Russian Avant-Garde at the Museum Ludwig: Original and Fake
Questions, Research, Explanations

Af­ter a long pe­ri­od in which it was ta­boo, an in­creas­ing num­ber of mu­se­ums are be­com­ing more trans­par­ent about how they deal with inau­then­tic works and exchang­ing knowl­edge. With a stu­dio ex­hi­bi­tion on the Rus­sian avant-garde, the Mu­se­um Lud­wig is pre­sent­ing re­search on the au­then­tic­i­ty of works in its col­lec­tion. Thanks to Peter and Irene Lud­wig, in ad­di­tion to Pop Art and Pi­cas­so, the Rus­sian avant-garde is a core fo­cus of the mu­se­um’s col­lec­tion, with more than 600 works from the pe­ri­od be­tween 1905 and 1930, in­clud­ing some 100 paint­ings.

For vari­ous rea­sons, works of ques­tion­able au­thor­ship have cont­in­u­al­ly found their way in­to pri­vate and in­sti­tu­tio­n­al col­lec­tions. Works by Rus­sian avant-garde artists were coun­ter­feit­ed par­tic­u­lar­ly of­ten (due to their de­layed re­cep­tion af­ter Stalin­ism, for in­s­tance). Even re­cent­ly, paint­ings from this era that have turned out to be inau­then­tic have been pre­sent­ed in mu­se­ums. The Mu­se­um Lud­wig is al­so af­fect­ed and is cur­rent­ly sys­te­m­at­i­cal­ly in­vesti­gat­ing its col­lec­tion of paint­ings with the help of in­ter­na­tio­n­al scho­lars. This re­search rep­re­sents an im­por­tant con­tri­bu­tion to the in­ter­na­tio­n­al dis­course on the Rus­sian avant-garde. One goal is to iden­ti­fy and distin­guish in­cor­rect at­tri­bu­tions in the mu­se­um’s col­lec­tion.

The ex­hi­bi­tion pre­sents the meth­ods and find­ings. With twen­ty-sev­en works by, or former­ly at­tribut­ed to Ljubow Popowa, Kli­ment Red­ko, Niko­lai Suetin, Ni­na Ko­gan, El Lis­sitzky, and other artists, it pre­sents art-his­tor­i­cal and tech­no­log­i­cal meth­ods for mak­ing artis­tic au­thor­ship and ques­tion­able at­tri­bu­tions rec­og­niz­able. In ad­di­tion to works from the mu­se­um’s own hold­ings, Mo­mus in Thes­sa­loni­ki - home to the Col­lec­tion of Ge­orge Cos­takis - as well as Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Ma­drid kind­ly pro­vide loans of orig­i­nal works that served as tem­plates for our not-au­then­tic pic­tures.

A film by Con­s­tantin Lieb (pro­duc­tion: art-beats.de) of­fers in­sight in­to the ex­ten­sive ex­am­i­na­tions and co­op­er­a­tions with dif­fer­ent sci­en­tists.

Of the 100 paint­ings in the Rus­sian avant-garde col­lec­tion at the Mu­se­um Lud­wig, half have un­der­gone an art-his­tor­i­cal and tech­no­log­i­cal ex­am­i­na­tion, most by Dr. Maria Kokko­ri, art his­to­rian and art tech­nol­o­gist at the Art In­sti­tute of Chica­go and a spe­cial­ist in the Rus­sian avant-garde, in col­lab­o­ra­tion with the paint­ing re­s­tor­er at the Mu­se­um Lud­wig, Pe­tra Mandt. Four­teen paint­ings by Mikhail Lari­onov and Na­talia Goncharo­va were se­lect­ed for a fun­da­men­tal ex­am­i­na­tion of the Rus­sian Avant-Garde Art Pro­ject, which was con­duct­ed by Dr. Jilleen Na­dol­ny from Art Anal­y­sis & Re­search In­sti­tute in Lon­don.

The ex­am­i­na­tion of the paint­ings was gener­ous­ly sup­port­ed by the Peter and Irene Lud­wig Foun­da­tion and the Rus­sian Avant-garde Re­search Pro­ject; ad­di­tio­n­al fund­ing came from the Ger­da Henkel Foun­da­tion and the ZEIT Stif­tung. The ex­hi­bi­tion, ca­t­a­logue, and ac­com­pany­ing sym­po­si­um are al­so sup­port­ed by the Peter and Irene Lud­wig Foun­da­tion and the Rus­sian Avant-garde Re­search Pro­ject as well as the Ernst von Sie­mens Kun­st­s­tif­tung, the Bea­t­rix Lichtken Stif­tung, the Fre­unde des Wall­raf-Richartz-Mu­se­um und des Mu­se­um Lud­wig, and the Fritz Thyssen Foun­da­tion.

Be­tween the 5th and 7th of Novem­ber 2020, a dig­i­tal in­ter­na­tio­n­al sym­po­si­um took place in con­junc­tion with the ex­hi­bi­tion. You can watch the lec­tures on­line any­time: