NEW YORK, NY.- Where else can you find the following under one roof -- Jewish happiness, a famous Russian ballerina, Chinese and French nudes, a sculpture of Czar Peter the Great, and a Stalin-era Soviet propaganda papier-mâché desk set?

These items are among Shapiro Auctions’ more than 300 lots of European and Asian paintings, Russian sculpture and fine art, Fabergé, rare books, militaria, Soviet posters, and inscribed photographs. Shapiro’s spring sale takes place at the company’s headquarters in New York City on Saturday March 18.

The auction’s highlights include works by Chinese artists from the estate of Milton Gelfand in Pound Ridge, New York. Mr. Gelfand was a successful businessman who traveled extensively around communist China during the Sino-U.S. rapprochement in the 1970s and managed to build an impressive art collection of contemporary Chinese paintings and sculpture.

Standing Nude by Beijing artist Li Guijun (b. 1964) is one of the sale’s top lots, with a presale estimate of $70,000-$90,000; authenticity is confirmed by the artist himself. Li Guijun painted adolescent girls exclusively for almost twenty years, and the one in the auction is among his early works created at the time of graduation from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing in 1988.

The Gelfand estate also offers two artworks by Xu Yanzhou (b. 1961), another prominent realist painter from Beijing: Seated Nude (1988), est. $15,000-$20,000; and Portrait of a Man, est. $5,000-$7,000.

Other Asian artists in the auction include Vietnamese-born Mai Thu (1906-1980) and Vu Cao Dam (1908-2000), whose Le rendez-vous (1972) has an estimate of $32,000-$37,000. The work comes from the estate of Marilyn Jones. At the age of 23, Vu Cao Dam moved to France to continue his studies and never returned to his homeland. In Paris he absorbed Impressionist and Post-Impressionist elements into his art.

Dutch artist Antoon Van Welie’s Portrait of Anna Pavlova (1938) depicts the turn-of-the 20th century Russian prima ballerina, who was first a principal dancer at the Imperial Russian Ballet in St. Petersburg, and then Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in Paris. This large oil on canvas, 157x104cm, has an estimate of $30,000-$40,000.

The romantic genre artist Frederic Soulacroix (1858-1933) appears in the auction with an oil on canvas, Nude by a Fountain, est. $20,000-$30,000. Though born in France, Soulacroix primarily worked in Florence and painted the pleasures of the rich and powerful, especially beautiful women, in elegant interiors.

The auction also features a collection of Soviet posters, and one of the most important is Jewish Happiness, est. $20,000-$30,000, ​by the prominent Russian modernist artist, Natan Altman (1889-1970), who also made stage designs for the Jewish State Theater in Moscow in the 1920s.

Other Russian lots include Mikhail Chemiakin’s sterling silver sculpture of a seated Peter the Great on a marble pedestal. The original was made in 1991 for the main square in the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg. The head of this 90cm copy made by the artist himself, (2002), is based on Peter the Great’s wax death mask in the State Hermitage Museum; est. $40,000-$60,000.

Russia’s most important classical 19th century artists, the Peredvizhniki, are represented by Vasily Vereshchagin’s Nepalese Village, est. $20,000-$30,000; as well as works by Vasily Polenov and Konstantin Makovsky. Aleksei Isupov’s oil on canvas, A coastal village, is from the artist’s estate; est. $22,000-$28,000.

One of the most unique lots is a 1932 Stalin-era propaganda Palekh papier-mâché desk set, known as `agitlak’, made by the lacquer miniature painting master, Nikolai Zinoviev. The five pieces in this set are decorated with military themes that call the Soviet nation to defense against possible capitalist invaders; est. $15,000-$20,000.

In October 2014, Shapiro Auctions set a world record for a Zinoviev-Palekh `agitlak’ when it sold a similar set made in 1931 for $305,000, and which had a presale estimate of $30,000-$40,000.

There is a fine selection of early Soviet era art from the famous Kholodkov collection. Some of the most interesting works are a pair of gouaches by Nikolay Troshin, Harnessing a Mare, (1931), and Country Road, (1931), each with an estimate of $1,500-$2,500; and also a gouache by Olga Deineko, Transporting the Goods by a River, (1931), est. $800-$1,200.

The auction will take place on Saturday March 18, 2017.