Like many a man of the people, Joseph Stalin didn’t know much about art, but
he knew what he liked: brightly coloured canvases depicting the heroic deeds
of his Red Army. He admired realistic pictures that told a story: the
triumph of good communists over the evil Nazis, or the lifting of the
900-day siege of Leningrad. But what he couldn’t, and wouldn’t, fathom was
modern art. So when the Soviet leader inherited the greatest collection of
modern painting in the world, all confiscated from the bourgeoisie in the
revolution, he turned to his trusted friend and member of the Politburo,
General Voroshilov, for advice. Should he destroy it? Did this filthy French
art deserve to be shown? And who would want to look at the trashy Matisse or
Cézanne anyway? For a moment the fate of some of the world’s greatest
paintings hung in the balance.
The canvases, which included two of the most famous paintings of the 20th
century, The Dance and Music by Henri Matisse, had lain in storage for
decades. Art historians in the West had been searching for these
masterpieces for years. Had they been destroyed during the revolution? The
year was 1948 and Voroshilov was in charge of purging culture. He demanded
to see the Matisses. Together with Alexander Gerasimov, the president of the
USSR Academy of Arts and portraitist of Lenin, he inspected the pictures.
When Voroshilov saw the blue and terracotta hues and the nude figures
cavorting on the canvas, he burst out laughing: “Tee hee hee,” he chortled.
What lunacy. Detestable Matisse’s art might have been, but it wasn’t even
worth destroying. The paintings were safe.
That Stalin’s general considered the canvases to be beneath contempt is only
the first of many miracles in the story of modern art under the Bolsheviks.
In the aftermath of the Russian revolution, private collections, like the
great noblemen’s houses, were nationalised, giving rise to much looting and
destruction. Like a story from the Old Testament, these paintings survived
famine, fire and flood. Confiscated by Lenin’s commissars, The Dance, for
example, was seized as property of the state, neglected for years, then sent
to Siberia during the second world war and finally lodged in a storeroom
until long after it had ended. Such “degenerate” art – the communists
commandeering the same word that the Nazis had used in Germany – was not
shown again in Russia until after Stalin’s death in 1953. So when Matisse
died the following year, he went to his grave never knowing what had
happened to some of his greatest paintings.
Another miracle is that The Dance, together with masterpieces by Picasso,
Cézanne, Monet and Gauguin, is coming to London’s Royal Academy of Arts.
After protracted negotiations, with President Putin and Gordon Brown lending
support, Russia is letting some of its treasures out of the country. Last
month, the RA hardly knew where it stood. The paintings were coming; the
next day they weren’t. The Russians were said to fear the canvases might be
seized by the grandchildren of the original owners because British law could
not guarantee their safe passage in and out of the country.
A compromise was struck only after, in late December, the culture secretary,
James Purnell, announced he would fast-track new legislation concerning
anti-seizure laws – to provide any painting with a “safe passage” across
borders. The bill was due to be put before parliament later this year; owing
to pressure from Putin’s government, it has been brought forward – even
though all living descendants of the original owners long ago waived their
claims to restitution.
The Russians are understandably cautious. Three years ago some paintings they
had loaned to Switzerland were impounded. The paintings were returned only
after a legal dispute had been settled. So now, a fortnight before the
exhibition at the RA opens, all anyone can do is wait. “It’s been a
cliffhanger,” says Jennifer Francis, speaking for the gallery. “We’ll be
delighted when we see those crates arriving.”
For years after the revolution, Russia’s paintings didn’t leave the country.
It is only recently that the political climate has allowed Russian museums
to collaborate with their western counterparts in staging exhibitions. For
the first time in history, Russia’s four great state museums, the Hermitage,
the Russian, the Pushkin and the Tretiakov Gallery, are joining forces to
mount this blockbuster in the West. Long starved of funding, the museums
badly need the cash, and the energy-industry giant Eon has sponsored the
exhibition. The result is that over 150 paintings, half of them never seen
before in Britain, will go on view at the RA when From Russia: French and
Russian Master Paintings 1870–1925 opens later this month. Some of the
greatest works by Renoir, Cézanne and Van Gogh will hang alongside those by
Russia’s greatest modern artists, Chagall, Kandinsky and Malevich.
“These years are one of the most fertile and exciting periods in art history,”
says Ann Dumas, co-curator of the exhibition. “These pictures, so revered by
us, were completely cutting edge at the time.”
The exhibition will also reveal Russia’s rich history of plutocrats. Like
today’s collectors who buy Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst, it was the rich
merchants who bought modern art. And it was through two businessmen, Ivan
Morosov and Sergei Shchukin, that Russia became home to the greatest
examples of modern art. By 1914, for example, Shchukin, who made his fortune
in textiles, had accumulated 37 Matisses, 16 Gauguins, 16 Derains, four Van
Goghs, eight Cézannes and 50 Picassos. As one critic noted, he was perhaps
the only man to own more Picassos than Picasso himself. As for collecting,
he once said: “If a picture gives you a psychological shock, buy it. It’s a
good one.”
He must have spent his whole life in shock. Like Morosov, Shchukin lived for
art. He went to the office every day, but when he came home he would sit in
front of his pictures and fall into a trance – a bit like a husband in front
of the television. His friends recalled him spending up to two hours at a
time studying a picture. And he bought not because he wanted to display his
wealth, but because he loved art. For Matisse, whom he regarded as a close
friend, he was the perfect patron. “He was good because he always came
back,” said Pierre Matisse, Henri’s son.
Both Shchukin, born in 1854, and Morosov, born in 1871, were products of
Russia’s burgeoning middle class. Both families had built up enormous wealth
through textiles – Morosov employed 40,000 men in his mills. They could
afford to entertain on a lavish scale. One visitor recalls a stuffed bear at
the entrance to a room bearing a tray of caviar. One of Morosov’s brothers
would send his shirts to be laundered in London. Like the aristocrats they
aspired to be, this self-made, mercantile class tended to speak French, not
Russian, among themselves. Russian was used to command servants. Morosov
kept a box at the Bolshoi and tables booked permanently in all the best
restaurants. Shchukin was more extrovert, Morosov more reticent. The latter
was once described by the French dealer Ambrose Vollard as “the Russian who
never haggles”. In terms of spending, he and Shchukin were the Abramovich
and Berezovsky of their day, buying paintings the way modern oligarchs
acquire football teams.
The pair would shuttle between Paris and Moscow on spending sprees. Shchukin
met Matisse in 1906, and in the French capital they were part of the social
set centring around the cafes of Montmartre. With the arrival of Diaghilev’s
Ballets Russes, Paris was in the grip of Russian fever. Every restaurant
dish was suddenly prepared “à la russe”. In Montmartre on any given evening,
you would find Matisse, Shchukin and Morosov with dancers and artists such
as Leon Bakst and Alexandre Benois, who designed ballets for Diaghilev.
Through Matisse, Shchukin met Picasso, though they never became friends.
Picasso’s mistress Fernande Olivier once described the Russian as having an
“enormous head like the mask of a pig”, and the artist unkindly drew a
cartoon of him as a pig. Perhaps the Spaniard was miffed that the rich
Russian sought out Matisse, not him. Yet when Picasso ventured into cubism
and others stopped patronising him, it was Shchukin who kept buying. “This
is the future,” he once remarked when he saw the strange, distorted lines of
the new cubist style. As one of the great art dealers of the time, Daniel
Kahnweiler, said, “Shchukin was almost the only important collector of
avant-garde art.”
It was on one of these French forays that Shchukin introduced Morosov to
Matisse. Shchukin had bought his first picture, a Monet, in 1897, at the age
of 43. Friends but never rivals, the two merchants had different enough
tastes never to compete. Morosov was a cautious collector who took his time
making up his mind; Shchukin fell in love with paintings and just had to
have them. As the author Beverly Whitney Kean, who wrote a biography of the
two collectors, has commented, “They created a force which changed the face
of Russian art.”
That force, although frenzied, was to be brief. Domestic and political
upheaval would change the course of history and their ostentation was
doomed. Shchukin threw his money around, organising lavish dinners at his
Moscow mansion and ordering fabulous gowns from Worth in Paris for his wife,
Lidya. She despaired of his shopping trips – apart from the haute couture.
She dismissed Gauguin’s bare-breasted Tahitian lovelies as “pliant maidens”.
Perhaps her husband spent too much time contemplating them. She did,
however, commandeer a Cézanne “because it matched the wallpaper” in her
bedroom.
Their happiness was to be short-lived. The next few years would bring tragedy
and change. Shchukin’s youngest son committed suicide, and Lidya died in
1907 in her thirties. The following year his brother Ivan, who had bought
forged pictures, killed himself. Shchukin was quite alone.
He went abroad, to a monastery in the Sinai desert, for a spiritual retreat.
On his return he found solace in art. It gave him consolation, he once said,
“living in a picture”. Paintings, unlike wives, sons and brothers, could not
disappear.
No wonder he bought as never before, one afternoon purchasing 11 Gauguins. By
1909 he had bought so much, particularly from Gauguin and Cézanne, he opened
his house to the public. His extraordinary art collection made him one of
the most talked-about men in Moscow.
It was around this time that he decided to commission The Dance and Music from
Matisse in Paris. Later, however, he realised how much nudity they would
contain and sent a telegram cancelling his order. His detractors had long
accused him of corrupting Russian youth. He took this criticism seriously,
particularly because he was in the process of adopting three young girls,
distant relatives. But he soon recovered his nerve. The Dance duly arrived
and he was delighted. Not so the Establishment. When Valentin Serov, one of
Russia’s most prominent narrative painters, saw it, he said: “This is junk.”
The public seemed to agree that his collection was rubbish. Visitors gawped
and giggled. One scribbled over a Monet. Shchukin remained unperturbed,
acting as a guide. Yet most agreed with the man who had doodled on the
Monet, dismissing the modern art as meaningless graffiti. Stalin’s friend
Voroshilov would have exactly the same reaction about 40 years later.
But not everyone agreed the art was worthless. Shchukin’s house soon became
the centre of the Russian avant-garde. A salon, which included the artists
Tatlin, Larionov, Goncharova and Malevich, grew. His paintings became a
radicalising force, annoying the Establishment even more. Art professors
hated the effect he had on their students. “Everyone is seething in his own
way,” wrote one. “They want to catch up with Paris and they don’t want to
study. After all this hot pepper, school fare is not to their liking.”
There was to be no more hot pepper anyway. The outbreak of the first world war
brought a halt to their purchases, and both Morosov and Shchukin
concentrated on their businesses.
In 1918 the Bolshevik government nationalised industries, putting an end to
private enterprise. Both merchants planned to leave Russia. When looting
broke out during the revolution, Shchukin, who had remarried, sent his new
wife and child to safety in Germany. As a caviar capitalist and the most
high-profile collector in Russia, he knew he could not stay. He had heeded
Lenin’s pronouncement: “Art for us is like an appendix. In time we shall cut
it out.”
That same year his private collection was nationalised too, his house later
becoming part of the State Museum of Modern Western Art. For a while,
Shchukin swallowed his pride, moving into the caretaker’s lodge and acting
as guide and curator. But in the summer of 1918 he fled Moscow with a train
ticket to Kiev, a false passport and a doll stuffed with diamonds.
Morosov, meanwhile, whose 300-strong collection of Monets, Bonnards, Gauguins
and Cézannes had also been seized, was forced to work as deputy keeper of
his collection, taking the proles around his beloved pictures. But when he
received orders to move into the basement, he fled with his wife and
children to Switzerland. He died three years later at the age of 50, no
doubt broken by the loss of his homeland and his collection.
If Shchukin, who had settled in Paris, was similarly depressed, he did not
show it. But he shunned many of his old friends, including Matisse. He
stopped buying art, save for the occasional cheap Dufy. “I am no longer in a
position to buy,” he wrote to Matisse. It was as if the Russian was only
happy playing the part of rich patron. Matisse would later say of their long
collaboration: “It took sheer nerve to paint in this manner and it took
sheer nerve to buy.” But in exile, Shchukin had lost everything.
With the two merchants gone from Russia, their collections were amalgamated
and housed in Morosov’s old mansion. Shchukin’s home, meanwhile, became the
Ministry of War. But even Morosov’s house could not contain the 600 or so
pictures. Many were sent to the Hermitage but not shown. In a remark typical
of the time, Gerasimov said: “If anyone dares to show Picasso, I shall hang
him.” Modern painting was seen as an embarrassment. Art was the product of a
diseased bourgeoisie. The men who had bought such filthy examples of
decadence were labelled as parasites, and the names of Morosov and Shchukin
were obliterated from history.
Marxists began their own evaluation of modern painters. Gauguin was derided as
a “mere hedonist” who ignored the realities of colonial exploitation;
Matisse’s work was dismissed as “mere decoration”. The only one who came in
for praise was that man of the people Van Gogh. While the modernists’ stock
fell, that of Russian realists such as Repin, Serov and Levitan, some of
whose pictures are also coming to London, soared.
With the outbreak of the second world war, the pictures at the western art
museum were sent to Novosibirsk in Siberia. Once peace was restored, Stalin
ordered the museum’s dissolution, and its contents were divided between the
Pushkin in Moscow and the Hermitage in Leningrad. They were not shown again
until after his death. Now these galleries attract millions of visitors a
year, and the names of Morosov and Shchukin have been restored.
Like Matisse, Shchukin died not knowing what had happened to his precious
pictures. To the casual observer, he was just one of many Russian émigrés
living out their retirement in France. Shortly before he died in 1936, he
was approached by an artist, Le Fauconnier, whose work he had bought several
years before. He wanted to buy back one of his paintings from Shchukin and
present it to the Hermitage as a gift. The old Russian merely shook his head
and smiled: “I think I have given enough.” s
From Russia: French and Russian Master Paintings 1870-1925 is at the Royal
Academy of Arts, London, from January 26 to April 18. Deirdre Fernand travelled
to St Petersburg and Moscow with Cox & Kings, www.coxandkings.co.uk
