Bonhams Paris opens autumn with work the Soviet state spent decades trying to suppress

When Soviet authorities declared certain canvases formally unfit for exhibition — too abstract, too individualist, too indifferent to collective ideals — they didn’t extinguish the work. They drove it into apartments and dacha studios, where it continued under different conditions and occasionally different names. That continuity is now surfacing at auction in Paris, in the form of the Eric A. Peschler Collection: an accumulation of paintings, drawings, and sculptures by artists including Erik Bulatov, Grisha Bruskin, Eduard Steinberg, Boris Sveshnikov, and Dmitry Krasnopevtsev — figures whose work institutional Soviet culture could neither sanction nor, in the end, suppress.

The Peschler sale — running online and appearing for the first time on the open market — is the most art-historically weighted entry in what is, even by Bonhams Paris’s recent standards, an unusually wide-ranging autumn programme. The auction house, operating in the French capital under the combined Bonhams Cornette de Saint Cyr banner since its absorption of the venerable Paris firm, has assembled a calendar that spans Greek antiquities recovered from a Kérkyran private residence, Islamic and Indian art, Post-War and Contemporary canvases, Impressionist and Modern works, and three New York and Massachusetts sales anchored by the collection of Sandy Lerner.

Lerner — who co-founded Cisco Systems in the 1980s and later launched the Urban Decay cosmetics brand — spent more than three decades assembling one of the most distinctive private collections to come to market in recent memory: cat-themed art and decorative objects in every medium, from a Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita painting to Boucheron jewellery and works touched by Henri Matisse, all chronicled in her 2017 book Caticons: 4,000 Years of Art Imitating Cats. The first instalment of that sale comes to Bonhams’s New York rooms at the end of September; estate furniture and decorative arts from her Georgian Revival Virginia residence follow in Massachusetts.

Back in Paris, the calendar reaches across several registers simultaneously. A sale drawn from Chanel’s own reserves — Chanel: From the Vault, Paris — sits alongside the Zoute event in Belgium, which adds vintage and classic automobiles to what is otherwise a fine art programme. November holds the traditional register: Old Master and 19th-century paintings, then The Classics on consecutive days. December closes with Impressionist and Modern works, Post-War and Contemporary material, and a large survey of Asian art.

What the programme reveals, in aggregate, is the scope of the Bonhams Paris operation in the aftermath of the Cornette de Saint Cyr merger: a single European address that can hold Soviet unofficial art and Cisco-funded cat obsessions alongside Chanel couture and classic automobiles without apparent register collision. Whether the ambition carries through to the results is the autumn’s remaining question.

Tags: Bonhams, auction houses, Chanel, Eric A. Peschler, Sandy Lerner, Soviet non-conformist art