Painting Ukrainians say stolen from one of their museums sold at auction in Moscow

A decidedly controversial auction in Moscow: two days ago, on Feb. 18, the Moskovsky - Moscow Auction House in fact sold an Ivan Aivazovsky (Feodosia, 1817 - 1900) work, which some believe was stolen from the Mariupol Museum of Local History . The painting, Night of a Full Moon, is an oil on canvas from 1878 and was sold for 92 million rubles (about 920,000 euros) against an initial estimate of 100 million (about 1 million euros). Raising the case in recent days was, from his Twitter profile, jurist Gyunduz Mamedov, Ukraine’s deputy prosecutor general between 2019 and 2021: according to Mamedov, the painting is part of a group of 52 works that the Russians, after the occupation of Crimea, allegedly illegally transferred to the Simferopol Museum of Art, violating international laws. Mamedov also reports that as early as 2017, Interpol declared that the paintings were wanted internationally.

According toUkrainska Pravda reports, the illegal export of the painting dates back to 2014: on February 18 of that year, the Mariupol Museum of Local History and the Simferopol Museum of Art signed an agreement for an exhibition titled Russian and Ukrainian Art from the 18th to the beginning of the 20th century, which included the arrival of 52 paintings from Crimea to Mariupol. These included Aivazovsky’s Night of the Full Moon . The exhibition in Mariupol was to last until May 31 but was closed early, as the directorate of the museum in Sinferopol demanded that the paintings be returned to Crimea, which in the meantime, in March, was occupied by the Russians (the declaration of annexation dates back to the 18th, which, however, the UN recognizes as Ukrainian territory). The then director of the Mariupol museum, Olha Chaplynska, unilaterally terminated the agreement on March 19, and on March 20 the head of the repositories of the Kuindzhi Art Museum in Mariupol, Natalia Kuronysheva, handed over the 52 paintings to an employee of the Museum in Sinferopoli. The works would later be transferred to occupied Crimea as a result of an action by a group of military personnel on leave who, in 2017, would take charge of the operations. Thus, on August 17, 2017, the Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s Office announced that the 50 or so paintings had been added to the database of stolen works of art through Interpol. The museum officials who were involved in handing over the works, according to Pravda, were convicted (although they later received amnesty).

TASS also reported on the sale of the work, but let it be known that the co-founder of the Moskovsky auction house, art historian Sergey Podstanitsky, believes there is no evidence to support the “strange claims made by the Ukrainian side”: according to the Russians, in fact, the painting sold in Moscow is not the one from Sinferopolis. “Aivazovsky,” blogger Sofia Bagdasarova told TASS, "produced a huge number of paintings, including dozens entitled Night of the Full Moon. When Ukraine lost Crimea, it automatically reported the theft of all objects from Crimean museums, announced their search and filed them in the Interpol database. There is also a painting entitled Full Moon Night from the Museum of Sinferopolis." And according to the Russians, the work sold at auction would not be the one of Sinferopolis (which they said dates back to 1882), but a similar view, depicting the city of Constantinople, which went to auction in 2008 at the Swedish house Stockholms Auktionsverk.

Ivan Aivazovsky was one of the leading Russian area artists of the 18th century, also found in several European museums: he is best known for his nocturnal landscapes such as the one in dispute.

Painting Ukrainians say stolen from one of their museums sold at auction in Moscow

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