The chair of the Ukrainian antique market leader may soon become empty. Once a gallery owner and collector Leonid Komskyi was on the verge of ruin: all his property was pledged under a mortgage agreement with a large Russian bank whom he now owns two million dollars.
“Collecting is a passion. When novice collectors come to me, I warn them fair and square: be careful, this is afatal disease”, these are the words of Leonid Komskyi, a well-known Ukrainian gallery owner, a publisher and a collector. This could be the start of an ode to a person who has been professionally engaged in art for 25 years. Could be, but apparently will not.
Thus, the media reported of another life, carefully concealed by the “Ducat” auction house owner and an Antiquary magazine publisher, the editorial board of which once included Viktor Yanukovych.
Do you know that the Ukrainian antique market is completely “black”? It is so much “black” that it borders on the plundering of Ukrainian cultural values. There are news in the media every once in a while that art objects have disappeared from one or another museum.
Last January, 95 early-printed books and hundreds of other printed items (vintage posters, magazines) disappeared from the Lviv Art Gallery. In 2016, the first early-printed book in Ukraine worthy of $ 150,000 was stolen from Vernadskyi Scientific Library. Thefts and mysterious disappearances in Ukraine happen not for nothing – this is the art mafia’s systematic work. And this is not about cinema gangsters who make their smooth theft swith the help of special devices under the screen of night.
Ukrainian art mafia are people in jackets, enjoying total corruption in museums. There is no need to arrange a demonstrative robbery, if you can agree with the museum management and just take away a particular object of art.
“The only thing the state should do is not interfere,” the most famous Ukrainian antiquarian Leonid Komskyi once said in an interview. It turns out that the heads of museums benefit from the lack of a governmental program for the museum field development. It’s really easier to appropriate pieces of art this way.
The collector Leonid Komskyi
Let’s say, we hardly know how valuable the paintings in the vaults of the National Art Museum are. We do not know what is stored and whether it is stored there at all. That is because the less we know about the true value of Ukrainian cultural heritage, the calmer gangsters feel.
It is difficult to steal “Mona Lisa” from the Louvre or the work of Velázquez from the Prado. But it is so easy to steal the paintings of an supposedly unknown social realism artist from the vaults of the dilapidated Ukrainian museum. Here his canvases are known only to market specialists, to experts in culture and the arts. And wealthy collectors abroadare ready to give hundreds of thousands of dollars for them.
All the more so as the Ukrainian legislation is arranged in such a way that the antique market is as non-transparent as possible, and it is good earning money in troubled waters without attracting the attention of law enforcement agencies. Among other things, when a stolen painting, sculpture or any other object of art is on sale, the buyer does not ask about its origin. That is, he does not care where this object of art came from. The buyer is satisfied with it being genuine. As for the antiquarians, according to their unwritten code, are always silent as for where they look for objects and how they got possession of this or that thing. Not to mention that if a particular painting or book has with a criminal tinge.
So why not expropriate a painting from the Ukrainian museum and sell it to an anonymous collector abroad? That’s probably what the former Culture Minister Dmytro Tabachnyk thought, and, most importantly, what he did, dragging a long tail of art objects missing from the Ukrainian museums, being, among other things, the president of the Guild of Antiquaries of Ukraine. What an excellent screen for turning the love of art into a passion for enrichment.
But it was not all as easy as it sounds, even for Tabachnyk of the late Yanukovych era. In order to systematically trade the stolen objects of art, one needs his own gallery owner and seller. A large one, known for the market and media. With his help, stolen goods can be put up for auction and make good money. A close friend and, concurrently, a well-known art dealer in Ukraine, Leonid Komskyi, was apparently chosen for the role of such an intermediary.
Komskyi conducted his first sales of art and antiques by auction in 2009, then he has published Antiquary magazine for about ten years, regularly telling the press on Ukrainian art and culture, held various exhibitions, owned antiquarian shops and art galleries. No wonder that in the days of Tabachnyk his personal paintings and books dealer strengthened his credibility and even entered the TOP 25 of the most influential figures of the Ukrainian art market according to Focus magazine.
Pre-auction exhibition of “Ducat” auction house
“Everything starts with the assembler somewhere in the village, standing in the local market with the announcement ‘I buy coins, dishes and old things’. He sells something from what he has found to a larger dealer, and the latter goes to a city, where he finds his buyers,” this is how Komskyi described his everyday work in one of his many interviews.
Komskyi has a particular passion for Ukrainian socialist realism, making it his speciality. Komskyi admitted that the masters of this genre, Mykola Hlushchenko and Serhii Shyshko, whose works are sold at Kyiv auctions for hundreds of thousands dollars, still lead in his sales.
After the Revolution of Dignity, when Tabachnyk himself became a rarity, but this time a political one, thing with his protégé went to a more quiet rustle of banknotes.
“There used to be many officials among the buyers. They usually bought the items for gifts. Now the gift segment has actually disappeared,” Komskyi repents.
Things were worst for socialist realism, which is easily explained. In contrast, Leonid tried to ride the patriotic wave, flirting with the general public about the increased interest in Ukrainian art in the country as an important indicator of national maturity. This echoes the words pronounced back in 1775 (that’s a really valuable copy): “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.”
It seems that having not formed bridges with the new government, Komskyi had to get into debt. And it seems to be heavy. Otherwise it’s not possible to explain the fact thatin May 2015, the Department of the State Register of the Main Territorial Department of Justice in Kyiv arrested the non-residential premises with a total area of over 200 square meters on Oles Honchar street, which half-belong to Komskyi. And together with this decision all Komskyi real estate property was arrested, wherethere is, among other things, a $ 2 million mortgage loan taken outfrom a Russian bank to buy an apartment at Volodymyrska street, which is a business address of Antiquary magazine.
Besides the fact that he is doing business on the Ukrainian artistic heritage sale, Komskyi leads the life of a real rentier (he leases spaces) and is listed as “Olivin+ LLC”, beneficiary, which is engaged in the production of jewellery.
As we can see, the result of this whole story is sad: the image of a progressive gallery owner and connoisseur of high art is rapidly drying up without a patron imbued with the power, and instead there is a debtor with the distrained property.
