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A virtuoso capable of creating a masterpiece in a matter of minutes using a simple set of paints, a couple of cigarette butts and leftover snacks. An outstanding improviser. A brilliant representative of the underground art, forever persecuted by the monstrous Soviet laws. Today his works are in great demand. Zverev's craftsmanship is admired by the third generation of collectors. His exhibitions are still sold out. Memoirs and monographs are published. Dozens of buyers are competing for his works at auctions. There is a whole private museum named after him in Moscow.

Since March 11, 2021, from the third step of the pedestal of the most expensive living artists, we see not the mastodon Gerhard Richter, but a young guy of forty with the face of Garik “Bulldog” Kharlamov. His name is Mike Winkelmann. The son of an electrician and a social worker from a small town in Wisconsin. Formerly an IT guy and web designer. And now the famous artist Beeple.

One of the main and most expensive Russian nonconformists. His name has been heard even by those with little interest in fine art. After all, stories about Tselkov can be found several times in the prose of Sergei Dovlatov. One of the most famous is in “Solo on Underwood” — about how the artist set prices for his paintings. He did it in a very peculiar way. And all because one day the artist severely underestimated his painting.

This tough psychological and mystical cycle by Mikhail Chemiakine is called “Angels of Death”. A series of watercolors of the same name was exhibited at the Hermitage in 1995. A powerful expressionist cycle: overcoming nightmares, desacralization of the world of shadows, photo-reportage from the depths the subconscious.

Before us is a great rarity. An example of a large, nervous painting by Vladimir Yakovlev. And one of his most important themes is the cat. There is a beautiful legend that Yakovlev once saw from the window of a psychiatric hospital how a cat caught a pigeon. He was shocked, imagining himself in the place of the unfortunate bird. But knowledgeable people say otherwise. The cat in Yakovlev's work was inspired by Picasso's “Cat Catching a Bird”. Dramatic philosophical subject: a metaphor of human destinies, a conversation about the predator and the victim, about the defenselessness of man in the face of circumstances.

This is the astounding story of how Vladimir Yakovlev, a retoucher for a publishing house, began to draw under the impression of exhibitions of foreign artists as part of the 1957 Youth Festival. And he quickly revealed himself as a phenomenal intuitive painter. In the 1970s, his gouaches became symbols of unofficial art. They were bought by representatives of the Soviet creative and scientific intelligentsia. Against the background of the dominance of propaganda art, the purchase of Yakovlev's works was certainly a form of intellectual resistance.

Tushenosh — a porter of cut carcasses — is a philosophical metaphorical image in Chemiakine's work. For the artist, it was an opportunity to show the symbolic neighborhood of life and death, a reflection on the vanity of vanities and, of course, an expression of the aesthetic rapture received in The Belly of Paris. The “stomach”, or “belly of Paris”, the writer Émile Zola called the food market Les Halles — the epitome of a bustling commercial life and its attendant vices.

The history of this gouache can be traced back to 1969, when it was acquired by the American collector Arthur Odum. In the U.S., this piece participated in the exhibition «Russian Painting of the 1960s, «was published in a catalog in 1990. “The work under study belongs to a rare cycle of Yakovlev's works painted in pointillé. Such pieces from the late 1960s, executed at such a high level, are a great rarity... This is certainly a creative success of Vladimir Yakovlev... It is a monument to Moscow's unofficial art...” These are quotations from Valery Silaev's expertise.

Before us is Krasnopevtsev. Fabulous beauty. Rare in plot, infrequent in color, large and expensive. The authenticity has already been confirmed by the main expert in Dmitry Krasnopevtsev’s art, Alexander Ushakov. He also told us the exact name of this work: “Two shells and beads”. This is the most valuable period of the master of metaphysical still life. An indisputable masterpiece.