Aron Froimovich Bukh (1923–2006) was a Moscow painter who moved from impressionism and the traditions of the Union of Russian Artists towards the expressionism of his late years, recognisable above all for the dense impasto of that late work. The Don Auction House collection holds 6 works, all of them late: oil on canvas and on hardboard, painted between 1994 and 2005. Estimates in this section: from 12 000 to 180 000 ₽.
Aron Froimovich Bukh was born on 31 March 1923 in Berdychiv (now Zhytomyr region, Ukraine); in 1926 the family moved to Moscow, and the artist spent the rest of his life there. He took his first lessons as a teenager at a children’s art centre in Moscow’s Sovetsky District (Dom khudozhestvennogo vospitaniya detey). From 1941 to 1944 he was evacuated to Engels in the Saratov region and worked at a defence plant. In 1944–1945 he studied at the art studio of the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions under Konstantin Fyodorovich Yuon, and in 1947 he graduated with distinction from the Moscow Regional Art College “In Memory of 1905”, where his mentor was Vasily Nikolayevich Baksheev. From 1948 he showed his work in exhibitions in Moscow, at republic level and across the USSR, and from 1959 he was a member of the Union of Artists of the USSR. He died on 21 February 2006 in Moscow.
The Don Auction House collection holds 6 works by Aron Bukh, all of them in the painting section. They are oil on canvas and oil on hardboard, in small, intimate formats – none larger than 60 × 80 centimetres. Their dates fall between 1994 and 2005, which places every one of them in the artist’s late period. The titles include “Golden Bouquet”, “Birches”, “Evening”, “Monastery of the Exaltation of the Cross” and “Flowers”. These are original paintings, not reproductions: each one is unique. The lot entry states the artist, the year, the medium and the dimensions. The full form of the name matters here – “Aron Froimovich Bukh (1923–2006)” – because the same surname belongs to two other painters, the artist’s sons Felix (1948–2024) and Grigory (born 1974).
From the 1950s to the early 1980s Bukh worked within the traditions of the Union of Russian Artists and of impressionism; from the early 1980s he turned to expressionism without leaving figurative painting behind. What made him recognisable was the technique of his late years: he barely used a palette, mixed his paint directly on the canvas and laid it down with wide brushes, a palette knife, a flat decorator’s brush and his hands, and the number of layers could reach ten. The result is a dense impasto surface on which colour is placed in large masses. His genres stayed classical: flowers and still life, landscape and forest, “urban fantasies” and old Moscow, the nude, the portrait and the self-portrait. Work of a comparable kind by other artists is gathered in the painting and Russian painting sections.
Three posthumous museum exhibitions are documented in the museums’ own announcements. From 22 April to 25 May 2009 the Marble Palace of the State Russian Museum held a solo exhibition – by the museum’s announcement, the largest posthumous show to that date and the first showing of his work in St Petersburg; the paintings came from the holdings of the Moscow gallery “Expo-88” and from private collections, and a bilingual catalogue, Aron Bukh: 1923–2006, was published by Palace Editions in 2009. From 18 April to 12 May 2013 the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, together with the Aron Bukh Museum, presented “Aron Bukh: The Master’s 90th Anniversary”, some seventy paintings and works on paper curated by Elena Yakovleva and Sergey Alexandrov, with a catalogue published by Virtualnaya Galereya in 2013. From 26 June to 21 July 2019 the Samara Regional Art Museum and the “Expo-88” gallery showed “Aron Bukh. His Own Path”, around sixty paintings and works on paper, mostly from the last decade of the artist’s life. We make no claim that the works in our collection appeared in these exhibitions.
The Don Auction House is based in Rostov-on-Don and runs online sales. All 6 works by Aron Bukh are gathered in the catalogue; the estimates in this section are from 12 000 to 180 000 ₽, and the final price is decided by the bidding. The schedule of upcoming sales and the list of past ones are in the auctions section, and registration and bidding are explained on the how to buy a painting page. If you own a work by Bukh and are considering a sale, start with sell a painting: for a first conversation we will need photographs, the dimensions, the medium and whatever is known about the history of the piece. The other names in the collection are listed under artists, and a neighbouring section of the catalogue is Russian painting.
