Painter Grisha Bruskin tops a €1m Bonhams sale of Soviet art a Swiss reporter bought in Moscow

Grisha Bruskin’s Logie looks, at first, like a parade turned to plaster: nine panels of white, statue-like figures, a bugler, a man at a ship’s wheel, a girl with a tennis racket, each holding one object in Soviet red against a ground of dense handwritten script. They are the official culture’s own emblems, lifted off their pedestals and filed like entries in a dictionary. That cool, encyclopedic irony is what bidders fought over in Paris, where the painting became the top lot of a Bonhams sale that carried Soviet non-conformist art past the million-euro mark.

What set the collection apart was not only its names but its route to market. Every work came from Eric A. Peschler, a Swiss journalist and filmmaker who reported from the Soviet Union for Swiss public broadcasting and bought directly from artists working outside the official system.

Grisha Bruskin painting Logie, nine panels of white Soviet figures holding red objects over handwritten text — Grisha Bruskin, Logie (1986). Image: Bonhams

Bonhams offered 65 works from his holdings online; 90.77 percent of the lots found buyers, and the sale was 100 percent sold by value. Bruskin led from the front. Logie made €254,400, more than three times its €60,000–80,000 estimate, and a related study, Logie. Esquisse pour le Leksikon fondamental, followed at €152,800 against €30,000–40,000. Its title points to Fundamental Lexicon, the canvas that topped Sotheby’s landmark 1988 Moscow auction. A third work, Alefbet, fetched €76,600, nearly double its high estimate.

Dmitry Krasnopevtsev, whose hushed still lifes of jars, shells and broken vessels kept a deliberate distance from Socialist Realism, drew intense competition. Still Life with Tree and Jars brought €63,900 and Still Life With Broken Vase €53,740, while an early composition of glass bottles and jars from 1957 reached €43,520, more than twice its high estimate.

Eduard Steinberg’s elongated Composition (deux tableaux), a meditative abstraction that grows out of Suprematism, made €40,960, more than four times its estimate. A work on paper by Semyon Faibisovich, Nikita Sergeevich, reached €25,600, nearly four times its high estimate, and Viktor Pivovarov’s The Literary Dispute, a wry Moscow Conceptualist scene of a pastel creature and a hunched figure locked in argument, sold for the same sum.

Viktor Pivovarov painting The Literary Dispute, a pink and blue creature beside a table and a thin figure in a chair — Viktor Pivovarov, The Literary Dispute (1985). Image: Bonhams

Peschler, who lived from 1922 to 2005, first met many of these artists during the Khrushchev Thaw and spent five years living in Moscow, an experience he recounted in his book Privat in Moskau. Through the 1970s and 1980s he kept returning to their studios, buying works that had never been shown publicly. He filmed Kabakov, Steinberg and Yankilevsky for the Swiss television documentary Glasnost and the New in Tradition, and published Artists in Moscow: The New Avant-Garde and Contemporary Drawings from Moscow Studios, two early references on unofficial Moscow art.

Daria Khristova, head of Russian paintings at Bonhams and head of the sale, credited the result to demand for “museum-quality works with distinguished provenance” and described the collection as “a powerful testament to resistance, intellectual independence, and the enduring strength of creative freedom.”

The online auction, The Eric A. Peschler Collection: Non-Conformist Art of the Soviet Era, ran on Bonhams.com from 25 September to 5 October 2026, after a three-day preview in Geneva, and totalled €1,033,696. The prices confirm a market. The paintings themselves are still doing what they did in Moscow apartments four decades ago: taking the state’s own images apart in plain sight.

Tags: Bonhams, art auctions, Eric A. Peschler, Soviet non-conformist art, Dmitry Krasnopevtsev, Eduard Steinberg