An important collection of underground Russian art collected by a Jewish couple who were liberated from the Nazis by the Red Army will appear at auction in London next week.
The 62 works of non-conformist art are remarkable in their own right, coming from a period when abstract or conceptual artists were vigorously suppressed by the Soviet authorities.
But the personal history of the husband and wife collectors, Jacob and Kenda Bar-Gera, adds a remarkable layer of poignancy to the story.
“It is very moving to hear their story,” said the Sotheby’s specialist Jo Vickery. “It is a chapter in history which comes alive through their collection … they were collecting artists who were outlawed and it spoke to their own experiences.”
Kenda was 13 when the Nazis occupied her home city of Lodz in Poland and forced all Jews into a ghetto before transportations to Auschwitz began. Most of her large family ended up in the camp. She was the only one not murdered.
Her survival was down to good fortune and a gritty determination, said her son, Dov Bar-Gera. “She was blond and she had green eyes. One of the officers always said she must have been kidnapped by the Jews.
“My mother was strong too. Later she was an iron lady, unbelievable. She had the will to survive and that is what kept her alive.”
Her future husband was Russian, brought up on the border of what is now Ukraine and Russia. After the German occupation Jews were executed on an massive scale, although it was Ukrainian men doing the shooting, said Dov Bar-Gera.
Jacob was lucky and was hidden by a farmer until 1944 when the Russians liberated the area and, then 18, he joined the Red Army. Shortly after the war ended, while serving in Warsaw, Jacob decided to desert in order to move to Israel.
The couple married in the early 1950s and moved to Cologne in 1963 when Jacob, a diplomat, was part of one of the first Israeli missions in Germany.
Bored, Kenda opened a gallery and was initially interested in the art of Germans who had been suppressed by the Nazis. In 1968, the couple heard about the struggles of suppressed artists in the post-Stalin Soviet Union, who managed against all odds to make works that were illegal.
Through a business contact they began smuggling in paints and materials for the artists and often received gifts as a result. By the 1970s they were active buyers, although it was high risk and canvasses were sometimes damaged because they were hidden among the belongings of diplomats and students.
The family’s Cologne home was soon heaving with Russian avant-garde art. “I’m not exaggerating. It was everywhere,” said Dov Bar-Gera. “It was a relatively modest apartment, maybe 100 sq m, and under each bed there were works. They were behind cupboards and on top of cupboards. It was full.”
He said it was a life mission of his mother, a child of oppression, to help and speak up for suppressed people and as a gallerist she always supported artists who had been persecuted by totalitarian regimes, whether in Russia, Spain or Germany.
Russia obviously held a particular place in her heart and her son recalls working in Moscow and his mother insisting he lay flowers four times a year at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. “For her the Red Army was second to God.”
The couple were buying art unseen, so often had no idea what it was like, but Vickery, Sotheby’s international director of Russian art, said the works were of remarkable quality.
“It is an incredibly rare collection and very representative of the era. They have a very wide selection of the major names and it is incredible to see it together.”
The 60 works going on sale include pieces by Ilya Kabakov, Boris Orlov, Vladimir Weisberg, Mikhail Shvartsman, and Oleg Tselkov, the recognised leader of the Russian underground in the late 1960s. Three of his works are for sale including a diptych Circus (1969) showing grotesque, pink-faced creatures pinned down by buttons, nails and curtain rings.
That comes with an estimate of £80,000 to £120,000, while other works have more modest estimates in the low thousands.
Vickery said any Russian artist of the time not working in the socialist realist style was forced underground. “The irony is that the Russians were the great pioneers in abstract art before the revolution. All that art was put underground in the basements of state museums and only brought up again during Perestroika and Glasnost.”
It was the Bar-Geras’ life ambition to get their collection exhibited publicly, an ambition nearly realised in 2003 when a museum for “persecuted art” was due to open in Ashdod, Israel. For various reasons that fell through and, after their parents’ deaths, Dov Bar-Gera said he and his sisters tried to make it happen.
There have been exhibitions in Switzerland and Slovakia but “we couldn’t find a museum which would take the collection and show it. We did not want it to disappear into the cellars of another collection.”
Reluctantly they came to the decision to sell, he said, with Sotheby’s offering about a quarter of the works at the sale in London on Tuesday. “It doesn’t make sense to keep it in a warehouse. You have to share it. At least some of the people who are going to buy will, I’m sure, lend it to exhibitions.”
Both Jacob and Kenda had an abiding love of Russia but for years were forbidden from entering the country: Jacob because of a death penalty imposed for his desertion and Kenda because she was part of an underground Jewish defence organisation in Warsaw shortly after the war.
When they did go in 1989 it was incredibly moving. “My father had not been back since 1945 and he was so afraid. He thought they had given him the visa just to get him in the country. He was at passport control and he gave his passport and the guy looked at it, stood up, shook his hand and said ‘Welcome back home,’ and my father started to cry.”
• The Bar-Gera collection can be seen at Sotheby’s London until 28 November before the sale on 29 November.
