A man and woman in their late thirties, dressed in artists’ clothing, hold in their hands a double portrait of themselves as Adam and Eve. Naked and slightly idealized, they are depicted in front of what looks like a magnolia tree. Adam stands with an apple in his hands. Eve is about to leave paradise: she steps out of the picture into the male artist’s hand, placed safely under her foot. This composition is executed in oil on wood and reminds one of the post-World War I “New Objectivity” paintings or of the figurative paintings of the 1960s and 1970s. It was done, however, in 1980 by Dmitri Dmitrevich Shilinskii, a Moscow artist. It is one of ninety-seven paintings shown recently in the Künstlerhaus in Vienna in an exhibition called “Aspects of Contemporary Soviet Art.”¹ The exhibition also included five hundred prints and drawings and ten sculptures. It was put together from the collection of Peter Ludwig, the famous West German chocolate manufacturer and art collector who is known in the United States for having amassed an enormous collection of American Photo-realist and Pop art.

Mr. Ludwig’s interest in Soviet art has developed recently, as he explains in an interview published in the exhibition’s catalogue.² In the late 1970s he started collecting East German art. In 1979, in an interview coinciding with the opening of his East German exhibition, he was asked whether he intended to include Soviet art in his collection. He said he was in