Russian Art and American Money, 1900-1940 by Robert C. Williams (Harvard Paperbacks)

The Roerich material gave to Robert Williams a clue to realize that behind the buying of Russian art in America was an extraordinary sales campaign by both the Imperial and Soviet governments. As his research progressed, it became increasingly apparent that Russian art was a valuable export commodity intended to earn credit—economic and political—in the United States, especially in the years prior to American recognition of the Soviet Union in 1933. A crucial figure in this campaign turned out to be Dr. Armand Hammer, the multimillionaire owner of Occidental International and M. Knoedler and Company art galleries, a shrewd trader who had gone to Russia in 1921, obtained concessions to mine asbestos and to manufacture pencils, and then left Russia around 1930 with truckloads of precious Russian art objects—icons, chalices, paintings, and jeweled Faberge treasure—which he sold through department stores in America.

This book is about how art exhibits and sales became most notable in 1924 and from 1928 to 1933, when the Soviet government was campaigning for the United States' diplomatic recognition and trade. Between the Soviet seller and the American art buyer emerged a nether world populated by émigrés, con artists, entrepreneurs, and art dealers whose traffic in art objects produced not only private gain but public attention to Soviet affairs.