Natalia Goncharova s Soldier Washing Horses (1910), valued in court documents at $6m, is among the works that a gallery s lawyer says were taken hostage Courtesy of Shchukin Gallery
In a long-running court battle, the Shchukin Gallery is seeking the return of five paintings by Kazimir Malevich and Natalia Goncharova worth $63m that the gallery says were taken by a Russian financier and have remained hidden ever since.
Back in 2013, Rustam Iseev, a Russian financier and client of the Shchukin Gallery, introduced the investor Vladislav Gershkovich to the gallery’s owners, Nikolai Shchukin and his wife, Marina, who were looking for capital to finance the purchase of five-early 20th-century paintings, three by Malevich and two by Goncharova. This introduction would result in years of bitter multi-jurisdiction legal filings, the most recent of which, initiated in April by Shchukin’s lawyer Stephen Weingrad of Weingrad & Weingrad, is seeking nearly $9
Natalia Goncharova s Soldier Washing Horses (1910), valued in court documents at $6m, is one of the missing works Courtesy of Shchukin Gallery
A tangled four-year-long legal struggle over $60m worth of Russian art that the financier Rustam Iseev allegedly stole from Shchukin Gallery which previously had galleries in New York, Paris, and Estonia has taken a new turn.
On 1 January, Shchukin and its lawyers Weingrad & Weingrad jointly filed a new lawsuit (first reported in the
New York Post) to force New York Supreme Court Justice Paul A. Goetz to hand over a “secret letter” detailing the location of five early 20th century paintings, three by Kazimir Malevich and two by Natalia Goncharova. According to an independent appraisal cited in the suit, the works are worth over $60m.