Nureyev Auction: A Balletomane's Bonanza

NEW YORK -- Growing up in poverty in the Soviet republic of Bashkiria, the late ballet star Rudolf Nureyev shared a one-room wooden house with his mother, three sisters and two other families. After his dramatic leap to the West in 1961, he made up for that early deprivation with a vengeance -- owning seven homes and filling them with art and antiques.


Some of those art treasures, along with a trove of ballet costumes, dance slippers and other memorabilia that should speak volumes to balletomanes, will go on sale Thursday evening and Friday at Christie's auction house in Manhattan.


Estimated to realize as much as $4.8 million, the sale was assembled largely from the dancer's apartment in the Dakota, the landmark building in Manhattan, while costumes and slippers have come from several of his European residences. A similar auction of the contents of his Paris apartment was initially planned for Christie's London salesrooms, but has been held up by a lawsuit filed by a sister and niece of the dancer, challenging his will.


Proceeds of the New York auction will benefit two dance foundations established by Nureyev, who died of AIDS in Paris in 1993.


"The decision was made to go ahead with this part of the sale because the money is needed so the foundation can honor its obligations," said David Llewellyn, a director of Christie's London who is in charge of coordinating the sale.


If the auction represents only a segment of his collection, it is still providing an eyeful to visitors at Christie's presale exhibition.


"He must have had very high ceilings," murmured one awestruck browser on a recent visit. How else could he have displayed the enormous Old Master paintings, the huge Elizabethan carved-oak-and-marquetry tester bed, the 18th-century double harpsichord and the German Rococo oak desk that stands nearly 11 feet high? What less-than-palatial residence could accommodate the 12-foot-long Jacobean oak dining table, the 55-light Rococo-style Venetian glass chandelier that hung above it, and the dozens of kilim rugs and textiles that were draped over furniture or rolled up and stored under it?


Even a first century A.D. Roman marble torso -- estimated to sell for $300,000 to $500,000 -- was given plenty of breathing space in Nureyev's living room, where it had star billing over the many paintings that emphasized the beauty of the male figure.


It's not, of course, the mere size of the artworks that impresses visitors but their unabashed theatricality. "There is a magic to these things -- he was very flamboyant," said Elizabeth Ross Johnson, a collector and ballet buff who is on the board of the Dance Theater of Harlem.


"Seeing them all together, you get the feeling of how alive he was, how romantic he was, what a connoisseur he was," she said.


For those without the means to buy, say, Johann Heinrich Fuseli's 1780 painting of "Satan Starting from the Touch of Ithuriel's Lance" (estimated at $500,000 to $700,000), the selection of ballet memorabilia offers more moderate and undoubtedly more poignant remembrances of the ballet great. Nureyev's well-worn ballet slippers, for example, are valued as low as $40 to $60 a pair -- for now.


"His slippers were never, ever given away in his lifetime," said Llewellyn, who thinks they're likely to go for more than the estimates. Those $40 slippers, by the way, a.k.a. Lot 87, come with a bonus: The soles are stamped Size 7EEE and inscribed with Nureyev's name.