"The painting is a celebration of Russian character, " says Sarah Mansfield, head of Christie's Russian art department.
The former Mikhailovsky Palace, now the Russian Museum, houses one of the country's finest collections of Russian art.
"I think we are seeing a large amount of the top-quality Russian art going back to Russia, " said Philips, although in most cases it has been paintings.
With the mammoth Hermitage dominating the city's cultural landscape, it would be easy to overlook what St Petersburg has long lacked, a space to highlight contemporary Russian art.
He avoids jargon in his writing and is an entertaining art historian, as is shown by his popular television series on Spanish and Russian art, and by his weekly art criticism.
"The Coachman, " which has never appeared before at auction, was part of the 1924 "Russian Art Exhibition" in New York, the first high-profile showing of the country's art after the 1917 revolution.
Till then he combined Russian and French art in unique scenes of shtetl life at once realistic and magical, personal and archetypical, with floating brides, upside-down people, fiddlers on roofs and calves in cow's bellies.
According to David Jackson, professor of Russian and Scandinavian art histories at the University of Leeds, these qualities allow people with little knowledge of Expressionist art to relate to what was, when it was first shown, an avant-garde work.
High-profile Russian and Chinese collectors have been buying art at auction or from galleries and then donating it to Russian and Chinese museums.
Over the years, he sold off his businesses and reinvesting proceeds in gold, Russian and American equities, and art.
Clad in a gray chalk-striped suit and open-necked shirt, the 45-year-old metals mogul and New Jersey Nets owner camped out at the foot of the entry staircase and greeted his guests, a stylish swirl of art collectors, writers and Russian expats.
We had to study Russian for the year, and we did art in the forest.
Like the National Gallery in Washington, the Hermitage in Leningrad (now St Petersburg) and other Russian galleries also took a fancy to German art treasures located by Soviet troops in 1945.
The Art Newspaper quoted sources saying the London-based Russian billionaire was the buyer of both paintings.
Many Russians see the looted art as "compensation" for the millions of Russian lives lost during the Nazi invasion.
Russia holds over 200, 000 items of "trophy art", an issue which as dogged German-Russian relations since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The Rothko painting was one of eight works hand-selected by the Russian-American artist for his landmark solo show in 1954 at the Art Institute of Chicago.
The works are on loan from the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg and other Russian museums, as well as the National Gallery in Washington and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
And The New Elite will be more than hopping on their private jets to move from castle to castle to yacht, pushing up the prices of art and trying to emulate the Roman Emperors, the 18th century French nobility or the Russian Tsars.
Richard Nelson's intimate, bittersweet new drama, "Nikolai and the Others, " about the immortality of art, showcases a purely imaginary country weekend in the lives of a group of famous Russian emigres in America that depicts those two great talents working together, surrounded by supportive friends.
"Over the course of many years, during the most difficult historical times, the art of Van Cliburn brought together people from different countries, different continents and united them, " Russian President Vladimir Putin said in a statement that was read during the service.
Patrick De Bana's "Labyrinth of Solitude, " for a bare-chested Mr. Vasiliev, used the "Ciaconne" attributed to Tomaso Antonio Vitali to underpin a vignette for the intense, short-statured Russian that intermittently launched him into applause-winning spins and jumps meant, perhaps, to show the agony of art.
WSJ: Kings of the Dance, Opus 3 | Royalty Made Common | By Robert Greskovic
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