MOSCOW, RUSSIAN FEDERATION.- Hundreds of drawings worth more than $1.3 million have been stolen from the State Archive of Literature and Art in Moscow. Authorities have estimated that between 1,500 and 2,000 drawings by the late artist Iakov Chernikhov were from the collection were stolen. The thieves replaced folders that contained the drawings with worthless sketches to delay the discovery of the theft. So far 274 drawings have been recovered.

Andrei Chernikhov, grandson of the late artist and president of a foundation dedicated to promoting the artist learnt that Christie’s London had sold nine of the missing drawings on June 22. He had the sale reversed.

Iakov Georgevich Chernikhov Chernikov was born to a poor Jewish family, one of 11 children in Pavlovgrad, Ukraine on December 17, 1889. After studying at the college of art in Odessa, he moved in 1914 to Petrograd (St. Petersburg) and joined the Architecture faculty of the Imperial Academy of Arts in 1916, where he later studied under Leon Benois. Greatly interested in futurist movements, including constructivism, and the suprematism of Malevich (with whom he was acquainted), he set out his ideas in a series of books in the late 1920s and early 1930s, including: The Art of Graphic Representation (1927), Fundamentals of Contemporary Architecture (1930), The Construction of Architectural and Machine Forms (1931), and 101 Architectural Fantasies (1933).