The Morozov collection at Fondation Louis Vuitton — Russia’s Silver Age shines again
The remarkable collection of French and Russian art acquired by two wealthy brothers is on show in Paris
When Mikhail Morozov visited fin de siècle Paris, he said he “ceased to be a tourist and became a human being”. It’s little wonder the Russian industrialist and art collector felt revitalised by the French capital. Born into a cultivated family whose fortune derived from textile mills, Mikhail and his brother Ivan had grown up in a Moscow beau monde of Impressionist artists and wealthy patrons whose efforts were forging a new avant-garde era known as Russia’s “Silver Age”. In the throes of post-Impressionist ferment, Paris must have felt like an even more thrilling nirvana.
From the time of his first visit to Paris in 1898 to his death at the age of 33 in 1903 — he was a notorious bon viveur — Mikhail built a collection of 39 French paintings, including works by Monet, Manet (the first to enter Russia), Renoir and Gauguin, and 44 by Russian artists. Meanwhile, between 1904 and 1914, his brother Ivan acquired 240 French works, including the first Picasso to enter Russia, and 430 Russian.
Now, the Morozov collection is on show at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, the first time all these works have travelled outside Russia. It is the second leg of a journey that began with the foundation’s 2016-17 display of the collection acquired by Sergei Shchukin, a businessman and contemporary of the Morozovs.
Shchukin — owner of 50 Picassos — was the braver buyer. But visitors to the foundation won’t be disappointed. The scene is set with portraits of the collector brothers. Painted by Valentin Serov, a full-length portrait of Mikhail hints at his excessive tendencies, buttons straining over his tailcoat.
Ivan’s portrait, by Impressionist Konstantin Korovin, boasts a fluid liveliness he lacked in reality. Unlike Shchukin, who welcomed Russian artists into his home to view the French contingent, Ivan hoarded his collection for his privileged circle. And while luxury was a leitmotif at home, for workers in his Tver factory, grim conditions provoked regular strikes.
Whatever his character defects, Ivan’s eye was impeccable. In 1908, his purchase ensured that “The Harlequin and his Companion” (1901) became the first Picasso to enter Russia. Showing Harlequin and his friend slouched over a café table, chins propped on their hands in bored melancholy, the image exemplifies the tension between estrangement and intimacy that shines through Picasso’s early work.
Next to it is “The Cork” (1878), which became the first Manet to enter Russia when it was bought by Mikhail in 1900. Showing two barflies, it testifies to the radical shift made by this French trailblazer away from stiff, academic idylls towards images of life in all its compelling, chiaroscuro imperfections.
It was risky to take such bold pictures — scandalous, even, in conservative Parisian circles — back to far more puritanical Moscow. Curator Anne Baldassari says that the Morozovs’ collection of nudes caused particular outrage. But the city’s artists longed for novelty. On show here, “Portrait of a Chorus Girl” (1883) — painted by Korovin after he returned from a trip to Paris — shows a full-lipped young woman in a rakish straw hat sprawled in front of leafy trees, her casual fearlessness echoing the artist’s rapid, blurry, shimmering brushstrokes.
In 1907, Ivan started to commission the monumental cycles that would transform his mansion on prestigious Prechistenka Street into a trendsetting domus. Our first sight of these brave new roomscapes are the paintings commissioned from Pierre Bonnard between 1910 and 1912 that adorned the staircase. The centrepiece here is “The Mediterranean”, a triptych of 4m-high panels showing a sun-washed, tree-shaded terrace stretching towards a glimmering azure sea, clearly designed to bring a slice of Côte d’Azur summer to a chill, grey Moscow afternoon.
It’s the long-hidden French gems that are this show’s treasure
Detached and inward, Cézanne could not be more different from the sensual, sun-worshipping Bonnard. Yet Ivan became a passionate collector of the Aix-en-Provence-based artist’s work. His Damascene moment came in 1907 at the Salon d’Automne in Paris, where a posthumous Cézanne retrospective included “Paysage Bleu” (1904-06). Showing Cézanne at his late zenith, the painting translates the Provençal landscape into a symphonic hymn of mottled blues with splashes of ochre and terracotta to hint that the day’s heat still simmers. Between 1907 and 1913, Ivan bought no fewer than 18 Cézannes.
It’s the long-hidden French gems that are this show’s treasure. There are two astonishing Van Goghs: “La Mer aux Saintes-Maries” (1888), a diminutive marine view whose zesty blues and whipped-cream whites prophesy the Fauvism that wouldn’t arrive for another two decades; and “The Prison Courtyard, Saint-Rémy” (1890), a tragic image of prisoners shuffling around a green-grey tower. Made after a drawing by Doré just two years after the life-affirming seascape, it was painted while Van Gogh was locked up in the Saint-Rémy asylum. Between them, these two images are a poignant witness to the turbulent psyche of this tormented talent.
Equally illuminating are the Matisses. A quartet of early still lifes — “The Bottle of Schiedam” (1896), “Blue Pot and Lemon” (1897), “Fruit and Coffee Pot” (1898) and “Blue Pitcher” (1901) — show the painter navigating away from Dutch-style grandeur towards the ecstatic chromaticism that, in the 1898 painting, transforms a fruit bowl into a sun-kissed festival of peachy pink, citron yellow and eau-de-nil.
By 1912-13, when Matisse painted his “Moroccan Triptych”, his surrender to pure colour was complete. In a palette of ultramarine, cobalt and turquoise, the paintings bind the north African sky, sea and architecture into a single radiant expression of sun-seared, ceramic-smooth blueness. It was acquired by Morozov with the assistance of Shchukin who, rather than being threatened, encouraged his fellow collector to buy bolder works.
This is not a flawless show. In 2021, to see Gauguin’s Tahitian paintings of pubescent, half-naked girls curated without so much as a nod to the creepy eroto-colonialism that underpins them, is unacceptable. And although Morozov called them the “pearls of his painting gallery”, the stylised panorama of flimsy, raspberry-skinned nudes ensures that the decorative cycle, “L’Histoire de Psyche” — commissioned from Nabis group painter Maurice Denis by Ivan for his Music Salon in 1907 — is a kitsch, reactionary, faux-Arcadian pastiche of the Renaissance cycle by Raphael on which they were based.
Yet the conservative anima of “Psyche” played a fascinating role in the rollercoaster journey the Morozov collection suffered after the Russian Revolution of 1917. When his collection was nationalised in 1918, Ivan fled to Finland before settling in Switzerland. In 1925, his Russian paintings were dispatched to Moscow’s Tretyakov Gallery.
In 1928, the collection was united with that of Shchukin as the State Museum of Modern Western Art, but a number of Denis panels were covered by Shchukin’s Matisse works. In 1937, when the Matisses were removed along with Fauvist and Cubist works because their “formalism” was deemed ideologically unacceptable, the “Psyche” cycle was reinstated.
Towards 1948, Stalin pulled the plug on the whole decadent enterprise. Squirrelled away in the Pushkin and Hermitage museums, the Morozovs’ paintings were not shown until after Stalin’s death in 1953 when some Impressionists found wall space. However, the later avant-gardes remained off-limits until the late 1960s and Morozov’s name was not mentioned until a show in 1981 at the Pushkin Museum.
In Paris, this story is recounted through documentary photographs of the Prechistenka mansion’s many transformations. But, shocked though we are by such suppression, we should remember that the freedom of Russian artists today is gravely at risk. President Vladimir Putin has written a note in the Louis Vuitton Foundation’s catalogue lauding Morozov’s “unique collection”. It’s a shame he is less compassionate towards contemporary dissident voices.