting is a fake, Nadolny wrote in her conclusion. She came to the same conclusion about the painting attributed to Popova: “a fake.”

“Everything from words”

While experts were studying the provenance and examining the paintings, we tracked down those who helped Sachs build the reputation for the collection and wrote the articles that the Orlando gallery gave to Beatrice's parents to convince them of the authenticity of the paintings being sold.

Leading researcher at the Russian Museum Anton Uspensky is the only living art historian associated with the famous museum who spoke positively about the Sachs collection. He published three articles about the collection, including in prestigious magazines - “Dialogue of Arts”, published by the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, and Academia, a publication of the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts.

Uspensky’s articles are built around supposedly held seminars against formalism (the same ones from which the paintings bought by Uncle Moses went to thrift stores in the 1950s). But in a conversation with the BBC, he said that he did not check this information himself and wrote everything from the words of Zaks: “These are family memories that are not confirmed in any way, not recorded anywhere.”

One of his articles states that “the historical and artistic value of the works is confirmed by expert opinions of international specialists.” The texts are illustrated with photographs of paintings, which are all signed as original works by Rodchenko, Lissitzky, etc. without a question mark.

However, the art critic says that he did not confirm the authenticity of the paintings, never even saw any of the work, only photographs, and was not aware of the use of his name in the sale.

In the articles, Uspensky also claimed that another “Proun” by Lissitzky from the Sachs collection was purchased by the Basel Art Museum. This is wrong. “As a result of intensive research into our archives, we have not found any trace of the Sachs family in general or works related to them in particular,” the head of provenance research at the Basel Museum, which owns three Prouns, all from other collections, told the BBC .

Vitebsk art critic Tatyana Kotovich also wrote a lot and laudatoryly about Sachs’s collection. “This is news to me. What you're talking about is using my name. There is no statement anywhere that I guarantee that this is this artist,” she said when asked by the BBC about the role of her articles in the sale of paintings.

Kotovich wrote that “Sachs cooperates fruitfully with the most prominent experts,” and listed members of the association of Russian avant-garde experts InCoRM, who issued certificates for many works from the collection sold in the Orlando gallery.

Soon after, InCoRM found itself at the center of two scandals when the certificates of its members surfaced in high-profile trials of Russian avant-garde counterfeits in Germany and Belgium.

Patricia Reiling, founder and president of InCoRM, told the BBC that the organization fell apart due to attacks from critics: “With all these accusations of fraud and slander, no one wanted to deal with anymore...”

Wrong facts

All this time we also tried to talk with Leonid Zaks himself. We wrote and called him at all possible addresses and numbers. His daughter forwarded our request to him, but even then Zaks did not respond.

And only two weeks before the release of our investigation, he got in touch - and suddenly agreed to a telephone interview.

What happens to that part of his collection that he did not manage to sell, and where is it now? Zaks was evasive: “I would like to avoid this question and some others… price and others…. It is stored, this collection, in a European warehouse.”

He disclaimed all responsibility for the paintings sold on the European market:

“I was torn from these paintings from the moment they left the Orlando gallery. I think these questions should not be addressed to me!”

Over and over again he repeated: “I didn’t sell anything.”

Then I asked him to tell me about the provenance of the collection. How can he confirm the stories about peasants giving away modernist masterpieces in 1944-1945?

“What evidence? Can you imagine what happened there after the war?” - Zaks was found.

He did not argue with the fact that no seminars on formalism were held at the Moscow club of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and only referred to the words of one late art critic who allegedly told him about them.

In response to the experts’ conclusions, the collector said that the history of the collection was written down by his mother, “an honest person,” and added: “Well, who should I believe - people unknown to me or my own mother?”

Zaks says he has nothing to apologize for and he didn't sell anything himself.
I noticed that his mother's story doesn't change the nature of his story - it's a family tradition.

Zaks replied: “What is written is no longer a legend, it is a fact. Perhaps this fact is erroneous, but this is far from a legend or tradition.”

More than my questions about forgeries and fictitious provenance, Zaks was surprised by the amounts that Beatrice’s parents paid for works from his collection. He argued that his work could not cost 400 thousand Swiss francs - and called such amounts “nonsense.”

“I’ve never seen such money from the Orlando gallery,” he said.

Sachs was also offended that Anton Ouspensky told the BBC that he had not seen the paintings and was not involved in their sale, rather than protect his collection.

“Uspensky visited the Orlando gallery, and more than once, by the way. And he saw what kind of gallery it was, how it worked. He knew it was a commercial gallery type store,” Zaks insisted.

“A wave of fakes flooded the whole world”

At the very end of our conversation, I asked Zaks if he would like to apologize to Beatrice.

“I can’t apologize, but I can sympathize. There’s nothing to apologize for,” he replied.

Deceived collectors of expensive paintings rarely evoke sympathy. After all, these are rich people with money to spare.

But in the case of Malevich, Lissitzky, Ekster, Popova, Goncharova and other avant-garde masters, this has long been not just a matter of losses for private buyers - but a threat to their entire heritage.

“There are much more fakes than genuine things,” says Andrey Vasiliev.

The history of the Sachs collection shows how easily dubious paintings with invented histories can end up in the world's leading museums. There they are seen by hundreds of thousands of people, they end up on the pages of textbooks, and a new generation of art critics learn from them.

It was the dominance of the “fake” that forced Akinshu, Vasiliev and Butterwick to fight counterfeits. But sometimes even they despair and admit that the outcome of this battle is already known.

“With the help of numerous art historians who fancy themselves academic scholars and at the same time generously issue certificates to confirm the authenticity of dubious works, [the avant-garde] has turned into a giant room of distorting mirrors, populated by terrible twins,” Akinsha wrote in one of his articles.

With many losses, the work of radical experimenters of that era - Russian, Ukrainian, Jewish artists - was still able to survive the persecution of the Soviet regime, World War II and the Iron Curtain.

But decades of market boom and the resulting wave of counterfeits threaten to bury their legacy under mountains of bad copies.