‘Icons of Modern Art’: Picassos, Matisses, Monets, Oh, My!
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Version 0 of 1. 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.) 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. |