It is the first time ever that the masterpieces of the Russian art collector Sergei Ivanovich Shchukin have traveled abroad as a collection. Until now only separate works have been seen in the West. In the 1979 “Paris-Moscow” major retrospective at the Pompidou Center – a huge exhibition from Soviet state museums – there was no mention anywhere of the origin of the art works.
It was not until 2010 at the “Matisse Malevich” exhibit held at the Hermitage Amsterdam that the French canvasses were identified as follows: “Origin: Museum of Modern Western Art, formerly from the collection of Sergei Shchukin.” So, it is a first to see more than half of the entire collection in Paris today. Almost unnecessary to say that the astronomical insurance cost covering such important objects could only be afforded by Bernard Arnault, the 14th richest man in the world and CEO of LVMC (Louis Vuitton and Moët and Chandon).*
The thrill of seeing for the first time works from well-known artists – Monet, Derain, Gauguin, Cezanne, Matisse, Picasso and others – explains why the exhibit is attracting such huge crowds, happy to be in familiar territory. The well-organized flow of people meanders through the Frank Gehry’s whimsical structure of glass panels seemingly billowing in the wind. At each of the four levels, one catches spectacular vistas of the Eiffel Tower and Paris with its cluster of skyscrapers in the Defense business district or the vast wooded expanse of the Bois de Boulogne.
The wealthy textile merchant Shchukin was – with his friend and rival Ivan Morozov – the most illustrious Russian art collector at the turn of the 20th century. He went into exile in France after the 1917 revolution and died there in 1936. His collection was nationalized and later divided between the Pushkin museum of Fine Art in Moscow and the Hermitage in St Petersburg, and then vanished into Siberian storage. During the Cold War, the works were returned to Moscow, but remained in boxes. By the 1960s, they gradually reappeared.
Shchukin was an avid and methodical collector. Following the example of his older brothers (in a family of 10), he started collecting in the 1880s. He acquired paintings from the leading art merchants in Paris, such as Ambroise Vollard, Durand Rueil or the Swiss Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler. He had an exceptional ability to detect talent. For instance, by including the constructivist Montagne Sainte-Victoire vue des Lauves, 1905, he revealed how well he understood the importance of Cezanne (26 paintings) as the spiritual father of modern art.
The organizers of the exhibit reproduced the way the canvasses were hung in Shchukin’s Moscow residence in a touhe touche fashion, that is touching each other all the way to the ceiling.
He had a special relationship with Henri Matisse and became his sponsor, commissioning many of his 57 paintings, among them La Danse, the largest (8’6″x 12’10”) and most beautiful version of which is today on view at the Hermitage. The painting had caused a scandal at the Salon d’Automne of 1910. The Desserte dominates one of the rooms at the Vuitton exhibit with its decorative floral shapes and fruits scattered on a rich red background of a table dropping vertically and merging with the wall.
His acquisition of Picasso’s works (54 canvasses) is particularly interesting. At first he was repelled by them, particularly by the cubist period. Stephane Guegan, French art critic and curator at Orsay, wrote, “Shchukin compared the analytic cubism of Picasso to buckets of crushed glass.” But gradually, he grew to appreciate the brutal forms, such as Femme tenant an eventail (woman holding a fan) 1907. He shared with Gertrude Stein the attraction for the preparatory studies to the seminal Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907 .
Shchukin was eager to show his works and educate the public. He turned his residence into a museum that was open several days a week. Among the visitors were the members of the Russian avant garde. They were stunned by what they saw. In less than 10 years not only the talented young Russian artists assimilated Western art but were able to grow from it and create suprematism, neo-primitivism, cubo-futurism, etc.
The Vuitton exhibit offers a sampling of the works by the extraordinary generation of Russian artists on the eve of World War I : Casimir Malevich, Larionov, Tatlin, Klioune, Rodchenko and the acclaimed female artists: Goncharova, Popova, Rozanova, Exter, Popova, or Udaltsova.
Shchukin heirs did not try to receive financial compensation for the art taken away by the Soviet government. All they wanted was to restore their grandfather’s memory, the recognition for his genius and avoid breaking up the collection among different owners.
One century later they may have fulfilled their wish.
Editor’s Notes:
i) This is the opinion of Nicole Prévost Logan.
ii) *See Nicole Logan’s previous article published on ValleyNewsNow.com, Jan. 22, 2016.
iii) ‘Icons of Modern Art – The Shchukin Collection’ is on display at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, which is housed in a Frank Gehry building in the middle of the Bois de Boulogne in Paris, France through Feb. 20, 2017.
About the author: Nicole Prévost Logan divides her time between Essex and Paris, spending summers in the former and winters in the latter. She writes a regular column for us from her Paris home where her topics will include politics, economy, social unrest — mostly in France — but also in other European countries. She also covers a variety of art exhibits and the performing arts in Europe. Logan is the author of ‘Forever on the Road: A Franco-American Family’s Thirty Years in the Foreign Service,’ an autobiography of her life as the wife of an overseas diplomat, who lived in 10 foreign countries on three continents. Her experiences during her foreign service life included being in Lebanon when civil war erupted, excavating a medieval city in Moscow and spending a week under house arrest in Guinea.