John Spurling’s review of French Painters, Russian Collectors appeared in the TLS of June 2, 1995.

Beverly Whitney Kean
FRENCH PAINTERS, RUSSIAN COLLECTORS
Shchukin, Morozov and modern French art 1890–1914

“My curiosity was aroused”, Beverly Whitney Kean writes in her preface, “when I first visited the Hermitage in Leningrad and the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow . . . . Who was responsible for galleries overflowing with the great early Matisses and Picassos, for major works by Gauguin, Van Gogh and Monet, displayed now without credit or explanation? No books had been written about this in the West. It was a fascinating mystery, a tale never explored, and I felt strongly that the story had to be told.” At the time of Kean’s visit, in the 1970s, the only official explanation could be that these extraordinary acquisitions had somehow been made by the genius of Soviet Man, if not by the Great Leader and Art Lover in person. But for Stalin, as for Hitler, such works had been horrible examples of Western decadence, and it was only gradually, after his death, that the paintings were brought out of storage and shown to the public at all. Ivan Chuikov, one of today’s leading contemporary Russian artists, has told me how, as a student and the son of a prominent Soviet Academy painter, he was once admitted to the storage room at the Pushkin Museum in the early 1950s and made dizzy by what he saw: an Aladdin’s Cave of colour and Cubism, the choice masterpieces of a twentieth-century artistic revolution which had been erased from history by the Soviet political revolution.

Kean solved her mystery and told her story in a book called All the Empty Palaces, published in 1983. But even then the existence of its two principal heroes, Sergey Shchukin and Ivan Morozov, millionaire textile merchants who had bought avant-garde French art before the First World War, when it was too advanced for most Western taste, was still only fitfully recognized in the Soviet Union. The book, written with the help of surviving members of Shchukin’s and Matisse’s families, made a stir among Russian cognoscenti and alarmed the authorities, who confiscated all the copies they came across; while in the West in its own way just as stodgily suspicious of ground-breaking books by authors without official standing it was little noticed and has now become almost impossible to obtain. This second edition, corrected and expanded in the aftermath of the Soviet era and retitled French Painters, Russian Collectors, is as welcome as it is still indispensable to anyone with even a passing interest in the history of Russian art.

For the story of how a few Russian merchants emerged from a backward society, in which their grandfathers had often been serfs, to become patrons and publicists for the most radical experiments in art ever made is embedded here, as it must be, in the whole development of Russian art, both before and after their intervention. In her early chapters, Kean sets out with succinct clarity the perennial rivalry between Slavophile Moscow and European-orientated St Petersburg; the old tradition of icon-painting presided over by the Orthodox Church and the comparatively recent one, started by Catherine the Great, of collecting Western masterpieces; the activities of “The Wanderers” (nineteenth-century realist nationalists approved of by the later Soviet Realists) and the counter-activities of Westernizers such as Diaghilev, Benois and Bakst.

Kean’s final chapters describe how the merchants’ collection survived the Revolution and the antipathy of Lenin, partly because, in the decade before the First World War when the collectors opened their treasures to public view, they directly influenced the new wave of Russian artists Malevich, Tatlin, Rodchenko, Goncharova, Larionov, etc, who believed, in those heady days, as did Lenin’s Commissar of Education, Lunacharsky, that the artistic and political revolutions were the same. It is ironic that Stalin’s fear of what the merchants had imported only made sure that two generations later Ivan Chuikov and others were exposed all over again to that same powerful influence, still unassimilated and therefore undiminished.

But at the heart of the book are the merchants themselves: not just Shchukin and Morozov, but also their many relations and competitors, including the self-effacing Pavel Tretyakov, who collected the work of native painters, and the overwhelming Savva Mamontov (“expansive, moody, cruel and generous”), whose patronage contributed to the early theatrical and musical successes of Diaghilev, Stanislavsky, Chaliapin, Mussorgsky, Borodin and Rimsky-Korsakov, as well as many of the Russian artists who designed their sets and costumes. The wealthy patrons and sponsors of our own day bear no comparison with these extraordinary pre-Revolutionary Russian capitalists. Some of the lesser figures supported and collected what was already known and admired, but the big ones brought to the arts the same vital entrepreneurial passion that had made and kept them rich, and they inspired energy and risk-taking in living artists as much as they rewarded it. Shchukin once said to his daughter, “If a picture gives you a psychological shock, buy it. It’s a good one.” He bought thirty-seven Matisses (the great Dance and Music panels commissioned specially for his own house in Moscow, others straight off the easel, when the artist himself was still doubtful about what he’d painted), sixteen Gauguins, sixteen Derains and constantly shocking himself almost as much as everybody else fifty Picassos. “He may have been”, writes Kean, “the only man who ever, at any time, owned more Picassos than Picasso.” Since he had long ago made a will leaving his whole collection to the city of Moscow, Shchukin did not attempt or wish to retrieve his possessions after they were appropriated by the Soviet authorities. He died as an exile in modest circumstances in France in 1936, his “Tsar’s gift”, as Benois called it, awaiting its time.

Kean’s book is original, carefully researched and meticulous, providing, for instance, complete lists of the collections of Ivan Morozov and his brother Mikhail, as well as Shchukin, but she is a collector herself and this is an enthusiast’s work as well as an art historian’s. It has the same qualities of passion, curiosity, sharp appraisal and controlled energy in taking trouble as its subjects, the Russian merchants. She is particularly good at putting the paintings and the people themselves into words (“Malevich was a skilled brawler”, she throws off); so that although small illustrations are included, they are almost unnecessary.French Painters, Russian Collectors is exactly the book which Kean looked about for in vain when she was first confronted with the mystery of the Hermitage and Pushkin masterpieces, and no visitor to Russia should leave without it.

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