Today, the masterpieces of Wassily Kandinsky, the founder of abstract art, are sold at auctions for record-breaking prices, but, for the Soviet authorities, he wasn’t of such value. In 2017, his ‘Painting with White Lines’ (1913) was sold at Sotheby’s for $42 million. It turns out that the provenance of this painting is like a detective story: in 1974, the USSR exchanged it for a little-known letter written by Lenin.
The Soviet leadership literally hunted down every document connected to the name of the leader of the revolution, especially the originals of his manuscripts – even short notes and letters. If such items came into citizens of the USSR’s possession, they were obligated to turn them in. But, when it was revealed that some of the documents were kept overseas, the authorities had to resort to cunning – including buying them or exchanging them for something else.
Sotheby's
In 1974, the Soviet government learned that there was an original of Lenin’s letter to Bolshevik Grigory Aleksinsky, dated February 7, 1908. As the German magazine Spiegel wrote back then, collector Wilhelm Hack contacted Moscow, having learned that his friends owned a letter of Lenin – and he himself suggested to exchange it for a painting by Kandinsky.
The letter was already published in the Soviet press, but, it turned out (and, according to the conditions of the deal, the German side had to keep silent about it) that the letter had a previously-unknown postscript. The Jewish question was raised in it and the Soviet authorities feared that the letter could have been used by the West in anti-Soviet propaganda.
The exchange was discussed at the highest level and was positively resolved. The party instructed the Ministry of Culture to hand one of the paintings from the vaults of the Tretyakov Gallery into the possession of the KGB and exchange it for the letter’s original.
The owner of the letter preferred to stay anonymous. Later, Sotheby’s website published the painting’s provenance, which had the list of the painting’s owners, from the Tretyakov Gallery to Hack’s collection, from where the painting was put up for sale.
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