There has always been a vivid rivalry between Russia’s two capitals, Moscow and St Petersburg, and it is a curious twist of fate that Moscow should have supplied the Hermitage with the paintings for which it is now best known abroad, the superb Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works from the collections of Sergey Shchukin and Ivan Morozov. The two men were Moscow merchants and their collections, formed at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, were confiscated after the Revolution. Initially, their large family homes in Moscow were opened to the public as museums. Then, in 1927–8, the paintings were combined in the Morozov home which was renamed the Museum of Modern Western Art. In the 1930s there was further shuffling of art between Russian museums, for ideological and administrative reasons, and the Hermitage got a first instalment of pictures from Moscow; the rest came in 1948.
As Communism began to require conformity in aesthetic as well as other fields, Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings were branded decadent and exhibitions of them were gradually reduced, then banned. The Shchukin and Morozov pictures had a temporary reprieve during World War II when, along with the contents of other Moscow museums, they were shipped to Siberia for safe-keeping, but after their return to Moscow the Museum of Modern Western Art never reopened. In 1948 its contents were split between the Hermitage and Moscow’s Pushkin Museum. The Hermitage got the larger pictures – most of the Picassos and the best Matisses, since it had more space – while the Pushkin focused on the Impressionists.
The first instalment of over one hundred paintings arrived at the Hermitage between 1930 and 1934. The Hermitage had just been forced to contribute some 400 Old Masters to the Pushkin Museum to enable Moscow, as the new capital, to boast a ‘national gallery’ of its own, and the modern pictures were secured as a modest compensation. They got another 200 or so in 1948, making around 300 in all. Some paintings were exhibited in the 1930s but most of them could not be displayed after World War II when modern Western art was branded decadent and corrupting by Stalin’s apparatchiks.
The first post-war showings at the Hermitage were disguised among other exhibits. The curators slipped a few Impressionists into a 1955 exhibition of ‘French Painting from the twelfth to the twentieth century’; in 1956 there was a Cézanne exhibition combining paintings from Moscow and Leningrad; in 1959 there was an exhibition of French landscapes in which Matisse and Derain were daringly included. The Shchukin and Morozov paintings were only put on show as a group in the 1960s. They were hung in the former quarters of the ladies-in-waiting on the second floor of the Winter Palace but are now the great stars of the General Staff Building. They decorate the top floor with skylights to provide overhead lighting. The idea of hanging them there was the main argument for turning the General Staff Building into a museum of the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Meanwhile they have travelled all over the world, repeatedly to America and Japan, and to several European locations. In Essen in 1993 the paintings from Morozov and Shchukin were shown from both Moscow and St Petersburg, and Morozov’s frescoed music room was reconstructed. In 2016 the Shchukin collection was shown from both locations in a blockbuster exhibition at the Louis Vuitton Foundation, attracting over 1 million visitors, a record for any temporary exhibition worldwide.
It was no coincidence that the great pre-revolutionary collections of avant-garde art should have been formed in Moscow rather than St Petersburg. In the last decades of the nineteenth century St Petersburg society, which revolved, as always, around the court, was aristocratic and conservative; new art, as we have seen, took an antiquarian route. Moscow, meanwhile, was the base of the new merchant class and artists were reaching forward towards abstraction. It was a period in which the traditional differences between the two cities were sharply highlighted.
The grand medieval traditions of Muscovy lingered on in Moscow after Peter the Great removed the government to St Petersburg in the early years of the eighteenth century. Initially, Moscow remained inward-looking and Russian, while St Petersburg embraced European influence, most especially the sophisticated culture of France. Then, in the nineteenth century, many new merchant families – entrepreneurs who had climbed to impressive wealth on the back of the industrialisation of Russia and the new rail links which facilitated national and international trade – found Moscow a more convenient trading base than the northern capital.
As the later generations of merchant families sought distractions outside their counting houses, Moscow too became the setting for a vivid flowering of the arts. Pavel Tretyakov, heir to a textile empire, became the patron of the Wanderers (Peredvizhniki), the first homegrown, Russian artistic movement of any major significance. A loosely linked group of realists who painted contemporary life, landscape and scenes from Russian history, they were linked by the Society of Travelling Exhibitions, founded in 1863, which exhibited their work all over Russia – hence the name ‘Wanderers’. The group included Ilya Repin among its portrait and genre painters, Vasily Surikov among its history painters and Isaak Levitan among its landscapists. In 1874 Tretyakov opened his gallery as a museum and by 1890 it attracted 50,000 visitors a year, the same number as the Hermitage.
In 1883 theatre, ballet and opera were released from state control and two years later Savva Mamontov, a railway tycoon, opened the Opéra Privé in Moscow, effectively the precursor of Diaghilev’s travelling company. Mamontov had been obsessed with theatre since childhood. On his country estate at Abramtsevo he created an artistic colony which drew together the talents of the leading artists of his day, painters such as Valentin Serov and Mikhail Vrubel, the legendary theatre director Stanislavsky, the composer Mussorgsky and the singer Chaliapin. He presided over an extraordinary explosion of creativity.
Shchukin and Morozov made their own contribution to this environment by recognising the importance of the French avant-garde ahead of their contemporaries and buying in bulk. They started collecting French Impressionists only a little after the Havemeyers in America, well before most Europeans had recognised these artists’ significance. More importantly, they collected Gauguin, Van Gogh, Picasso and Matisse on a massive scale almost before their work was saleable elsewhere. This meant that they had first choice. Shchukin’s collection of pre-1914 Picassos, more than fifty canvases in all, is now recognised as the most important holding anywhere in the world. The collections the two men brought home to Moscow, before World War I and the Revolution closed down such bourgeois activity, were sensational.
The Shchukin and Morozov families were surprisingly similar. In both cases, the family fortune was based on the textile industry; in both cases, enterprising ancestors had found a hungry market for their wares in Moscow, after the city had been sacked by Napoleon, and stayed to make a fortune. There were several art collectors in subsequent generations of both families.
The Morozovs originally came from the village of Zuevo, some fifty miles east of Moscow. Savva Morozov, a serf, obtained permission to open a small ribbon factory there in 1797. After Moscow had been wrecked in 1812, he travelled there with a pack of textiles and ribbons on his back. The Muscovites were enthusiastic buyers and by 1837 he had 200 workers in his factory and had bought his family’s freedom from serfdom. His youngest son, Timofey, proved an outstandingly acute businessman, becoming one of Russia’s most powerful industrialists, a shareholder and director of both the Merchants’ Society and the Commercial Bank. By the 1880s the Morozov factories at Zuevo spread over two- and a-half square miles and employed a workforce of 8,000. An eleven-day workers’ strike in 1885, which involved rioting and damage to machinery, had to be put down by the police with the help of a Cossack regiment.
The first Morozov art patrons belonged to the third generation. Timofey had two sons, Sergey who built and endowed the Moscow Museum of Handicrafts, an ambitious palace of folk art, and Savva who was the principal backer of the Moscow Art Theatre where Stanislavsky launched his theatre of realism. Savva built the company a new theatre with a plain white auditorium – in sharp contrast to the Baroque interiors of traditional theatres – a massively expensive revolving stage and comfortable dressing rooms for the actors. Stanislavsky commented: ‘All for art and the actor, that was the motto that controlled his actions.’
Savva Morozov was a friend of the revolutionary writer Maxim Gorky, and had a strong social conscience. He did all he could to improve conditions in the family factories. However, when he suggested a scheme for sharing profits with the workers to his widowed mother, the principal shareholder, she removed him from control of the company and sent him packing to the South of France. A month after his arrival there in 1905, he committed suicide.
Such was the sad fate of Timofey’s branch of the family, but the descendants of his brother Avram, who had run the family’s industrial complex at Tver, were to prove even more significant art patrons. The three brothers, Mikhail, Ivan and Arseny, grandsons of Avram, had been brought up by their widowed mother Varvara Morozova, a powerful and forward-looking woman. She supported equal education for women, founded trade schools for workers, endowed the first public library in Moscow and ran a brilliant salon attended by the likes of Tolstoy and Chekhov. She employed Konstantin Korovin, one of Mamontov’s best theatre designers, to teach her children to paint. Her sons reacted to their enlightened upbringing in very different ways. Mikhail and Arseny refused to have anything to do with the family business. Arseny gave himself over to parties and pleasure. He built himself a Moorish castle in the centre of Moscow. When his chosen architect, Fedor Shekhtel, asked him in what style he wanted it built, Arseny replied: ‘In all styles, I have the money.’ The revelry ended in 1908 when he died of blood poisoning.
Mikhail shared his brother’s taste for gambling and wild parties but he also lectured at the university, wrote books and formed the first great Morozov picture collection. He started with French landscapes of the Barbizon school, moved on to Degas, Monet and Renoir, and rounded the collection off with Gauguin and Van Gogh. He died at the age of only thirty-three in 1903 and his widow gave a group of his paintings to the Tretyakov Gallery. They were later moved to other museums and some of the best landed in the Hermitage: Renoir’s full-length portrait of Jeanne Samary (1878), Degas’s pastel, After the Bath, and Monet’s dazzling Poppy Field (1887) among them.
The third brother, Ivan, was the collector who earned his family lasting fame. He was the only one who was interested in business and is said to have been the epitome of a Victorian tycoon: reserved, perfectly tailored and a little haughty. Where Shchukin welcomed visitors to his home, Morozov’s collection was only shown to artists and friends. The conventional exterior hid warm feelings, however. Matisse’s daughter remembered him as ‘bluff, genial and kindly – rather like an explosive child’.
Ivan Morozov studied engineering in Switzerland, learned his trade by running the family textile mills at Tver and in 1900 took over the head office in Moscow. To accord with his new social eminence he bought a large, eighteenth-century mansion on Prechistenka Street, which had formerly belonged to a nephew of Catherine the Great’s favourite, Prince Grigory Potemkin. The interior had been reworked in the 1840s in the Neo-Gothic style and Morozov ripped this out to restore clean white walls. He had a leading architect redesign the interior as a background for his pictures. The building works lasted for two years, from 1904 to 1906; it is no coincidence that 1907 saw an explosion in Morozov’s picture buying. After the Revolution, his home became the Museum of Modern Western Art.
Until Mikhail’s death in 1903, Ivan Morozov appears to have regarded French painting as his brother’s domain and concentrated almost exclusively on collecting contemporary Russian art. He continued to buy Russian work, in parallel with French masters, throughout his life and by 1913 could boast of owning 430 Russian works, which are now mostly in the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. As a young man he had made a sketching trip to the Caucasus with his teacher Korovin and started the collection by buying Korovin’s landscapes. He moved on to lakes and forests by Levitan, then to Vrubel’s Symbolism and more Romantic, theatrical works by Mikhail Larionov and Natalya Goncharova – a blaze of Russian colour. He also became a keen patron of a little-known artist from Vitebsk called Marc Chagall.
The Russian works reveal the keynote of Morozov’s collecting, an abiding love of the decorative. Surviving records suggest that Morozov’s first French painting was an Alfred Sisley landscape purchased in 1903, A Frosty Day in Louveciennes. He started to internationalise his collection in that year by buying the work of the Spanish painters Joaquín Sorolla and Ignacio Zuloaga, both at the height of fashion in France, who borrowed the Impressionists’ approximative brushwork but applied it to more conventional subject matter. Still feeling his way in 1904, Morozov bought Sisley and Pissarro landscapes and a Renoir portrait of the actress Jeanne Samary. He may have bought the Renoir in memory of his brother Mikhail who had owned the highly finished, Salon portrait of Jeanne Samary now in the Hermitage; Ivan’s purchase was a more intimate, impressionistic rendering and now hangs in the Pushkin.
Morozov came of age on the Paris scene in 1906. He helped Diaghilev to organise the ground-breaking Exposition de l’Art Russe at the Salon d’Automne – which had a catalogue by Benois – lending extensively from his own collection. He was rewarded with the Legion of Honour and election to honorary membership of the Salon d’Automne. He also bought his first two Bonnards – he became enthusiastically addicted to Nabis and Intimiste paintings – and his first Monet, a view of Waterloo Bridge, romantically depicted as a shadow in the mist.
The following year, 1907, saw Morozov making vast purchases for his newly completed Moscow home. He bought his first Gauguins – the rich colour of the primitive Polynesian scenes probably reminded him of Russian folk art – and his first Cézannes, initially favouring landscapes in the manner of Pissarro whom he already admired. He went on to develop a particular enthusiasm for Cézanne, buying many of his late, more difficult pictures. Cézanne was the only artist with whom Morozov seemed happy to go beyond the decorative. He searched for a late landscape for many years, leaving a blank space over his fireplace to accommodate it, and finally found the Hermitage’s famous Blue Landscape of 1904–6 in the storeroom of Ambroise Vollard, the French art dealer, in 1912.
Félix Fenéon, the French art critic, who ran the Bemheim-Jeune Gallery, which specialised in the avant-garde, has left a splendid description of Morozov’s visits to Paris:
Almost as soon as he gets off the train, he is to be found in a shop which sells paintings, settled into an armchair that is particularly deep and comfortable and which the art lover cannot easily haul himself out of, while pictures are presented to him like episodes from a film. By evening, Mr Morisov [sic], who looks at pictures with unusual care, is too tired to go to the theatre. After a few days spent in this way, he goes back to Moscow, having seen nothing except paintings; many he takes with him, the ultimate choice from what he has seen.
Not content with mere buying, Morozov also commissioned decorations for his Moscow mansion. The most ambitious was the scheme of wall paintings executed by Maurice Denis for his White Salon, or Music Room, a vast Neoclassical chamber, already supplied with pillars, frieze and a vaulted ceiling by its original architect. Denis was a central figure in the Symbolist movement and his paintings of the more affecting moments of history and myth look rather old-fashioned to the modern eye. His work was, however, the height of fashion in Paris – Morozov bought his Sacred Spring in Guidel from the Salon des Indépendants in 1906 – and Denis became the Russian patron’s close friend and adviser. In 1907 Morozov commissioned him to paint five panels depicting The Story of Psyche for the Music Room and, after he arrived to hang them in 1909, he was commissioned to paint another eight panels to fill the rest of the walls.
The naked nymphs and cherubs disporting themselves among pink clouds, verdant gardens and palaces seem a strange accompaniment to Morozov’s Van Goghs, Cézannes and Matisses. Yet they serve to underline both the decorative nature of the patron’s taste and the wide range of artistic endeavour in France in the years which saw the birth of Modernism.
In 1911 Bonnard was commissioned by Morozov to execute a second decorative scheme in the space at the top of the grand entrance staircase. The mural entitled On the Mediterranean invited the visitor to enter a summer garden on the Riviera, with trees, roses, a stone balustrade, a few seated figures and the sparkle of blue sea in the distance. It was a vast triptych, the allotted space being divided into three parts by two massive Corinthian pillars.
The difference between Morozov and Shchukin as patrons of contemporary art is underlined by the paintings that the two men commissioned to greet their guests at the top of the formal entrance staircase. Shchukin commissioned two vast canvases from Matisse, titled Music and Dance, each a grouping of childishly naked figures on a bright blue ground. They are not pretty, ‘easy’ works like the artist’s much loved nudes and flowers, or Bonnard’s Mediterranean. Matisse used the simplified figures to make abstract patterns of colour; the two paintings look forward to the purely abstract, cut paper works he made in his later years and are now amongst the most highly regarded paintings in the Hermitage. Shchukin was determined to patronise the most important new developments in contemporary art, even if it meant buying art that was ahead of his own taste. Matisse recognised this when he wrote an account of their relationship:
One day he [Shchukin] dropped by at the Quai St Michel to see my pictures. He noticed a still life hanging on the wall and said ‘I like it but I’ll have to keep it at home for several days, and if I can bear it, and stay interested in it, I’ll keep it.’ I was lucky enough that he was able to bear this first ordeal easily, and that my still-life didn’t fatigue him too much. So he came back and commissioned a series of large paintings to decorate the living room of his Moscow house…. After this he asked me to do two decorations for the palace staircase, and it was then I painted Music and Dance.
Shchukin’s friend Prince Sergey Shcherbatov, who wrote a lively account of the Moscow art scene of his day, recorded Shchukin’s agony of misgiving over one of his Matisse purchases. ‘You know, I privately hate this picture myself,’ he told Shcherbatov, ‘have been fighting with it for weeks, curse myself and almost cry that I bought it. But lately I feel that it has begun to overpower me.’ These are not the doubts of a diffident ingénue, rather of a man used to relying on his own judgement in business, who knew that keeping ahead of the game was no easy matter. He had cornered the textile market at rock bottom prices during the 1905 Revolution and made a vast fortune on the speculation when order was restored. He tried to do the same again in 1917 but this time the textiles rotted in their warehouses and his fortune was confiscated by the Bolsheviks. You cannot win every time.
The Shchukins were Old Believers, a fundamentalist sect that split off from the Orthodox Church in the seventeenth century. They had been involved in the textile business since the eighteenth century but they had never been serfs. Their modest Moscow shop was burned down in 1812 and Vasily, the Shchukin of the day, had to rebuild his business from scratch. His son Ivan – Sergey’s father – was an assertive, bombastic figure who took over the firm in 1836 and turned it into a thriving business. When he changed its name to ‘I. W. Shchukin and Sons’ in 1878, the capital value of the company was four million gold roubles. Sergey improved on this; the firm was reputedly worth thirty million roubles by 1917.
An interest in the arts was introduced into the Shchukin clan by Ivan’s wife, Ekaterina, who came from a distinguished family of tea merchants called Botkin. Their caravans had travelled between China and Russia since around 1800 and a branch of Botkin and Son was opened in London in 1852. Ekaterina’s three brothers were all collectors. Dmitry Botkin collected drawings, rare books and modern French paintings – modern, in this context, meant Courbet, Corot, Theodore Rousseau and Charles-François Daubigny. Mikhail was a history painter and collected the kind of props he used in his paintings: medieval Limoges enamels, fifteenth-century Italian majolica, Roman terracottas, old Russian enamels, as well as paintings by his Russian contemporaries. Some of his collection ended up in the Hermitage after his death, but the curators having discovered that many of his treasures were fakes allowed Antiquariat, the State organisation for selling art abroad, to sell them off in the 1930s. Vasily was a famous writer and critic with advanced views, a friend of Turgenev and Tolstoy, and collected modern European paintings.
Ivan and Ekaterina Shchukin had eleven children, five daughters and six sons. The latter, in order of birth, were Nikolay, Petr, Sergey, Dmitry, Ivan and Vladimir. Their father expected all of them to enter the business in the true merchant tradition, but he was to be disappointed. Only Sergey, the future collector, inherited his father’s business genius. Nikolay turned into an amiable sybarite. He played cards and collected English silver, rather than attend to business, though nominally employed by the family firm. Petr longed for the academic life and, when denied it by his father, combined his business trips with collecting prints, rare books, Oriental art and Russian folk art.
His visits to the annual Russian trading fair at Nizhny Novgorod on the Volga turned Petr’s interests towards Russian antiquities. His Moscow home became an overflowing treasure house, beloved of scholars who came to study and catalogue but could not keep up with Petr’s purchases. In 1892, at the age of thirty-nine, he decided to build a museum and, in keeping with his antiquarian interests, ordained that it should be built in seventeenth-century style. Three interlinked buildings in Old Russian style duly rose on Gruzinskaya Street in the centre of Moscow. There were vaulted ceilings, carved and gilded pillars, and a hall painted in imitation of the decorations on an eighteenth-century Russian charter.
In 1905 Petr gave his museum to the State and was rewarded with a civil service title equivalent to the grade of general in the army, which allowed him to wear a white and gold uniform while he guided visitors around his collections. The picture gallery was largely devoted to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russian school but two of his brothers lived in Paris and he could not resist the temptation of Impressionism. Finding himself short of money in 1912, he sold the stars of his collection to his brother Sergey. Monet’s Woman in a Garden, painted in Sainte-Addresse in 1867, which he bought in Paris in 1899, is now in the Hermitage and is possibly the finest Impressionist painting in the whole collection. A woman in white with a parasol is walking in a sundrenched rose garden with a bed of bright red, miniature roses in the foreground. With Victorian prurience Petr hung his best nudes in his private apartments, rather than the museum: a Degas pastel of a girl towelling herself called After the Bath, which is now in the Hermitage, and a Renoir study of a seated nude dating from 1876 – the artist’s best period – called La Belle Anne, which is now in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. Petr got the latter thrown in as a free gift when he was buying a Japanese screen painting.
Petr’s brother, Dmitry Shchukin, became a passionate collector of Old Master paintings, notably Italian, Dutch and German. He had already declared in 1914 that he intended turning his home into a museum, but the Bolsheviks forced his hand. In 1918 it was nationalised and opened to the public as the ‘First Museum of Old Western Painting’, then in 1924 the 146 paintings and drawings were transferred to the Fine Arts Museum, later renamed the Pushkin, where Dmitry became the curator of the collection.
While he bought many notable paintings, Dmitry is particularly remembered for the story of the Vermeer that got away. On a trip to Germany he bought an allegorical painting of a woman sitting on a globe which bore the signature of the minor seventeenth-century Dutch master Caspar Netscher. When he got it back to Moscow, none of his friends liked it and he himself ended up disliking it intensely. The Berlin dealer he had bought it from kindly took it back, giving Dmitry a small profit on the deal. He was delighted with this transaction, until he read in a magazine that Dr Abraham Bredius, the director of the Hague Museum, had bought the painting and found, under the false Netscher signature, the name of Vermeer van Delft.
Ivan Shchukin, the fifth of the brothers, was also a collector of Old Masters, but a spendthrift whose costly liaisons and art purchases brought him to ruin. He and his younger brother Vladimir were the only two of the six sons who were permitted a university education by their father. Both attended Moscow University and, after their father’s death in 1890, they moved to Paris together. Vladimir, who had always been sickly, died in France in 1895. Ivan, however, set himself up with a smart apartment on the Avenue Wagram where he dabbled in philosophy and established a famous salon which was attended by many leading painters – Degas, Renoir, Odilon Redon – and every colour of visiting Russian, from princes of the blood to Vladimir Ulyanov, otherwise known as Lenin. On occasion, Ivan was denied entry to Russia on account of his association with revolutionaries.
However, it was his connections with the leading artists of the day which proved Ivan’s downfall. He travelled across Spain with the Spanish artist Ignacio Zuloaga and the French sculptor Auguste Rodin in search of paintings for his collection, buying a notable group of El Grecos. When his debts became too pressing in 1907 he sold his Old Master collection – all but the El Grecos – at the Berlin auction house, Keller and Rainer. The auction prices were inexplicably low and it was clear that the El Grecos would have to go too; but the experts who came to assess them said they were fakes. On 2 January 1908 Ivan committed suicide, which is doubly tragic in that the El Grecos are now considered to have been perfectly genuine.
Sergey Shchukin, the great collector of Impressionist and modern paintings, was the third brother in order of seniority. While Nikolay and Petr had been sent to boarding school, Sergey was considered too delicate – he grew up with a severe stutter – and was kept at home with private tutors. Occasionally he escaped to St Petersburg to stay with his artist uncle, Mikhail Botkin, where he could wander at will through the big art collection – undoubtedly an influential experience. Another was the business trip to Egypt he made as a young man. The stylisation of Egyptian art and its rich colour made a lasting impression on him – he later haunted the Egyptian section of the Louvre. The experience seems to have unlocked for him the doors to understanding the geometric structures of Cézanne and Picasso and the richly coloured primitivism of Gauguin.
In 1873 a visit to a doctor in Munster, Germany, substantially improved his speech and in 1878 he entered the family firm. It quickly became clear that the sickly child with a stutter had transformed himself into the business brains of the family. The loneliness of his childhood appears to have taught him self-reliance and a determination to beat the system that had initially seemed loaded against him. He drove himself to the limit to achieve the best, first in business, then in collecting. Even in his sociable later years, he retained a puritanical self-discipline. He slept with a window open all year round, ate only vegetarian food and walked, or took a cab, in preference to using his personal carriage.
The beautiful wife Sergey married in 1883 had luxurious tastes, however. Lidiya Koreneva came from a rich coal-mining family and loved social life. Shortly before the death of Sergey’s father Ivan in 1890, the latter gave his son his eighteenth-century palace in the centre of Moscow. It had formerly belonged to the princely Trubetskoy family and Lidiya’s lavish entertaining turned it into a meeting place for the liveliest minds in Russia – Diaghilev, Stanislavsky, Chaliapin and Rachmaninov all came there at one time or another. Even Lunacharsky, the future Soviet Commissar for Education, featured among Lidiya’s guests.
Initially Sergey left the interior decoration of the Trubetskoy Palace to his wife. Indeed, he never interfered with the furnishings, but from around 1895 he began to claim the walls. His first purchases were pleasant, unremarkable landscapes in the French Barbizon-ish style in fashion at the time. He bought several by the Norwegian artist Fritz Thaulow and others by French contemporaries who were then enjoying a modest success but have now been thoroughly forgotten – Firmin Maglin, Charles Guilloux and Charles Cottet, for instance. Like everyone else he bought a Zuloaga and in 1897 he commissioned a Burne-Jones tapestry from the William Morris workshop, a copy of the Adoration of the Kings tapestry he had admired in Exeter College Chapel in Oxford in 1890.
The Burne-Jones tapestry was hung at the end of Shchukin’s dining room where it was subsequently joined by sixteen Gauguins, hung edge to edge in the spirit of a Russian icon screen or iconostasis. The juxtaposition underlines a shift in Shchukin’s perspective as a picture buyer which must have taken place somewhere between 1897 and 1900. He had begun by buying for amusement to decorate his walls, then the idea began to crystallise of bringing to Moscow the most important, pioneering, modern art of the French school; it has been argued that he refrained for so long from buying Picasso because he was a Spanish artist, rather than French. By 1907 the collector knew that he was creating a gallery of modern art for the instruction and enjoyment of his compatriots. In that year, following the death of Lidiya, he made a will leaving his entire collection to the city of Moscow.
Sergey Shchukin’s buying can be divided broadly into three periods. From 1898 to 1904 he pursued Impressionism, but most importantly Claude Monet, whom he saw as the leader and creator of the school; from 1904 to 1910 he was mainly interested in Post-Impressionism, busily buying Cézannes, Gauguins and Van Goghs; from 1910 to 1914 he was almost exclusively concerned with Matisse, Derain and Picasso.
Shchukin loved to give guided tours of his collection and an early glimpse of this is provided by a rather condescending entry in the day book of one Margarita Sabashnikova:
12 February 1903. Yesterday evening we went to the Shchukins to look at their picture collection. I saw Monet’s Rouen Cathedral, his Sea and other things – Lobre, Brangwyn, Cézanne, Renoir, Ménard, Degas, Cottet, Carrière, Whistler – and finally Puvis de Chavannes, his Poor Fishermen. Our host was polite, switching on one light, then another and explaining the subjects of the paintings. He had the appearance of a cunning steward, his grey hair was combed over his forehead, his eyes looked out like mice from their holes…. There was a complete mis-match between his acute aesthetic understanding, his clever choice of paintings and his low class, peasant appearance.
Shchukin’s appearance cannot have been impressive. Picasso’s mistress, Fernande Olivier, also wrote an unflattering account of their first meeting:
One day Matisse brought an important collector from Moscow to see him [Picasso]. Chukin [sic] was a Russian Jew, very rich, and a lover of modern art. He was a small, pale, wan man with an enormous head like the mask of a pig. Afflicted with a horrible stutter, he had great difficulty expressing himself and that embarrassed him and made him look more pathetic than ever. Picasso’s technique was a revelation to the Russian. He bought two canvases, paying what were very high prices for the time – one of them was the beautiful Woman with a Fan, and from then on he became quite a faithful client.
Shchukin was a haunted man at the time of this meeting. A period of tragedy opened in his life in 1905 when his seventeen-year-old son, Sergey, killed himself by jumping into the Moscow river. Then his wife Lidiya died in January 1907, after only a week’s illness; in January 1908 his brother Ivan poisoned himself and in 1910 his second son Grigory, who was almost completely deaf, committed suicide.
In an attempt to find some relief Shchukin embarked on a journey to the Holy Land in the autumn of 1907, confiding to his diary: ‘In a short time I have suffered a great deal and borne irreplaceable losses. I felt I didn’t have the strength to begin a new life. My religious feelings were weak. I dashed from one thing to another in the attempt to fill my life with something. For a time I plunged into private philanthropy … then I became passionately involved in my business…. For a while this filled my life, but only for a while.’
In the ancient monastery of St Catherine’s at Wadi el Deir in Sinai he encountered a healing experience. A young monk had pinned a copy of a Matisse to the wall and was trying to teach himself to paint like the Fauves, the famous ‘wild beasts’ of Paris who had shocked the art world in 1905 with canvases ablaze with primary colours – Matisse among them. Shchukin spent many hours with the monk, discussing art and religion, and on his return to Paris he sent a large supply of paint and brushes to Sinai.
Shchukin had bought his first Matisse in 1905 but a few months after his visit to the Holy Land he commissioned Matisse to paint a large canvas for his dining room, the holy of holies where his sixteen Gauguins hung. A commission is, of course, a more trusting and personal affair than a purchase since the commissioner does not know in advance how the work will turn out. Then in 1912, his eyes finally opened by pain, Shchukin began to buy Picassos – not easy Pink or Blue Period romance, but early Cubism and works full of harsh distortion inspired by primitive African sculptures.
Shchukin understood that with Picasso he was not buying decoration and excluded from his Picasso room the Baroque ornamentation that filled the rest of the house. There were plain walls, straight-back chairs, some African sculptures. The effect on his Moscow contemporaries was explosive. One Petr Pertsov recorded his experience:
It is theoretically inconceivable that a simple Still Life, a bottle, a vase with fruits, a pharmaceutical vessel – could be saturated with a feeling of world denial and immeasurable hopelessness. But go into the Picasso Room and you will see this miracle, there you will find a whole series of canvases that depict only these harmless objects and that breathe through their outlines such an unbearable depression, such a ‘grief of the last days’ that you will be seized by an involuntary horror.
The following year, pushing his new-found profundity to its limits, Shchukin commissioned Dance and Music from Matisse. He already knew the Matisse painting Joie de Vivre of 1906, which belonged to his American friends and fellow patrons, Leo and Gertrude Stein. In the back of it is glimpsed a tiny bacchanalian ring of dancers – the inspiration for Dance. The Steins also owned an oil sketch of Music, which Matisse had exhibited at the Salon d’Automne in 1907. Early in 1909 Shchukin commissioned Matisse to paint the companion paintings on a monumental scale to decorate the staircase of the Trubetskoy Palace. Then he started to get cold feet. On 16 March he wrote to Matisse: ‘I have taken three young girls (8, 9 and 10 years old) into my house – and here in Russia (we are somewhat Oriental here) one cannot show nudes to young girls. Make the same circle but with girls in dresses. And the same with Composition II.’ Matisse refused. Instead he sent his patron the completed panel of Dance. The strategy worked. On 31 March Shchukin wrote to him: ‘I find your panel the Dance of such nobility that I have decided to defy our bourgeois opinion and to place on my staircase a subject with nudes.’
However, that was not the end of it. Before finally shipping the two completed panels to Moscow, Matisse exhibited them at the 1910 Salon d’Automne and sparked an explosion of abuse. One newspaper cartoon showed a horrified mother gathering up her children and hurrying them out of the Salon. Shchukin was in Paris for the opening of the exhibition and experienced the furore. He lost his nerve again and bought a huge allegorical work by Puvis de Chavannes, Genius Instructing the Muses, from the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery to substitute for the Matisses on the staircase. However, on the long train journey back to Moscow he changed his mind one final, and historic, time and wrote to Matisse:
While travelling (two days and two nights) I pondered a great deal and came to feel ashamed of my weakness and lack of courage. One should not quit the field of battle without attempting combat. For this reason I have decided to exhibit your panels. People will make a clamour and laugh, but since I am convinced that you are on the right path, time will perhaps be on my side, and in the end I shall emerge victorious.
When the panels arrived, Shchukin still had misgivings about the flautist’s private parts, as displayed in Music, and supplied a remedy by painting them out with his own hand. When Matisse came to Moscow in 1911 to help rehang his paintings, Shchukin was overcome with trepidation. According to an account given by his son Ivan in 1974 to Beverly Whitney Kean, author of French Painters, Russian Collectors, a study of Shchukin and Morozov, Shchukin greeted Matisse in the hall, then watched anxiously while he looked at the panels. After a long silence the artist shrugged and said, ‘It doesn’t change anything.’ So that was that. Nothing, indeed, was changed until 1988 when the Hermitage curator Albert Kostanevich was invited to a Matisse symposium in Chicago. While preparing his account of the museum’s Matisses he asked the restoration department to take a look at what Shchukin had done to Music, and see if his interference could be reversed. It turned out that the offending area had been painted over with water-soluble gouache on top of the varnish. They took a sponge and cleaned it off.
In 1911 the Matisse paintings were gathered from all over the house and hung together in the drawing room with the artist’s help and advice. The Derains were hung in the former nursery, the Gauguins in the dining room, and the Monets in the music room. Shchukin ended up owning thirteen Monets, thirty-seven Matisses, sixteen Gauguins, five Degas, sixteen Derains, nine Marquets, four Van Goghs, eight Cézannes and fifty Picassos. From 1909 onwards he opened his house to the public every Sunday and a wealth of accounts testify to the impact it had on the young Russian artists of his day. Teachers from the Academy accused Shchukin of ‘corrupting’ youth but the artists, including Kandinsky and Malevich, who absorbed and adapted the lessons of Shchukin’s pictures, are now regarded as being among the pioneers of Modernism.
Shchukin remarried in 1915 and in 1917 sent his wife and baby daughter, illegally, to Weimar where they set up house and awaited events. He himself remained in Moscow where he was arrested in January 1918 and spent a few nights in a police cell. He moved briefly into the caretaker’s cottage in the grounds of his home, where he lived with his daughter Ekaterina, her husband and child. Under Decree Number 851 of 15 November 1918, the Trubetskoy Palace and its contents became ‘The First Museum of Modern Western Painting’. It was, in fact, the first museum in the world exclusively devoted to modern art. On 19 December the Morozov house became the ‘Second Museum of Modern Western Art’. Ivan Morozov was appointed assistant curator of his former collection.
Shchukin left Russia in August 1918 and, after living for a while in Weimar, made a home for his new family in Paris. He had kept some money abroad for buying paintings and the doll that his little daughter Irina had clutched on her way to Weimar was stuffed with the family jewels. They had enough to live on but not enough to buy art in any serious way. Denied his role as a patron, Shchukin shied away from the company of artists, though he bought a few cheaper works by newcomers such as Le Fauconnier and Raoul Dufy. Ivan Morozov, who left Russia in 1919, was one of the first visitors to the Shchukins’ modest Paris apartment. Already a sick man when he left Russia, he died in 1921. Shchukin, who managed to make a happier life for himself, did not die until 1936.
Shchukin made a French will in 1926, leaving ‘all his belongings’ to his three children. The Russian government was sharply reminded of this in 1954 when thirty-four of his Picassos were exhibited in Paris at the House of French Thought, a Communist Party institute. Irina Shchukin, who lived in France, went to court to claim them. The exhibition was closed and the paintings rushed to the Soviet embassy where they were protected by diplomatic privilege and could not be seized by the French police. They were secretly returned to Russia before the affair could develop into an international incident.
In June 1965, recognising the opportunities for détente offered by Krushchev’s conciliatory approaches to the West, Irina wrote to General de Gaulle, then President of France, to say that she had no further intention of claiming the paintings though she was not ‘renouncing her rights as heir’. After that, the Shchukin and Morozov paintings began to travel the world, gracing exhibitions all over Europe, America and Japan.
Political changes brought about by perestroika in Russia spurred Irina to further effort. On the eve of the great Matisse exhibition in Paris in 1993 she wrote to Boris Yeltsin to demand justice for her family. ‘My father desired to turn the Trubetskoy Palace into a museum,’ she told him, ‘which would belong to his beloved Moscow’. She went on:
As the prosperous head of the famous trading house ‘I. V. Shchukin and Sons’ he had no idea that he would be forced to flee from Russia, taking with him only the family valuables stitched into the stomach of my doll Tamara. He could also not foresee that after his death in exile in 1936, as a result of the division of the collection between the Hermitage and Pushkin Museums in 1948, the logic of his collection would be destroyed. He did not expect his collection to be shown to the public without any mention of its origins or that a visitor, marvelling at what he had seen, would have no way of discovering how it had reached Russia…
As the only one of the three heirs left living, I, without touching on the rights of the descendants of my late sister, am obliged to deal, as best I can, with the bequest of my father – both moral and material – and to try to decide what he would have wanted to happen at this time.
My heart dictates this reply: to preserve the collection as the cultural heritage of my country, Russia, but on the understanding that Sergey Shchukin and his heirs should no longer be humiliated and insulted. For that to be achieved, it is absolutely necessary that the criminal decree of 1918 should be annulled and that the Shchukin family should voluntarily present the collection to the city of Moscow, as its creator wished, observing all the reasonable conditions which I set out today to Maître Bernard Jouanneau, advocate of the Supreme Court of Paris, who is defending my interests.
M. Jouanneau ‘reasonably’ requested that the family should receive one per cent of the insurance value of the collection from the Russian government, a little matter of £10 million or so, and that their copyright in the reproduction of the paintings in all publications, worldwide, should be recognised – another nice little earner. They have not succeeded on either count – yet. In 1993 the French court ruled that ownership in this case must be determined by the law of the country in which the property is located, namely Russia. Irina appealed against the decision but died in 1995 before the appeal reached court. Neither the Shchukin or Morozov families have renounced their rights and the Hermitage requires stringent guarantees before showing them abroad.
Meanwhile, the paintings have achieved the very impact that Shchukin originally desired for them. His collection powerfully influenced the Russian avant-garde artists of the early twentieth century; it went on to influence the dissident artists of the 1950s and 1960s and its existence helps to explain why there were so many good artists in Russia in the 1970s and 1980s – most of whom moved to the West after perestroika made it easier for them to leave Russia.