PARIS
— The history of collecting, the development of painterly style, the
changing fortunes of individuals and nations: You will think about all
these things on your second go-through of “Icons of Modern Art: The Shchukin Collection,” which opened last week at the Fondation Louis Vuitton here.
Your first visit will probably elicit another, less intellectual reaction: dumbstruck awe.
This titanic exhibition
assembles 127 works of French painting — by Monet, van Gogh, Gauguin,
Matisse, Picasso and many more artists on the Modernist hit parade —
that belonged to the Russian textile magnate Sergei Shchukin
(1854–1936).
He
acquired them in a concentrated buying spree of just 15 years, and
displayed his collection in a palace in Moscow — capped by “Dance” and
“Music,” the monumental panels that stand among Matisse’s boldest works.
By 1918, though, Lenin was in the Kremlin, Shchukin had gone into
exile, and the collection was nationalized and dispersed; some works ended up in Siberia.
The group’s partial reassembly here amounts to the blockbuster of
blockbusters, and a welcome coda features works by Kazimir Malevich,
Aleksandr Rodchenko and other artists whose study of Shchukin’s French
pictures was decisive for the development of the Russian avant-garde.
“Icons
of Modern Art” has been curated by Anne Baldassari, the former director
of the Musée Picasso. Beyond its historical consequence, “Icons” is
also a monster exercise in cultural diplomacy and legal wrangling, and
one that has not gone wholly according to plan. The principal holders of
Shchukin’s paintings — the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, in
Moscow, and the State Hermitage Museum, in St. Petersburg — have been
loath to collaborate in the past, and previous loans to institutions in
Western Europe have occasioned restitution claims from Shchukin’s heirs.
(“We are the victims of the holdup of the century,” one of his
grandsons told The New York Times last month.)
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It’s
taken some serious glad-handing, and the intervention of two national
governments, to reconvene works last seen together before the Russian
Revolution. The cost of presenting so many inestimable paintings outside
Russia is undisclosed but astronomical. Insurance and shipping alone
would be beyond the reach of Paris’s public museums; it fell to Bernard Arnault, the richest man in France and the president of the Fondation Louis Vuitton, to foot the bill.
The
capstone was meant to be an inaugural visit from Vladimir V. Putin,
alongside his French counterpart, François Hollande. (Mr. Putin was also
to dedicate an ostentatious new Russian Orthodox cathedral, hard by the
Eiffel Tower, which Parisian wags have nicknamed “St. Vladimir’s.”)
But this month, after Russia vetoed a French-drafted resolution at the
United Nations Security Council that sought to end the bombing of
Aleppo, Syria, Mr. Hollande characterized the Russian-backed strikes as “war crimes.”
A few days later, Mr. Putin’s visit was called off, though both
presidents have written introductions for this show’s cinder block of a
catalog.
Over
more than a dozen uncluttered galleries on four floors, Ms. Baldassari
plots Shchukin’s acquisitions as Europe tips into war, though she
ruptures the timeline with some thematic presentations, like a gallery
of portraits and self-portraits that opens the show. Cézanne broods.
Gauguin flashes his teeth. Amid them are two portraits of Shchukin, done
by the lesser-known Norwegian expressionist Xan Krohn, that translate
him into blocky zones of color. In the full-length portrait, he appears
in a gray morning coat, hands clasped before his waist; he stoops, he
appears shy. The bold background of orange and white rhombuses only
hints at his avant-garde sensibilities.
Indeed,
Shchukin’s first purchases were creditable but benign, including a
whiff of Romanticism: a lakeside enchanted castle by the Scottish
painter James Paterson. Landscape, though, an early passion, led him to
Claude Monet. He acquired a preparatory version of Monet’s “Luncheon on
the Grass” of 1866 — the uptight, unfinished cousin of Manet’s painting
of the same title, in which a dozen Parisians practice the new bourgeois
art of doing nothing. (Where Manet’s women got naked, Monet’s clung to
their petticoats.) “Luncheon on the Grass” foreshadows a clutch of major
Impressionist Monets, including an 1886 portrayal of the Normandy coast
as a milky field of periwinkle squiggles, and one of the finest of his
London impressions, done in 1904, featuring the Houses of Parliament
festooned with calligraphic sea gulls.
In
many cases he bought, despite his reservations — and would waver in the
face of his own uncertain taste. After “Dance” and “Music” netted
Matisse terrible reviews at the 1910 Salon d’Automne, Shchukin backed
out of acquiring them; then, via telegram, he changed his mind again and
renewed his purchase. (After they arrived in Moscow, he wrote to
Matisse, “I hope to come to like them one day.”) He was plotting out,
first for himself, and later for the Russian public, how form would
become paramount in Modern painting, and how illusionism would give way
to a new artistic autonomy. It was a didactic approach, at odds with our
stereotypes of private collectors as pleasure seekers or investors.
All
of Shchukin’s purchases were meant for display at the Trubetskoy
Palace, where he lived and which he opened to artists, students and the
Russian intelligentsia by 1908. Large graphics outside the galleries
here evoke the original presentation; in the dining room, for example,
more than a dozen paintings by Gauguin were jammed against one another
on a single wall. The 11 Gauguins here — above all, “Aha Oé Feii? (What,
Are You Jealous?),” a double portrait of languorous Tahitian women from
the summer of 1892 — constitute a high point of this show, though many
of them discomfited Shchukin, who was skeptical of nudes. He acquired
them anyway. “If a picture gives you a psychological shock,” he said,
“buy it. It’s a good one.”
Sometimes
that rule was too hard to obey. Shchukin passed on Picasso’s “Les
Demoiselles d’Avignon,” whose ghoulish prostitutes were too shocking
even for him, though he would soon fill the Trubetskoy Palace with more
than 50 of that artist’s works. “Three Women,” a tamer counterpart to
the “Demoiselles,” from 1908, was bought from the siblings Gertrude and
Leo Stein. Several cunning works of synthetic Cubism, such as a still
life with a bottle of Pernod from 1912, have been paired here with
later, purely abstract works by the Russian avant-garde, like Lyubov
Popova’s architectonic layerings of colored panes.
More
than Picasso, though, it was Matisse for whom Shchukin’s patronage
would prove decisive. Down and out in Paris, Matisse found in this
Russian patron much more than a reliable buyer; thanks to his textile
business, Shchukin sympathized with Matisse’s deepening interest in
decorative arts, and stood by him as he moved into a phase of piercing
color. The 22 works by Matisse here are, on their own, a reason to visit
this exhibition, though neither “Dance” nor “Music” was able to travel
here. Their absence is made even worse by this show’s one major
miscalculation: a cheesy video feature, from the filmmakers Peter
Greenaway and Saskia Boddeke, featuring a mustachioed Shchukin speaking
Russian-accented French alongside writhing dancers imitating Matisse’s
boogieing nudes.
Don’t
waste a second watching it, not when you could be upstairs with “Red
Room (Harmony in Red),” the 1908 thunderclap that began Matisse’s great
post-Fauvist period. You may think you know it from a thousand dorm room
posters, but no reproduction can capture the depth of the vermilion
wallpaper streaking down right onto the table —or the sufficiency of
color alone to negate the old rules of representation.
When
Shchukin commissioned it for his dining room, the one with the wall of
Gauguins, its title was to be “Harmony in Blue.” Matisse delivered a
work in a different color, but Shchukin didn’t mind. Personal taste, he
knew, was a flimsy ground on which to build a collection; better to
trust the artists.
“Icons of Modern Art” is on view through Feb. 20 at the Fondation Louis Vuitton; fondationlouisvuitton.fr.
A version of this review appears in print on October 29, 2016, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Picassos, Matisses, Monets, Oh, My!.
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