Putin?s painting draws 37 mln out of 70 mln at St Petersburg Christmas auction
14:04, 19 January 2009
ST. PETERSBURG. January 19. KAZINFORM A Christmas charity auction in St. Petersburg raised 70 million rubles by selling paintings by Russian celebrities. A similar auction drew 20.5 million rubles last year.
As a rule, Christmas paintings of politicians, businessmen and artists illustrate the Cyrillic alphabet. This year the paintings were dedicated to the Christmas Eve story from Nikolai Gogol?s collection Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka.
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin?s work featured a frost-rimmed window framed by embroidered curtains and the Russian letter ?u,? for ?Uzor? (Pattern) and drew the largest donation of 37 million rubles (over $1 million). A Moscow gallery bought the painting.
The second biggest sale (11.5 million rubles) was the ?Metel? (Snowstorm) painting by St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matviyenko. Over one million rubles were paid for paintings by Father Frost (Russian analog of Santa), VTB President Andrei Kostin, opera singer Anna Netrebko and St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly Chairman Vadim Tyulpanov.
The funds will be donated to a St. Petersburg children?s clinic, a cancer prevention and treatment center and the St. Catherine Church in Pushkin. The church is being rebuilt with donations prior to the 300th anniversary of Tsarskoye Selo to be marked in 2010, Kazinform refers to ITAR-TASS.