What to do when you’ve been accused, by various publications and Web sites, of all manner of misbehavior: money laundering, blowing $5 million on your daughter’s wedding and massacring mustangs to use their skins for upholstery?


You mount an art exhibition of course.


At least that’s what you do if you’re Janna Bullock, 44, the glamorous Russian-born real estate developer and art scene fixture who retreated from life on the party circuit to spend nearly two years combating accusations against her and her husband in  the Russian press and on some Web sites.  


In that time Ms. Bullock separated from her husband, Aleksei Kuznetsov, a former Moscow bank executive and government official. She took a leave from the board of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, which oversees the museum in New York and its branches abroad. She skipped some art openings and art fairs and stopped doing things like riding motorcycles from St. Petersburg to Moscow with the actors Dennis Hopper and Jeremy Irons and Thomas Krens, the former Guggenheim director.


And now she is back, with her first exhibition of her own art, which she is staging herself in an empty Beaux-Arts mansion on the Upper East Side of Manhattan that she was going to renovate and sell before she got sidetracked. The art opening in February brought out hundreds. And this is no show of beach landscapes or still-life bananas: Ms. Bullock has taken on nothing less than the Russian power elite, from Vladimir V. Putin to Mikhail S. Gorbachev. Walking through the show the other day in blood-red nail polish and black stiletto heels, the blond Ms. Bullock said the exhibition — which features photographs of prominent Russians accompanied by opinionated text — was her way to show solidarity with the protesters in Russia, where she no longer feels welcome.


“I was very inspired by the fact of the opposition,” she said. “This is the little I can do because I’m so fed up with the silence, with the injustice.”


State news media in Russia reported last year that Mr. Kuznetsov had been indicted on fraud and money laundering charges. Ms. Bullock said she had never heard that and questioned the credibility of the Russian official who released the information.  


But then everything about Ms. Bullock, a former baby sitter who built a real estate business and rose to become a wealthy Upper East Side boldface name, often seems cloaked in the intrigue and intricacy of a 19th-century Russian novel. Her husband, Mr. Kuznetsov, said in an interview several years ago that he was pressured to resign from his position as a regional finance official because government regulators were reviewing his wife’s Russian real estate development company, RIGroup. Ms. Bullock said he actually left for political reasons that had nothing to do with her company.


After Mr. Kuznetsov resigned, one of his political allies was shot in an apparent contract murder. (Ms. Bullock said her husband is now in Europe.)


RIGroup was taken over by a rival company called ORSI, one of whose owners was a bank belonging to President-elect Putin’s former judo coach, Arkady R. Rotenberg. Ms. Bullock has characterized ORSI as a corporate raider that stripped her company of assets and drove it into bankruptcy.


Representatives of ORSI, which later served as a court-appointed bankruptcy receiver for her Russian properties, have accused the couple of corruption and Ms. Bullock of profiting from her husband’s position.


This sort of accusation, which Ms. Bullock said was as baseless as the depictions of her as a money launderer, or a horse hunter, is one reason she cites for staging her counteroffensive, with the help of public-relations experts, against her bad press. (A Facebook campaign that claimed she was organizing safaris in which wealthy hunters shoot wild horses with poison appears to have been taken down.)


“My name was covered in dirt,” she said. “Just because I did better than others, somebody had the appetite to take it all away from me?”