Shapiro offers Russian art with iron-clad provenance at April 16 sale

Gene Shapiro Auctions LLC will conduct their Spring Auction of Russian Art on Saturday, April 16, during Russian Art Week. Both the auction and a week of preview exhibition starting on April 9 will take place at the company's location at 506 E. 74th St. on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

LiveAuctioneers will provide Internet live bidding. The auction will begin at 10 a.m. Eastern.

Company founder Gene Shapiro, is upbeat about both the quality and quantity of works that his eponymous firm will be offering, "With rising commodity prices and prominent buying by Russian buyers in the news, many private American collectors decided that now was the time to sell works that have been in their collections for years. As a result, we were able to obtain a lot of great consignments for this auction."

Indeed, on offer at Gene Shapiro will be more than 400 lots of paintings, bronzes, icons, enamel, silver, porcelain, rare books and maps, swords and militaria, posters, and works on paper, most of which are fresh to the market.

"We wanted to have something for everybody in this auction – from collectors of antique icons, to rare books, to buyers of Imperial Russian porcelain," said Shapiro. "We were helped greatly in this regard by several significant consignments from American families whose grandparents were buying and importing artworks from Russia in the 1930s."

One of these collections came from the family of Dr. Adolphus Rumreich, who served as the physician at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow from 1935-1938. While there, he and his wife, Edna Irene Hall Rumreich, assembled a sizeable collection of Russian pre-revolutionary art and books then being sold by the Soviet government. They often accompanied American Ambassador to the Soviet Union Joseph Davies and his wife, Marjorie Merriweather Post, prominent American collectors of Russian artworks of the 20th century, when they visited Torgsin and other Soviet agencies that sold antiques to foreign dignitaries.

Another American collection including important sets of Imperial porcelain and early 19th- and 18th-century icons was consigned by a family whose grandfather was a diplomat in the Italian Embassy to the Soviet Union during the 1930s, and who was actively acquiring Russian works of art during his time in Moscow.