Last Sunday, Feb. 18, an allegedly stolen painting by Ivan Aivazovsky, dubbed "Moonlit Night," fetched around $1 million in a controversial sale held by the Moscow Auction House in Russia.
The piece is believed to have been looted from the Mariupol Museum of Local Lore, a regional Ukrainian museum of history. However, the auction house denied these claims, saying that it was an entirely different piece.
Contentions Behind the Aivazovsky Painting's Sale
News about the auction first broke out last week, after Ukraine's former Deputy Prosecutor General, Gyunduz Mamedov, shared a statement about it on X (formerly Twitter).
"Russia plans to auction Aivazovsky's painting 'Moonlight Night,'" he wrote in the post. "This painting was among 52 canvases that were illegally transferred to the Simferopol Art Museum in Crimea."
Mamedov's statement was also quoted by the Ukrainian publications Kyiv Independent and Pravda, further exacerbating the controversy's spread. Tass, a Russian news agency, also confirmed that the auction did go through, as the painting sold for $995,000 against the pre-sale estimate of about $1 million.
According to Mamedov, the piece was among a group of works that was moved to the Simferopol Arts Museum in Crimea back in 2014 due to violating international law.
He added that the pieces were then placed by Interpol on an international wanted list in 2017, which should have prevented the Russian auction house from facilitating the 'Moonlit Night' painting's sale as per UNESCO's 1970 convention, which prohibits as much.
This is not the first time Russia has come under fire for partaking in "deliberate attacks" against Ukraine's cultural identity, as one museum in Kyiv was caught in the havoc of the Ukraine-Russia conflict and was reportedly looted as well.
History of the 'Stolen' Aivazovsky Piece
As per Pravda's report, the Simferopol Art Museum and the Mariupol Museum of Local Lore's 2014 agreement involved the loaning of 52 paintings that are part of the Ukrainian Museum Fund.
Under this loan, the Mariupol Museum was originally planned to receive the artworks from Crimea, to fill up the spots in the Ukrainian museum's would-be exhibition.
However, in March of that year, the Simferopol Museum requested the early return of the pieces, after Russia's occupation of Crimea around the same time. The Kuindzhi Art Museum, a separate collecting institution in Mariupol, later gave back the artworks to the Crimean museum.
In mid-2017, Radio Liberty first reported about the heft, where a collective of retired Crimean servicemen had looted the art pieces from the Mariupol Museum before transporting all of them to Crimea.
It was the Ukrainian prosecutor's office in the occupied country that first announced the 50-some paintings' status in Interpol's record of looted art pieces. As per Pravda, the officials that were involved in the incident were consequently given prison sentences, however, they shortly received amnesty afterward.
Moscow Auction House has since refuted any claims that say the Aivazovsky piece was stolen, Tass reports, as the Russian Romantic painter had made plenty of similar pieces and that the "Moonlight Night" painting it sold was a separate painting.
Despite having the same title, the auction house purports that the one it auctioned off was dated 1878 and was obtained at a 2008 sale by Stockholm's Auktionsverk in Sweden. In contrast, the painting that was included in Interpol's list was dated 1882 and is still held in the Simferopol Museum until today.
"There is no evidence supporting the strange claims made by this side," said Sergey Podstanitsky, Moscow Auction House's co-founder.
