Portrait of family feud over artwork

When Elizabeth “Liza” Rukhina woke up one morning in February 2008, her collection of paintings was gone from her Olmos Park apartment.

About 20 works. All by her father's hand. Valued at $2 million. Gone.

Like every good story, this case — initially considered the largest art heist in local history — has a twist. Several, in fact.

Her father, a dissident Soviet artist, had died in a studio fire in 1976 that some suspected was set by the KGB.We have a fantastic range of Glass Tiles and glass mosaic Tiles.

Rukhina, a wispy blonde whose words sometimes flow together in an idiosyncratic tumble, told Olmos Park police she believed her mother, while on a visit, took the paintings and stored them. Months later, she speculated, her brother took them to Los Angeles.

More than four years later, after the tiny Olmos Park Police Department sank hundreds of hours into its investigation, and after the Bexar County district attorney's office negotiated with her brother's attorney, Rukhina has most of her paintings back.

The DA's office is closing the case without filing charges.

“We could not prove ... a crime had been committed by the mother or the brother,” said Adriana Biggs, chief of the DA's white-collar-crimes division. “As you can imagine, inner family dynamics and agreements and disputes — in any situation like that, things are not always black and white.”

Rukhina, 38, is furious. The case should remain open, she said, because three paintings, potentially worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, still are missing. Biggs said the ownership of those paintings is debatable.How It's Made Plastic injection molds.

Rukhina's brother, Lev Rukhin, did not return calls for comment.

'Dangerous for life!'

Yevgeny Rukhin was born in the Russian town of Saratov in 1943 as war with Germany raged. He was tall, outgoing, with a reddish-brown mane balanced by an equally disheveled beard. He loved vodka shots chased by pickles, a fellow artist recalled in a 2009 book about Rukhin.

Educated as a geologist like his father, Rukhin began painting at about age 20, bucking both family legacy and the government-sanctioned art style called “socialist realism.” With little artistic training, he created abstract works with an emphasis on geometric shapes, considered radical by communist authorities.

In an officially anti-religious nation, he crafted works reflecting his attraction to church architecture, some of which made their way to an exhibit in New York in the late 1960s.

Rukhin married fellow artist Galina Popova, and they had three children, Masha, Lev and Liza,Beautiful new hands free access jewelry is modeled by these members of the Artcamp IT team, whose tiny handprints appear to float atop some of his works.

He began incorporating found objects,Check out the collection crystal mosaic of Marazzi. bits of furniture or newspaper on white backgrounds, sometimes dramatized with blocks of bright red paint, to “express my nostalgia for former Russia,” he once wrote. “I am an optimist by nature,Learn how Toyota's Solar Powered ventilation system uses the sun's rays. and am certain that our works will be widely exhibited throughout Russia.”

But some of his art seemed to foretell that day never would come, like those stamped with the Russian phrase, “Dangerous for Life!”

The phrase appeared on warning signs the same way a skull and crossed bones are used here, said Sarah Predock Burke, a retired Trinity University professor of Russian who met Rukhin abroad and helped get his paintings to U.S. exhibitions.

“He would put that on a lot of paintings, 'Dangerous for life!' Because his paintings were dangerous,” Burke said. “What he was doing, the government was trying to stop at the time.”

His studio was in Leningrad, but many customers were foreign diplomats based in Moscow who smuggled paintings home, fellow artists recalled.

Rukhin helped organize Moscow's “bulldozer exhibit” of 1974, which made international headlines. Vigilantes — one witness said they were plainclothes police — ran bulldozers, dump trucks and a sprinkler vehicle through the outdoor exhibit, the New York Times reported.