By Susannah Edelbaum, to Museum Spotlight Europe (March 2021)
From May 12th to October 10th this year, 200 works from the joint Mikhail and Ivan Morozov Collection of both French and Russian modern art will be on view at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, the fashion house’s vast Frank Gehry-designed exhibition space adjacent to the leafy environs of Paris’s Bois de Boulogne. For many of the works, which encompass masterpieces by Monet, Renoir, Matisse, Bonnard, Picasso, Gauguin, Rodin, and Degas, among others, this marks their first instance back in France since they were sold out of the country more than a century ago.
The Morozovs
In 1821, Savva Morozov, a Russian serf, used the profits of his small silk-weaving workshop to purchase freedom for himself and his four sons from landowner Nikolai Ryumin, a member of the Russian nobility. The family’s newly achieved independence turned out to be the first step in a spectacular rags-to-riches transformation into one of the wealthiest families in Russia, a dynasty of factory owners, businessmen, philanthropists, and art patrons.
By the end of the 19th century, Morozov’s grandson, also named Savva, had become a textile magnate, resident of the most expensive home in Moscow, and a major shareholder of the Moscow Art Theatre. By the early 20th century, two of the first Savva’s great-grandsons, industrialists Mikhaïl Abramovitch Morozov and Ivan Abramovitch Morozov, were among the foremost collectors of French modern, Impressionist, and avant-garde art in the world.
The Morozov Exhibition
On loan from the Pushkin State Museum in Moscow, the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, and the State Tretyakov Gallery museums, there are presently no further plans for The Morozov Collection to travel together elsewhere outside Russia. Enthusiasts of this period would thus do well to make their way to Paris to catch the exhibition if at all possible, as it offers a rare opportunity to take in these masterpieces without needing to obtain a Russian travel visa (a time-consuming, paperwork-laden, and not inexpensive process). Furthermore, the show is an unusual chance to view these works assembled all together under one roof, which at the Fondation is itself a spectacular wave-like confection that visitors won’t want to miss.
To those familiar with turn-of-the-century French masters or Paris’s recent history of blockbuster exhibitions, the background of the Morozov show likely sounds familiar. From October 22nd, 2016 to March 5th, 2017, a similar collection of paintings, including icons like Henri Matisse’s L’Atelier du peintre, were displayed in France for the first time since they’d left the country over 100 years prior. Likewise curated by Anne Baldassari, Icons of Modern Art: The Shchukin Collection saw 130 works by French artists including Monet, Picasso, Gauguin, and Cézanne make a once-in-a-century journey to the Fondation Louis Vuitton as part of a then-ongoing cooperative France-Russia cultural tourism program. In another overlap with the Morozov collection, the Shchukin works were all loaned from the Pushkin State Museum, the State Hermitage Museum, and the State Tretyakov Gallery—in fact, the Fondation Louis Vuitton show represented the first time these particular 130 pieces were displayed all together since 1948. The Shchukin Collection exhibition was a critical hit, attracted 1.3 million visitors, and had to be extended by several weeks due to widespread public interest. The Morozov Collection has thus been conceived as the third installment of the Fondation’s Icons of Modern Art exhibition series (the second was 2019’s The Courtauld Collection, A Vision for Impressionism).
The most significant common thread between the Morozov and Shchukin shows, however, are the pieces’ original collectors. The 2016-2017 exhibit paid tribute to Sergei Shchukin, a Moscow-based merchant and major early 20th century art patron who was both a contemporary of and rival to the Morozovs. He was one of Matisse’s principal collectors; the second version of the artist’s iconic painting La Danse (the first hangs in New York’s Museum of Modern Art), for example, was a work commissioned for Shchukin’s mansion. The exhibition at the Fondation Louis Vuitton honored Sergei’s vision and accomplishments as a collector of French artists, and now, in a sort of spiritual follow-up, the Morozov exhibition seeks to do the same for Ivan and Mikhaïl.
History of the Morozov Collection
Though both shows are named for the original collectors of their contents, however, neither the descendants of the Morozovs nor Shchukin are in possession of their ancestors’ art. In 1918, both Sergei Shchukin and the Morozovs had their mansions and art collections seized and nationalized by Russia’s new Bolshevik government.
Curiously, the second Savva Morozov, who once rejected a title offered him by the Russian Tsar, supported an early stage of the Russian Revolution in 1905. Shchukin, meanwhile, was supposedly barely taken aback when his collection was nationalized, having allegedly bought it all to educate his country’s citizens on its artistic value. And the revolutionary government indeed made both collections initially available for public consumption, having ordered them to the newly founded State Museum of Modern Western Art, established in Ivan Morozov’s own former Moscow mansion.
There they comprised the heart of the institution’s fledgling collection until 1948, when Stalin closed the museum during his campaign against so-called Cosmopolitanism. The works were placed into storage and only occasionally seen when they were loaned out for exhibitions abroad. (The Shchukin heirs have so far unsuccessfully used these trips to attempt restitution, by initiating lawsuits in the countries where institutions temporarily host works formerly owned by Sergei. For the Fondation Louis Vuitton exhibit, an advance agreement against any attempt at restitution was reached prior to the exhibit.) Later, during the Kruschev era, pieces from these collections once again began to work their way into view on exhibit at the Russian institutions where they were stored, and which retain ownership of them today.
On collecting sprees in France, the Morozovs took advice from Paris’s most well-known art dealers of the time, including Paul Durand-Ruel, Ambroise Vollard, and Georges Bernheim, ultimately acquiring over 250 paintings and sculptures. While the upcoming exhibition is a groundbreaking assemblage of many works from their 250-piece collection of Impressionist and Modern French masterpieces, lest we disregard the true breadth of the Morozovs’ preferences as collectors, the show will also feature a variety of their Russian paintings (of which they owned more than 400), including work by the avant-garde artists Natalia Goncharova, Kazimir Malevich, and Ilya Mashkov.
Furthermore, the show will also be the first and only opportunity outside Russia to visit the Music Room from Ivan Morozov’s former Moscow mansion. The installation, otherwise permanently on display at the State Hermitage Museum, is being shown at the Fondation Louis Vuitton as a finale to the presentation of The Morozov Collection.
This exhibition is special for so many reasons: it’s a chance to see work by masters once again displayed in the country that gave birth to them, to observe these iconic pieces all together as their brilliant collectors sought to do in their own homes, and finally, it’s a means to further an understanding of the artistic value that the Morozovs’ collecting habits, unique to the era, helped create. After all, Matisse, for example, was still considered an embarrassment when these Russian industrialists began seeking out his work. Today it’s a given that the artist’s paintings are among the most sought-after masterpieces in the world. The beauty of a rare show like The Morozov Collection is that it brings together the visual fruits of long-ago decisions that were instrumental in making this so.
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