Grisha Bruskin

Grisha Bruskin's Gorky Street studio is a quiet spot, high above one of Moscow's busiest thoroughfares. You enter from the alley, anticipating a visit with an artist who recently shot from obscurity to center stage of the international scene. As you open a battered door and start to climb the stairs, you are overwhelmed by the stench of animal waste emanating from a lower apartment where a woman raises chickens and geese.

Grisha Bruskin's Gorky Street studio is a quiet spot, high above one of Moscow's busiest thoroughfares. You enter from the alley, anticipating a visit with an artist who recently shot from obscurity to center stage of the international scene. As you open a battered door and start to climb the stairs, you are overwhelmed by the stench of animal waste emanating from a lower apartment where a woman raises chickens and geese.

Seven months after an unprecedented auction of Soviet contemporary art in Moscow, artists whose works brought record prices remain in the news. Exhibitions of their work are springing up throughout Europe and the United States, and critical reviews of their shows appear with increasing frequency in the art press. But what about Soviet artists who were left out of the sale? Have they benefited from glasnost?

Soviet artists fear that the Soviet Union Ministry of Culture may fail to meet its contract to pay them their share of profits from a $3.6-million Sotheby's auction held July 7 in Moscow. Efforts to contact the Ministry of Culture in Moscow were unsuccessful, but Sotheby's officials say they are looking into the matter and that the artists will be paid as promised. Payment was due Sept.

Many Russian job descriptions have changed radically since the former Soviet Union was dismantled. Alexander D. Borovsky's has become infinitely more interesting. As chief curator of contemporary art for the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg, he is charged with building a collection of art that was officially ignored for several decades.

Sotheby's ground-breaking auction of Russian Avant-Garde and Soviet contemporary art, to be held July 7 in Moscow, will contain no bronze busts of Lenin, no paintings of blissful workers, no visual narratives on the joys of socialism. But those are about the only themes missing in the recently published catalogue for the auction.

The Soviet Union's first international art auction totaled $3.6 million in sales, exceeding its organizers most optimistic expectations. The Thursday evening sale of Russian Avant-Garde and contemporary Soviet art was predicted to bring about $1 million, but bidding was fiercely competitive, and prices often soared above their estimates. As expected, two paintings by Alexander Rodchenko brought the sale's top prices.

The Soviet Union's first international art auction captivated the art world last week as it catapulted a handful of contemporary artists to stardom and gifted its participants with hard-currency bank accounts that will allow them to travel to the West. These are not trivial victories for artists who have a long history of struggling against an oppressive government, but few people in Moscow are ready to proclaim the $3.6-million sale a panacea.

Tahir Salakhov is a survivor of glasnost and perestroika. Other heads rolled when Mikhail S. Gorbachev set off revolutionary changes in the Soviet Union, but Salakhov held on to his position as first secretary of the Artists Union of the Soviet Union. A representational painter turned administrator, Salakhov rose to power during Leonid Brezhnev's regime, when the Big Brother-style union kept an iron hand on artistic production and maintained a rigidly nationalistic focus.

"IS that a Henry Moore?" Lynda Resnick asks, spotting a huge bronze reclining figure in Tasende Gallery's space at the Los Angeles Art Show. "How much is it?" Betina Tasende, director of the La Jolla-based firm's Los Angeles gallery, says that company President Jose Tasende "is in negotiations for that piece" -- meaning that he's trying to sell it to someone else. "How much would it be if he weren't in negotiations?" Resnick asks. "It's up there." "How far up?" "Over five."