A magical summer night at Moscow’s Garage Museum, where the champagne flows in rivers and the caviar is stacked in piles big enough to be visible from space. Dasha Zhukova and her husband Roman Abramovich have pulled out all the stops to inaugurate their new gallery and invited the biggest names in art, fashion and Hollywood.

There’s Karlie Kloss, George Lucas, Stella McCartney, Arianna Huffington, Miuccia Prada, Wendi Deng and, this being 2015, also Harvey Weinstein. Tiravanija, the Thai concept artist, gives a performance and the Kuban Cossack Chorus yodel out their hits. The sexy tunes of Michel Gobert, who does Dior’s runway music, float out from the rooftop long past midnight.

The gossip columnists are having the time of their lives: the place is packed with stars who, after several Beluga vodka cocktails, are happy to be papped and pay tribute to their hosts, Zhukova and Abramovich. “You know how people make guest lists for their fantasy dinner parties?” the artist Jeffrey Deitch coos to an interviewer. “Dasha not only did that, but everybody actually came.”

The Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow


It was only a few years ago, but how anachronistic this event now sounds. It would be hard to imagine those same celebrities appearing at an oligarch’s gallery opening today. Most of them are desperately scrubbing their Instagram feeds and Wikipedia pages of any hint of proximity to Russia, let alone its more light-fingered sons. The Victoria & Albert museum used to preen about the advisory work it gave to Garage on “branding and positioning”, although this has now been deleted from its website. Looking back, that glitzy night at Garage feels like the high water mark of oligarchian patronage to the art world — a weird, receding era of our modern cultural history when galleries and museums were happy to take dark Russian money hand over fist. As the invasion of Ukraine has forced the art industry to cut ties with its Muscovite backers, curators and dealers are starting to queasily wonder: how did we ever get in so deep?

The art world, until very recently, shamelessly courted Kremlin-backed billionaires. That Garage opening saw the eager attendance of Hans Ulrich Obrist, the Serpentine’s artistic director, dealers like Larry Gagosian and Sadie Coles, and the megastar artist Jeff Koons, whose giant balloon tat has besmirched many a public space.

At the same time, the boards of prestigious institutions were all too happy to accept Russian money and reward donors with senior positions. Pyotr Aven, a member of Vladimir Putin’s inner circle, became a trustee of the Royal Academy. Leonid Mikhelson, the energy giant, funded the Art Institute of Chicago. Viktor Vekselberg, the aluminium magnate, was an honorary member of the Tate Foundation, donated to the MoMA and gave more than $5 million to the John F. Kennedy Centre. Carnegie Hall, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and the Lincoln Centre have all gladly taken money from wealthy Russians and their companies.

Roman Abramovich bought Lucian Freud’s Benefits Supervisor Sleeping for £17m in 2008


Some of these appointments date back decades, but a number of institutions were happy to do business with Russian tycoons long after Putin started to aggress his neighbours. Leonid Mikhelson, for instance, was a trustee at the New Museum in Manhattan for several years following Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014, even after his company was sanctioned.

(To be clear, it’s not a problem that Russian money finances art, just oligarch money. Being an oligarch under Putin means explicitly supporting him, feeding resources and favours to the regime. It’s also worth adding that three years after the Garage opening, Dasha Zhukova has divorced Abramovich and spoken out against the invasion of Ukraine.)

Still, the involvement of oligarchs in the art world speaks volumes about its moral compass. This is a sunny industry for shady people, as Somerset Maugham might have said. Art might have noble values and beautiful aesthetics, but the art market is filled is filled with chancers, grifters, reprobates and villains all salivating at the thought of getting a slice of gallery and auction house sales. Last year, these amounted to $65 billion.

So how does a Russian tycoon — whose expertise is likely in muscling out competition in the treacherous post-Soviet economy — decide, all of a sudden, that contemporary art on the Upper East Side of Manhattan is their next calling?

"This is a sunny industry for shady people, as Somerset Maugham might have said..."

Let’s say you’re an oligarch. You’ve got billions of dollars in the bank –– never mind how! –– and you’re looking to make a few more. You’re not a huge fan of regulations, formalities and dealing with compliance departments. You also don’t like the way the Western press teases you for knowing how to fit a business rival for a pair of concrete boots, so ideally you’d like to improve your reputation as well. You could not do any better than the art world.

“It’s the last unregulated market,” says Marine Tanguy, founder of MTArt, a talent agency for artists. “You can do insider trading that would be deemed criminal in any other sector.” The art market is extremely opaque, which is great news for crooks who go where the money is and the law isn’t. Unlike housing, for instance, there’s no system of public registration that keeps track of what every piece of art has sold for (a widely-used database called artnet only goes back to 1985). Buyers can remain anonymous or hide their tracks using a series of middle men, which allows some investors to protect themselves from thieves and others to hide from public scrutiny.

Francis Bacon&#8217;s &#8216;Triptych 1976&#8217;, now owned by Roman Abramovich


Sales can also be extremely convoluted, making it hard to track who actually owns a piece of art. “Art sales are a series of back-to-back transactions between several dealers, often in multiple jurisdictions,” says Judith Williams, a New York art lawyer. “There’s an owner who has an agent who has a dealer who has a customer. The money can change hands in six separate transactions over the course of a week. Everyone is protecting their contact list and they may not even know who the end user is.”

, the painting that may or may not have been painted by Leonardo da Vinci, which was purchased by Prince Badr bin Abdullah of Saudi Arabia — apparently on behalf of Abu Dhabi’s Department of Culture. It is now rumoured to be on Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s private yacht. Either that, or a storage facility in Switzerland. It was the most expensive painting ever sold at auction — $450 million — and nobody knows where it is.

This is all music to the ears of anyone keen to dodge impending financial sanctions. “Art is a very easy way to hide wealth,” says Leila Amineddoleh, also an art lawyer. “It’s not monitored as thoroughly as other types of asset. Funds in a bank account, stocks or real estate are easy to trace. But art is easy to hide. It’s easy to slip into a suitcase and spirit past customs.”

"Art is easy to hide. It’s easy to slip into a suitcase and spirit past customs..."

The most notorious case of an oligarch who took advantage of the art market’s laxness — at least, that we know of — is undoubtedly Arkady Rotenberg, a childhood friend and judo partner of Putin. Arkady and his brother Boris were sanctioned in the wake of the Crimea invasion, but continued secretly trading in the US art market. They were able to buy $18 million worth of art through proxies like Arkady’s son Igor and their art advisor, an American man named Gregory Baltser, who set up shell companies in Belize to spirit expensive artworks out of auction houses, who have laissez-faire attitudes to due diligence.

The Rotenberg’s shady dealings were laid bare in a US Senate report two years ago, but has it had much of an impact? Trade publications noted a spike in art sales to Russians just before the invasion of Ukraine. The rush was especially noted in Switzerland, which accepts cash payments of up to £80,000, unlike in the European Union where payments in excess of €1,000 are banned. Switzerland is doubly convenient in oligarchian eyes because of the Geneva free port, dubbed “the world’s most secretive art warehouse”. A freeport has very little or no taxes at all, and is a great place to squirrel away precious art while you’re facing sanctions.

The Geneva Freeport, where priceless works of art are hidden away from the eyes of the public — and the authorities


Geneva’s freeport is about half the size of the British Museum and is estimated to contain around $100 billion worth of art and antiquities, among them works by da Vinci, Klimt, Renoir, Warhol, Van Gogh and reportedly one thousand pieces by Picasso. In all their most imaginative daydreams about how their work might be appreciated long after their deaths, I bet none of those artists imagined that 500 years later it would be shut in some tax-dodging billionaire’s windowless box, in between a haul of looted Egyptian artefacts and a stash of Nazi gold.

“I sometimes wonder if the whole art market isn’t a fantastic unregulated money-laundering scheme,” Grayson Perry once said, and you can start to see why. The money in art, and the ease with which it can be made, must make the cut-throat world of post-Soviet commodities look too much like hard work. In 1992, Abramovich was arrested on suspicion of robbing a train carrying 55 trucks of diesel, although the case against him was helpfully dropped. How much simpler it must have been instead to invest in Francis Bacon’s artwork (he bought 

 for $86 million — back in 2008, it was the most expensive contemporary piece ever sold at auction). Abramovich was put under sanction by the UK after the invasion of Ukraine. Keeping that painting from falling into the hands of the authorities will be much more straightforward than protecting his many London properties.

"I wonder if the art market isn’t an unregulated money-laundering scheme...”

The Russian government said in 2016 that it wanted to push soft power as part of its foreign policy objectives, hoping for the West to think about “Pushkin, Tolstoy, Tchaikovsky” instead of a “regime that goes to war with its near neighbours”, as one Kremlin-watcher put it. It seems that oligarchs close to Putin were only too happy to oblige. Again, this isn’t to say that any artistic project using Russian money was nefarious. But if it involved an oligarch whose closeness to the president was well-known, there can be little doubt that somebody’s kneecaps paid for a new museum wing. Oligarchs under sanction have been accused of using their industrial power to support the Russian war effort in Ukraine. Abramovich, for instance, is alleged to use the steel company that he partly owns to build Russian tanks.

By patronising the arts, an oligarch could tart up their social standing, and secure access to the rich and powerful. It could also do wonders for their reputation, or as Marine Tanguy puts it: “You could buy yourself a new name.” Here’s a classic example. Not so long ago, Vladimir Potanin’s reputation was mud. A billionaire businessman, Potanin was the architect of a 1990s scheme called “loans for shares” that allowed the cash-strapped Russian state to sell off its most lucrative assets far below market value. Historians now consider this a crucial moment in the creation of the oligarchy. One calls it “an act of colossal criminality” that has “defined the Russian economy and Russian business to the world”.

Self Portrait by Pyotr Konchalovsky, a 1912 painting recently seized in Paris, which belongs to oligarch Petr Aven


Potanin, no doubt hoping for his name to elicit a more salubrious reaction than that, started to pump money into the Guggenheim museum in New York. He became a major benefactor and in 2002, a trustee. Bootlicking praise followed after every donation. In 2019, after funding a fellowship at the museum, the Guggenheim’s director Richard Armstrong issued an obsequious statement praising Potanin’s “generous support and foresight”, thanking him for his friendship and “prescience in recognising the critical need for this work”. This was five years after Russia annexed Crimea and started a war in Donbas and one year after Potanin was named on a US Treasury list of oligarchs uncomfortably close to Putin. Prescient, indeed.

Potanin’s ties to the Guggenheim haven’t always been so smooth. In 2005, he invited Putin to visit the museum to celebrate a Russia-themed exhibition. According to those present, Putin was taken on a tour and shown a glass replica of an AK-47 rifle filled with vodka. Putin apparently nodded to one of his bodyguards, who swiped the piece and carried it out of the room. The museum hosts were left speechless.

"There is a cancerous rot at the heart of London..."

Having your name on the door of a gallery used to be a great way of laundering your reputation. Now ethically-minded observers in the art world hope that artwashing, as it is known, will begin to fall out of favour. “Sackler was a turning point,” says Tanguy, referring to the American billionaire dynasty behind Oxycontin, the prescription opiate that is estimated to have killed 200,000 people over two decades.

To improve their reputation as one of the most hated families in America, the Sackler clan poured their dirty millions into art. Only when public pressure became untenable did the MoMa, the Tate and the National Portrait Gallery promise not to accept further donations from them. The Sackler name is starting to come off gallery wings and university libraries. But it still stands at the Guggenheim, the National Gallery and the Victoria & Albert Museum, whose director Tristram Hunt said he was “proud” to receive Sackler money. “There is a cancerous rot at the heart of London,” an anonymous museum director recently told a British newspaper. “Arts organisations often turned a blind eye. Now we are really worried.” But cash from other dodgy regimes is still flooding into the art world. Just how scrupulous are these galleries?

Before the Sackler fiasco, institutions who took oligarch money didn’t even come in for that much criticism. In 2016, Washington DC’s Kennedy Centre accepted money from VTB, a Russian state bank under sanctions, to feature a performance by the Bolshoi Ballet. The VTB logo illuminated the stage and decorated the uniform of the waiters, and the bank’s president Andrey Kostin delivered a speech. State Department officials – including ones responsible for sanctions policy – were invited to the event. They kicked up a fuss about “terrible optics”, but it went ahead all the same. The Kennedy Centre even accepted a VTB donation the following year.

Russian President Vladimir Putin with Mikhail Piotrovsky


Now that’s all changed. In the New York art world, collectors have been bitchily briefing the press against each other, presumably in the hope of avoiding an oligarch-related smear themselves. Larry Gagosian, one of the Garage caviar munchers, has been dubbed “the official art dealer to the Russian oligarchy,” and an anonymous source quoted in the New York Post added that “the Bond villains he consorts with are dangerous, repulsive and devalue art by their very presence”.

Gagosian has had a close friendship with Mikhail Piotrovsky, the director of St Petersburg’s State Hermitage Museum, whose relationship with Putin is so tight that he boasted about helping to write amendments to the Russian constitution. “It’s not that I’m Putin’s person since the early ’90s,” Piotrovsky said in an interview last year. “Putin has been my person from the early ’90s.”

Jackson Pollock once said that the purpose of art is to come face to face with yourself. The well-fed bosses of every gallery that has ever taken money from an oligarch should try going to one of their own exhibitions.

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