There is a popular notion that the value of an artist’s work rises after his or her death, but how true is this? Demystifying this belief shows that there are many other factors which influence market price, and we must not underestimate the powerful role that art professionals and institutions as well as private collectors play in safeguarding individual artistic legacies now and in the future.

Spoiler alert for anyone who thinks that the value of art goes up once an artist has passed away: all academic studies on this subject resoundingly tell us that this does not happen. There are many other key factors which influence the value of an artist on the market, which exist irrespective of whether the artist is alive or not. Ars longa vita brevis: we often think about the past or the future when reflecting on this true statement, but it can remind us also that art which belongs to our present time – contemporary art - is always necessarily part of something much more enduring. To whom does a work of art or even an artistic legacy which is formed over years and decades ever belong? When it comes to monetary value, what matters most is how an artist’s work is perceived by the public or art collectors, and this, it transpires, is much more dependent than one might realise on the quality and zeal of the infrastructure around it. There are the art professionals who show it and write about it, or curate public exhibitions major institutions, both at home and abroad if an artist is to eventually be sold on the global market and make its way into international collections. A study published on Artsy in 2018 called ‘The Death Effect on Artist’s Prices Actually Occurs When They’re Alive’ showed that artist prices typically even drop in the year after their passing, before rebounding later. The drop in prices can perhaps be explained by market saturation where the misguided belief that there might be more interest in the artist’s work when he or she is no longer producing new works, motivates dealers and gallerists to suddenly offer more works for sale on the market which can push prices down, or results in works not selling. Thankfully it is a short-lived phenomenon. Incidentally, the same study suggested that towards the age of seventy, for artists already well-established, their prices tend to start going up.

Mostly – and this has little to do with the popular myth of an artist’s value rising after their death – it is wider changes to the art market and its context that can lead to a recalibration of pricing, which is what happened during the renaissance in private art collecting after the breakup of the Soviet Union, where in the decades that followed, a market for Russian art was established within Russia which in turn changed the tastes and scope of the international Russian art sales in London and New York where previously you could not buy post-revolutionary Russian art. Some artists lived to see their art skyrocket in value and others never lived to see this happen. Those Russian Soviet artists who were born in the 1920s and were by then in their seventies in the wake of perestroika. Dmitry Krasnopevtsev passed away in 1995 and it was a whole decade later that his ‘Still Life with Three Jugs’, one of the largest paintings ever made by an artist who always preferred working on a small scale, fetched Euros 747,366 at auction in London - a painting I vividly recall selling on behalf of its shocked and lucky seller, a foreign diplomat who had been living in Russia in the 1990s and had bought it from Krasnopevtsev. Vladimir Weisberg (1924–1985) died in 1985, yet the earliest auction record of his work selling in the west dates to 1989, and although many Western diplomats and entrepreneurs who visited the Soviet Union admired and bought his work, Weisberg never lived to witness the real, broad interest that has grown over the past few decades for his beautiful paintings, and the enviably solid auction market for this ‘Russian Morandi’.

Aside from seismic shifts in the art market – or in the case of post-soviet Russia the creation of a domestic art market from zero – which render the lives of us individuals as tiny specs in a wider universe over which we have little control, on the level of human behaviour, art collecting is of course a collective if competitive pursuit, and in any community, whether global or local, we are attuned to the values of our fellow human beings and here is a game of visibility and presence. This is where individual and institutional support of an artist can make or break their legacy, whether dead or alive.

It goes without saying that an artistic legacy is typically formed slowly over many years and for those talented artists who are in the autumn of their lives, despite having produced an expansive body of work over time, it needs to be well nurtured in the art ecosystem. Artists need museum retrospectives, solo institutional shows, scholarly publications and even appealing, professionally written and beautifully illustrated coffee table books, all of which contribute to how we value and view an individual artistic legacy. Such initiatives need consistency and repetition, because once an artist falls into obscurity, their value also drops, which is something that can happen both during an artist’s career or at any time after. It is not just the job of institutions, curators or critics. When major private collectors take an interest in a particular artist, that can also play a role in reappraisal of prices even if an artist has been forgotten, as has been the case with Ernst Neizvestny (1925–2016) and Boris Sveshnikov (1927–1998) whose names were barely mentioned in art circles for decades and whose work has become coveted because of a few private collectors passionate about their work. The risk is that private collectors create only a short-term bounce in prices, but if they do create publicly minded private foundations where the art goes on display it can have a very positive effect on the value of an artist’s legacy.

Unfortunately, what goes up can also go down and if there is no long-term consistency in institutional support, an artist’s legacy can fall into the doldrums for years if not decades which is what seems to be happening with Vladimir Nemukhin (1925–2016). The last peak of his market came in 2016 where one of his ‘Joker’ paintings sold for an impressive 80,000 Euros. The Joker was part of the legendary Bar-Gera collection which I sold at Sotheby’s, and it also coincided with two recent institutional solo exhibitions, in MMoMA in 2015 and at the Kunsthalle Jesuitenkirche in Aschaffenberg in 2016. However, since then, his prices have been stagnating, there have not been any more major publications or shows, and worryingly in this his centenary year which marks one hundred years since his birth, there are no major institutional retrospectives – disastrous for an artist who perfectly embodied the spirit of the underground and succeeded in creating his own language and formal aesthetics.

Conversely, the artistic legacy of Oleg Tselkov (1934–2021) has been well represented over the past two decades. In addition to dedicated commercial exhibitions at galleries in New York and London, there have been four notable solo retrospectives in Russia: the Russian Museum (2004), the Ekaterina Foundation (2014), MAMM (2021) and MMoMA (2022). The activities of private art patron Igor Tsukanov who has long championed Tselkov’s work and continues to do so, and the efforts of the artist’s family a triumvirate of three strong women equally passionate about his work and legacy, give a constant boost Tselkov visibility and value. Bucking all trends in death as in life, not long after he passed away in 2021 Tselkov’s painting ‘Boy with Balloons’ fetched a world auction record at Sotheby’s in London of Euros 671,544, more than double the next record, which had also been set the same day at MacDougalls auction house, a double act of posthumous market bravado.

Leonid Sokov (1941–2018) had a suite of major institutional retrospectives throughout the 2010s both in the USA and Russia: at MMoMA, the Zimmerli in New Jersey and the State Tretyakov Gallery, coinciding also with the publication in 2013 of an extensive scholarly catalogue of his work. His market value has continued to rise and seven of the top ten results at auction have been established since he passed away in 2018.

Although debunking the myth of artists’ work being worth more posthumously than during his or her lifetime, when it comes to younger artists who pass away unexpectedly, studies have shown that there can be a considerable uplift in the value of their art. Russian conceptual artist Valery Chtak (1981–2024) tragically passed away last year at the age of forty-two. Since his death, the dealers and gallerists who worked with him including Vladimir Ovcharenko and Elvira Tarnogradskaya, among others, have sensibly not rushed to offer his works for sale on the auction market. Tarnogradskaya, with the help of Irina Gorlova an experienced museum curator, former director of New Trends at the State Tretyakov Gallery, is instead preparing an extensive catalogue of his work to be published soon and is carefully considering possible future exhibition projects. Anna Zholud (1981–2025), born in the same year as Chtak, sadly passed away earlier this year, an exceptionally talented artist who suffered deeply from mental health problems, leading her to spend decades in a kind of self-imposed wilderness. Her career peaked early while she was in her twenties, and she had little public recognition since she was awarded the Innovation Prize in 2012. Now, Moscow gallerists Lena Parshina and Nadya Avanesova are working hard to safeguard her legacy for future generations.