Patrick Bade
The Collectors: Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov

Patrick Bade | The Collectors: Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov | 06.29.22

Visuals displayed throughout the presentation.

- This amazing looking structure is the Louis Vuitton Centre, which is in the Bois de Boulogne at the west side of Paris, looks a bit like a spaceship that’s crashed into the park. I have to say that I don’t find it very satisfactory as an exhibition space inside. And I enjoy winding up my French friends by saying that it’s the biggest waste of space since the Palace of Versailles. They always go, “Oh, .” But certainly, I think the two most exciting exhibitions that I’ve seen since the millennium have both been in this building and they’re between 2019 and 2022, two enormous exhibitions devoted to the Russian collectors, Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov. And without doubt, they were the greatest collectors of modern art in the period between 1900 and 1914. Of course, they had limitless money. That seems to be a fairly constant. In the history of Russia, you have these people with absolutely enormous resources, but they also had, I would say, extraordinary courage in the things that they bought. They were very uninhibited by any kind of traditional artistic values. They were prepared to look at everything new. So the first thing I want to say about them is that they were not Jews. And you may say, “Well, why even mention that?”

And I mention it because so many of the movers and shakers in the early history of modern art, particularly in this decade before the First World War, I won’t say they were Jews, they were of Jewish origin, the collectors, the dealers, the critics and as we’ve seen over the last couple of weeks, eventually also many of the artists. Now, if you’re interested in this phenomenon and why this happened, I would recommend once again, Charles Dellheim’s excellent book, “Belonging and Betrayal.” I’ve talked about it many times before. And he really explores this phenomenon of the Jewish involvement in early modern art. And as I said, these two men were not Jews, but there are certain parallels. Their money was new money. Their money came from trade and from manufacture and so they were not insiders in Russian height society. They were not aristocrats and I think that’s an important fact to remember. So here they are. That’s Sergei Shchukin on the left-hand side and Ivan Morozov on the right-hand side. And then to start with Shchukin, and the Shchukin exhibition in 2019 was the first of the two great exhibitions. And he didn’t actually make his money, he inherited, or he may have made more money, but he came from a very rich family.

And, in fact, it’s true of both of them that they were born into grand mercantile families, but it was recent fortunes. And so it was actually relatively, you know, he was into middle age, I suppose, before he really got into art. He went to Paris in 1897 and he fell in love with a Monet. He bought a Monet and that was the start of his interest in modern art. This is the interior of his palace in Moscow. You can see very blingy indeed. And the interior decoration is what you might call tulle Louis. Furniture is largely Louis Canes. And so in a way, it’s a bit strange to see these very radical modern paintings, these Matisses hanging in such a blingy interior. This is what it looked like after the revolution, when, as we show here, both the Shchukin and the Morozov Collections were confiscated by the Russian state, and they were eventually amalgamated. Now I should say, ‘cause these two exhibitions Shchukin, Morozov, they were the hot ticket in Paris and they had to extend the length of the exhibitions. They had to open up the exhibitions far into the night to accommodate all the people who wanted to see the exhibitions. And the two great selling points, well, first of all, is the unbelievable quality of the art in both collections. But also it was going to be a unique opportunity to see each collection as it was originally formed.

Because as I said, later on, after they were confiscated, the collections were, first of all, amalgamated and then they were divided between museums in St. Petersburg and Moscow. So even if you go to Russia, you can’t see either collection as it was originally put together. And the other selling point, which is even more true now, of course, is that the Russians said this was the last time this art was ever going to be let out of the country. And, as I speak, the Morozov Collection, it’s actually still in France 'cause it’s obviously, at the moment it’s not really possible to transfer such a vast and valuable collection back to Russia. So I think it’s in storage at the Russian Embassy in Paris. So Shchukin landed up buying 13 Monets, including this very important picture from the 1860s. This is actually just pre-impressionist. Impressionism really got going in the summer of 1868. It was a kind of sudden breakthrough for money and ennui. So this is quite a large scale picture. There are two versions. There’s an even larger version that Monet eventually cut up and it’s now exists in a fragmentary state. But he was already in the 1860s very preoccupied with trying to paint in the open air. This was quite a new thing. An artist had painted little sketches in the open air early in the century, Constable and so on, famous for his open air sketches.

But trying to paint a whole picture in the open air was a new thing and it was facilitated by the invention of collapsible metal tubes of paint that enabled an artist to take a box of a wide variety of colours with him out into the open air. It was a huge challenge, really, a logistical challenge to paint a picture on this scale entirely out of doors. So this is certainly a very, very important picture in the early history of impressionism. And of course, Monet was still alive, he was still painting. He lived until 1926 and Shchukin continued to take an interest in him. And in 1904 he bought this picture, which probably the paint was not even fully dry, 'cause as you can see, it’s dated 1901. And it’s one of a series of paintings that Monet created over several years, around 1900. When he first came to London in the winter of 1870, he was incredibly impressed by the London smogs. I can still just remember the last of the London smogs, what they used to call pea soupers, which were caused partly by conditions. And the south of England does tend to be foggy because of the Gulf Stream, but the famous notorious smogs of London were of course pollution, and they were caused by the burning of coal. Well, I remember how beautiful London looked, actually. It was magically transformed by these smogs and as I said, Monet was very impressed.

And by 1900, thanks to American collectors and now Russian collectors, he was quite a wealthy man and he could afford to stay in the best hotel in London, which was The Savoy Hotel. He took a suite on the fifth floor, and there are many pictures that are painted from The Savoy Hotel, but as you can see, this one is actually painted from the other side of the river. It was painted from St. Thomas’s Hospital where he was also allowed to set up a studio. This fabulous late Degas, it’s difficult to date precisely with Degas, but I think this will have been made in the 1890s or even around 1900, and you can see it’s a pastel. Degas liked a pastel for two reasons really. Pastel, which had been developed as an artistic medium in the 18th century, and then rather went out of fashion then was revived at the end of the 19th century. Degas liked it because you could draw directly in colour and also he apparently found that he, this is a big, big work, a large scale work, and by this time, he was almost blind. So a work like this had to be made as much from memory as from direct observation. And as he went into blindness and old age, the work become more and more vibrant. He’s for me, an artist who rarely puts a foot wrong.

Whereas, you know, other impressionists, you can say they had their good days, their bad days, their good phases, bad phases, Degas is nearly always interesting and these late pastels are quite extraordinary. The colour is almost hallucinatory. So he did collect impressions, he also had three Renoirs, but it’s really the post-impressionist onwards that formed the great strength of this collection. And he had no less than 16 Gauguins. Oh, I suppose by the time he started collecting him, in fact, Gauguin had just died. He died in 1903. And of course, when an artist dies, prices begin to rise. So I don’t think these were bargains. I think he had to pay substantial amount of money for these pictures. And there are photographs, I couldn’t find one unfortunately on the internet to show you, but there are photographs that show how these pictures were originally exhibited in his Moscow palace. And he set them up on a screen, what the Russians call an iconostasis, but it’s a screen called The Display of Icons. And I find that interesting because it also gives you, I think, a clue as to why these Russians were so much more open to the innovations of modern art than people were in many other countries. I think it’s because Western art for the Russians was for a tiny, tiny elite of the aristocracy and the tradition of the icon continued well into the 19th century.

The icon, which NEP doesn’t even attempt to give you an illusion of the real world, it’s an abstraction, it’s an equivalent, it’s a symbolic thing. So as modern artists, the post-impressionists, Gauguin, for instance, began to turn away from the Western tradition, going back to the renaissance of trying to mirror the real world, they moved into something flatter, more abstracted. Many people found that difficult, but the Russians seem to have found it easier to accept. This is the most unbelievably sumptuous gorgeous picture by Gauguin, the title is, well, it has a Tahitian title, which I won’t even try to pronounce, but Gauguin of course had two phases in the South Seas and sort of went semi native, but probably not as much as he’d like us to think he did. I mean, he was still eating Western food and very dependent really on Western things and contacts with Europe. And he certainly never learned to speak fluent Tahitian. But he liked to put these Tahitian titles, Tahitian language onto his pictures. I think probably because he wanted people to feel that he was living in some magical, far away non-European paradise. In fact, Tahiti wasn’t a bit like that. It was a very sordid, horrible little French colony, which had been completely ruined by alcohol, Western diseases and also by Christian missionaries who were forcing… You didn’t see women wandering around nude like this in Tahiti Gauguin’s day, 'cause the missionaries had forced them to put on clothes that were often very unhygienic and weren’t good for them.

So it’s a fantasy. Sad to say Tahiti was not this sensuous, gorgeous paradise that Gauguin would have us believe. So another major post-impressionist, Cezanne, he had eight Cezannes. This is I suppose the largest and most important. Rather strange picture, really, of two figures in commedia dell'arte costume. I think it’s a impressive rather than a likeable picture. He had this magnificent van Gogh of Dr. Rey. This is painted at the end of 1888, just after the notorious incident with the ear. Gauguin was van Gogh’s house guest, definitely the house guest from Hell, very unpleasant person, and tremendous tensions built up between them. I’m sure you know the story. And eventually van Gogh erupted in anger and he pulled out a cutthroat razor and he chased Gauguin around the house. And when Gauguin fled, he either cut off part of his ear or all of his ear through different versions of that, and he needed hospital treatment. And he was given very sympathetic treatment by this man, Dr. Rey. And in gratitude, van Gogh made this portrait and gave it to him.

Well, you know, he thought, “Oh, my God, what is this? Do I want this?” I think he didn’t want it. He obviously found it horrible and grotesque. And he actually had it in a chicken coop at the back of his house for some years, and then eventually put it into his attic. And then of course, the legend of van Gogh grew after his death and an artist, a Fauve artist, called Camoin, Charles Camoin, was asking about van Gogh and that’s where the doctors said, “Oh, I’ve got this picture in the attic, do you want it?” And he bought it for a pittance and then he sold it to the famous dealer, Vollard, no doubt at a considerable profit. Vollard sold it onto the Berlin dealer, Cassirer, no doubt at a many, many times greater profit. And eventually, I’m sure for a very substantial sum, it was so sold to Shchukin. Another really surprising thing for a Russian collector of this period to like was the work of Henri Rousseau. And Rousseau, also alive, he could have bought pictures directly from him and he owned seven paintings by Rousseau, including this very characteristic jungle scene. But perhaps, no, he had two great triumphs, really, his appreciation, his discovery of Picasso and Matisse. And so here you see in, I’m not sure if this is before the revolution or after the revolution.

His palace, of course, was initially commandeered as a museum for Western art. So it could be, I think it’s still in his palace maybe of the revolution. You’re looking here at a whole, well, there’s one Rousseau I can see top right-hand side. Everything else here is by Picasso and he was interested… Of course, Picasso was a constantly evolving artist. That’s one of the things that makes Picasso so fascinating, makes him so great. You know, Picasso, he said, “Most other artists, they spend their early years making a kind of mould and then they spend the rest of their career baking cakes in that mould.” Picasso never did that. Picasso was always up for something new. And the changes in his art between 1900 and 1914 are absolutely extraordinary. So the insert you can see top left is a work from 1900. So he’s only about 20 years old. He’s just arrived in Paris and it’s in a style that owes something to Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Steinlen, two illustrators of low life in Paris in 1900. You can see it in the photograph just to the right of the insert. But we can follow through every stage. These are where you can see synthetic cubist and we can see analytical cubist, the big pictures here. And I can see a couple of synthetic cubist pictures in the corner.

This is a blue period picture 1902. He went through this phase where he was extremely depressed. He had been very much affected by the suicide of his best friend, Casagemas, and probably also felt very guilty because it seems that he was probably sleeping with his best friend’s mistress, and that could even be a factor in the suicide. So he certainly goes through a very dark, very depressed phase where the pictures are dominated by the colour blue and they all show very depressed people and low-life images. And this is a woman sitting alone in a cafe with a glass of absinthe, which is a way to really zonk yourself, really to completely cut yourself off in the world with this highly alcoholic and even toxic drink. Then 1904, '05 into 1906, you have the Rose Period, still with a certain, the mood lightens a little bit, as does the palette of course, but it’s rather chalky, rather sweet colours, pale blues, pale pinks, a debt to the symbolist artist Pierre de Chavannes. I think the racing in the background is pretty well a quote from Degas, but it’s already very, very Picasso. You’re not going to mistake it for anybody else despite the influences and the borings. And they have a delicate poetic quality. They’re amongst, I think, the most accessible in these days, the most popular of all Picasso’s paintings. And, whoa, oh, this might be 1905, this is two or three years later.

Wow, what’s happened? And what has happened is his discovery of, in inverted commas, “primitive art,” his discovery of African masks, and of course the great breakthrough painting of the “Demoiselles d'Avignon,” which is 1907. You know, you look at Picasso or you could, not just Picasso, because the “Demoiselles d'Avignon” was just such a watershed picture in the early history of whatnot. He didn’t exhibit it for several years after he painted it, but it was sitting there in his studio, in the Bateau Lavoir studio that I have shown you over the last couple of lectures, and there were many other artists in the complex of the Bateau Lavoir. And lots and lots of artists of the Paris were going to visit Picasso studio and would’ve seen the “Demoiselles d'Avignon,” and it has an extraordinary impact on the development of modern art. And then we follow through into cubism proper. Well, this is an early example of what’s called analytical cubism, where the paintings are nearly monochromatics, not a lot of colour. The colour is drained out of these pictures. Some are actually monochromatic. And we have these sort of geometrical forms that gave rise to the name cubism and it was almost like reality seen through a fractured mirror.

This is the analytical phase of cubism. And round about 1911, this is a painting of 1912, we’ve got a synthetic, actually, I would say, this is a transitional picture between analytical cubism and synthetic cubism, which is flatter. I can’t actually see any collage in this particular picture, but it’s quite collage-like with things that seem to have been cut out and stuck on the surface. And can see he’s using this trick that he learned from his friend Braque, of doing fake wood graining by running a comb through the wet paint to make the wavy lines for the wood graining of the table. But for me, actually in both these exhibitions, for me the greatest shock in a way, the greatest revelation was the Matisses, particularly in the Shchukin collection. I would say if you haven’t seen these Matisses, you don’t know Matisse, and I would say that of myself. Sorry to admit that I was always a bit sniffy about Matisse before I saw the Shchukin show in 2019. I took, you know, Picasso’s slightly derogatory remarks, you know, he talks about Matisse being essentially rather decorative and just a pot of flowers and all this kind of thing, rather superficial artist, not the sort of radical innovator that Picasso himself was.

Of course, they were definitely frenemies. They were constantly looking over each other’s shoulder all the way through their career. And they sometimes exchange paintings. They also exchanged insults. But when I saw these Matisses in the Shchukin show, my God, what a revelation. They are so powerful. This is the best period in Matisse’s career, it seems to me, up to the First World War, a decade before the First World War. And this is called “Red Room,” dates from 1908, and this amazing scene where, so typical of Matisse, of course, where you’re looking after. When you’re looking this, the guard core at the bottom that you find on every Parisian apartment as the windows going right down to the floor and the economy of these pictures, you know, the economy of means, but the power, they have a power, I would say they have a really magisterial quality. And it was in 1909 that Shchukin commissioned Matisse to paint two large mural size pictures. This is “La Dance” which of course became a theme that runs through Matisse’s career and there’s a famous larger version that was commissioned by Barnes for the Barnes Foundation.

And there’s a famous version, there are two famous versions in the Museum of Modern Art in the city of Paris. And this is the other mural, which is called “La Music.” Now we move on to the Morozovs. Their family fortune largely came from the manufacturer of textiles. And the two Morozov brothers were born into a very wealthy family. But the mother, you can see in the background here, with the white hair, she was a bit of a tyrant. She was very strict. Their father had died young. She was running the family fortunes and she kept a very strict control of the money and they were not allowed to spend a lot of money until they came of age and then they came into their inheritance and that’s when they could start collecting. This is the older brother by one year, he’s born in 1870. This is Mikhail Abramovich Morozov and on the right-hand side, painted by Serov. And he was a flamboyant, colourful figure on the Moscow art scene. He was a patron of the composer, Scriabin, as I will be telling you on Sunday. And he was in particular a patron of a Russian artist and Serov who painted this portrait.

But he died very young in 1903. So most of the pictures in the Morozov collection were collected by the younger brother, Ivan. And so Ivan and Sergei Shchukin were friends. There’s certainly, I think, a slight element of rivalry between them, but not a hostile rivalry and if anything, Shchukin was a mentor to Morozov, and pushed him in the right direction. Here you’ve got a portrait by Serov in, I suppose, relatively conventional portrait for the early 1900s, not that unlike a painting by Sargent, but behind him you can see a still life by Matisse on the wall. As you’ve been reading in the papers recently, the Soviets defaulted on their foreign debt after the First World War. And they were very, very short of foreign cash so they actually sold a number of masterpieces, couple of old masters. There’s a Raphael that’s in the national area of Washington that was in the Hermitage. And they also sold a few of the Morozov pictures that were likely to raise large sums of foreign currency, including these two. The painting on the left is one of van Gogh’s most celebrated paintings, “The Night Cafe,” it’s painted in 1888. There’s a famous letter that he writes about this picture where he says he’s using the colours red and green to express the terrible passions of mankind and he wants the person looking at this picture to feel that “The Night Cafe” is a frightening place, a place where a terrible crime could take place. And on the right-hand side is a Degas of a cafe concert singer.

So the van Gogh was bought by an American collector who then gave it to Yale and the, I don’t know if it was bought directly, but the Degas landed up in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. But there’s still plenty, an incredible quantity of masterpieces. He was very keen on Renoir, had quite a number of Renoirs. This is probably the most important of his Renoirs. This is from the summer of 1868 when Renoir and Monet, they were eager to paint a novel subject matter, something from modern life, but something unusual, something that was not cliched. And they were staying at a bathing resort on the sand. Bathing was a relatively new craze in France in the 1860s. So this is “La Grenouillere,” Monet, Renoir sitting side by side, evidently using I think the same paints, sometimes painting identical compositions from the same viewpoint. Their idea initially was to collect a number of outdoor sketches and then work them up on bigger canvases to send to the salon the following year. But they had terrible financial difficulties. There are sort of pathetic letters where they write to their wealthier friend Bazille, saying, “Terribly sorry, I can’t afford the stamp to go on the letter and we have no money for brushes, no money for paints and canvases, can you help us out?” So there was no way that they’re ever going to realise their ambition or they wouldn’t have been able to go to the expense of hiring studios, hiring models.

But at the end of the summer of 1868, they had all these pictures and they thought, “Wow, we’ve really got something here. This is it. We don’t need to repaint these pictures on a bigger scale and with greater detail.” The sketch is the finished work and it’s the birth of impressionism and it’s an absolute key moment in the early history of modern art. I think this painting is absolutely ravishing. This is Renoir as good it as it gets. I’ll just show you, there’s neither of these two pictures, of course are in the Morozov collection, but they’re both pictures painted in the same summer. Do I need to tell you which is Renoir and which is Monet? I bet I don’t, I bet you that, well, that anybody who’s at all interested in art will know before I even tell you that it’s Monet on the left and Renoir on the right. The slightly different use of colour. Renoir prefers a rather warmer palette. This is the brushwork. Even in these small images on the screen so evident, that the broken brushwork, which is the key feature of impressionism, they use it differently, that Monet’s brushwork is bolder and Renoir’s brushwork is more feathery and more delicate. And I’m stressing that, because, oh, it must be 15 years ago, there was an exhibition of Renoir landscapes, the National Gallery, and my least favourite critic, Waldemar, wrote a review and he said, “Oh, I walked into a room and on the other side of the room there was a painting that I thought was by Renoir. And I thought, 'Oh, well, that one’s quite good.’ And I went closer to it and I looked at the label and the label told me it was not by Renoir, it was by Monet.”

So I’m afraid I sent him a very snippy note and I said, “If one of my students couldn’t tell the difference between a Monet and a Renoir from the other side of the room, I would tell them to choose another profession.” Another exquisite Renoir from the impressionist period. This is from the 1870s, ‘cause you can date it quite precisely really by the women’s fashion, the slightly narrower skirts, the use of the bustle. This is clearly, again, a picture that’s painted out of doors with this very magical rendering of the broken light filtering, shimmering through the foliage. And there are two portraits, 'cause Renoir was a great lover of women, he liked to be surrounded by women. He was incredibly susceptible to female beauty. And he was certainly in love with, I think, probably had an affair with this woman. She was an actress called Jeanne Samary and there are two portraits of her that are both in the Morozov collection. There’s a full length one, but I think it’s this half length one, which is the more beautiful of the two.

Continuing with impressionism, this is the very high point. This is a painting done in the mid 1870s. The seventies is the great decade of impressionism. And this is a Monet of the Boulevard des Capucines scene. Well, I searched this because there’s not much foliage on the trees. I think this is probably a spring day in Paris, but I’ve been out walking in Paris today. My God, so beautiful in the sunshine. It’s going to be hard to tear myself away from it next week. But so pictures like this, of course we love them. They’re all that wonderful animation of the street people moving, the shimmering light. Paris is a city of absolutely blinding light, so much more so than London, maybe partly weather conditions. There’s also the fact you’ve got one of these that have been newly built, Baron Haussmann street. There’s a typical Baron Haussmann buildings that the stone would still have been clean. And it’s this lovely pale honey coloured stone that reflects the light, and notice, it’s got a slightly photographic quality to this. Obviously not in the sense that it hasn’t got very sharp detail, but is partly the high viewpoint. It’s I think, indebted to the photographs of Paris streets that were taken by Nadar, the pioneering photographs in the 1860s and '70s.

They certainly knew Nadar 'cause they’d borrowed his studio for the first impressionist show, and they learned many things from Nadar’s photographs. Of course photography at that point, is quite slow. They didn’t have a very fast action. So in Nadar photographs, the people that they’re captured in the street are little blurred logs, and Monet has adopted this. It gives you a sense of the movement and the animation of the street, as I said. Notice also the bourgeois gentleman wearing their top hats. Nobody went out in the streets of Paris without a hat in the 19th century. Scriabin, who I’m going talk about on Sunday, did so and actually boys in the street would throw things at him because they, “Who is this weird man not wearing a hat.” And of course you wear the hat also to define where you are in the social hierarchy. If you are working class, you’re going to wear a cap and if you are bourgeois in upper class, you’re going to wear a proper top hat. The impressionists in the '70s, totally obsessed by weather conditions and by the seasons. And this is a delicious little painting by Sisley of frost in the spring. And this is Pissarro, always a little bit more sober, I would say, than the other impressionists, but a wonderful picture.

This is Pissarro at his best. Again, it’s a spring picture, maybe a little later in the spring. I think the trees are just beginning to sprout their leaves. And a later Monet, this is the morning, this is from around 1890, of course one of his most and loved, famous and loved pictures, the gorgeous poppy field. That’s from the '70s that he’s in a way gone beyond impressionism by the time he paints this, he’s moved on. And this, of course, from another one of these pictures, this I think probably is painted from the Savoy Hotel looking towards Waterloo Bridge. Cezanne. So there are large number of Cezannes of every period in the Morozov collection. This, as you can see, is a self-portrait. This rather unusual picture dates from fairly early on, it’s about 1870 and it shows his sisters. And the title of the picture is “The Overture to Tannhauser,” which the sister is presumably playing on the piano. So Cezanne is actually the same generation as the impressionists, he’s a year older than Monet, two years older than Renoir, but we call him a post-impressionist. He didn’t really have the same interests or concerns as the other impressionists, although he sometimes exhibited with them in their exhibitions.

So this is an early Cezanne. This is a very characteristic, wonderful still life from his full maturity as an artist in the 1880s. But with these curious discrepancies or shifting perspective, and something he never talked about so we don’t know how conscious he was of this, but it is one of the most interesting and one of the most influential features of his paintings and something that was of course taken up by the cubists later on. And we go through, this is a fairly late work, around 1900. He found it very difficult to find models. He liked painting portraits. He painted a lot of portraits. Well, firstly, nobody was going to pay him for a portrait 'cause they weren’t sufficiently flattering or even necessarily very good likenesses of the sitter. And the other thing was he required such endless sittings, famous story about him painting the dealer Ambroise Vollard and demanding 40 sittings of several hours each. And at the end of that saying, “I think I’m satisfied with the shirt front.” And here we have a very late Cezanne, right from the end of his life in the early 1900s where we look at this and we think, “Yes, yes, cubism is just around the corner from this.”

He dies in 1906 and there are exhibitions of his work in Paris in 1906 and 1907 that, again, it’s one of those moments, 1907 is a key moment. You’ve got the “Demoiselles d'Avignon,” Picasso, but also the big exhibition of Cezanne, which has a tremendous impact on the development on modern art. So although the most famous at Morozov’s, van Gogh’s “The Night Cafe,” was sold off by the Soviets. There are two important van Gogh’s that remain in the collection. This one, it’s quite a small picture, painted on a trip to the seaside in 1888. I can’t tell you how ecstatic this picture is and we may get something from the image on the screen, but you really have to, it’s one of those pictures you walk into a room and you see it on the other side of the room, wow. It has an extraordinary positive energy. Of course it’s to do with the colour, but it’s very much, I think, to do with the way the paint is applied to the surface. And that is something you can only, you can’t fully get that really through a reproduction. You have to see it in reality. But it is just an ecstatic little picture.

This one was very much the opposite, this is 1888. This is 1889 after the incident with the ear and a breakdown and he’s forced to go into the hospital of Saint-Remy where he spends a year and has various severe crises, health or mental crisis, don’t exactly know, but different theories about what was wrong with him. And there were phases where there were dangers of him self-harming and he wasn’t allowed out of the hospital, was locked in his room. So he would send letters to his brother, Theo, requesting engravings for him to copy. And one of the engravings, he was great admirer of the illustrator, Gustave Dore. Gustave Dore came to London in the 1870s and like a lot of continental Europeans was absolutely horrified by the poverty, the misery, the squalor of this great sprawling antique of the city.

And he went to a prison and he made this illustration of the interior of a prison, incredibly grim interior of a prison on the right-hand side. And it’s in the exhibition at the Louis Vuitton Centre, there was a little room where this picture was exhibited alone. And the room was darkened and it was almost like a chapel. And you could feel that people were silenced, if they talked at all, they talked in whispers and the painting had such an impact. And, you know, it’s quite hard to find how is it that a copy of an engraving by not really a major artist, just by a competent illustrator, Gustave Dore, could have such an impact. One thing that strikes me, of course, is the figure in the centre in the foreground. Is this van Gogh himself, who was of course imprisoned in the asylum? It’s the one figure where you can see that the man has pale red hair, as of course van Gogh had himself.

Onto Gaugin, and this, I regret very much actually that the night cafe scene of van Gogh was separated from this picture 'cause they were really in a way painted as pendants. This is Gaugin and this is painted in the same night cafe. There’s the van Gogh on the right-hand side. You see the billiards table. This is Madam Ginoux who ran the establishment and you can see it did indeed have red walls. So you have the red and the green of the billard table. And it would’ve been wonderful to have these pictures side by side as they originally were in the Morozov collection. And a number of Gauguins, I’m not sure his Gauguins are not overall as impressive as the Shchukin ones, but this is a very gorgeous one from his first Tahitian stay. Let me show you his characteristic technique. So different actually from van Gogh. Van Gogh, the paint surface is loaded. It’s impasted, it’s very built up with paint and the movement of the brush and the texture of the paint is very integral to the impact of the picture. Gauguin likes to use a coarse canvas. And in this detail you can actually see the texture of the canvas and it’s almost like the canvas sucks in the paint. Paint is applied quite thinly and it’s quite fluid and it goes into the texture of the canvas.

There are a couple of artists who Morozov liked, who are not in the Shchukin collection. Very often you can, you know, you can see that they were buying in parallel. This is Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and it’s a very characteristic picture of his favourite model, Yvette Guilbert. She was not too thrilled about being his favourite model 'cause some ways you could say it’s a rather cruel caricature. You can see photograph of her on the right-hand side, how she looked at the time that she was actually rather a pretty woman or maybe what the French would call jolie laide. I mean, she had a rather piquant, charming face. He’d certainly, Lautrec has aged her and made her look much more raddled than she really was. On the left is a caricature of her by Sashi Etree, which is in my flat, it’s in the next room to this one, that I picked up a couple of years ago. Now another artist that Morozov was very keen on and is absent from Shchukin collection is Pierre Bonnard. So he found Bonnard all on his own. And there are a number of, this is obviously, you can see, a Paris street scene is by the big picture. And he may be inspired by Shchukin commissioning mural size pictures from Matisse. These are big pictures and this is how they were exhibited, really as a mural, although they’re all on canvas in his palace.

Some great examples, Fauvism, and of course, these paintings are being bought, you know, while the paint is still wet. These are very new paintings, Fauvism bursts upon the world in 1905. It’s really French expressionism, painting a white canvas so that the colour is very vibrant with pure colours unmixed, straight from the tube and directly. So there’s an incredible energy and vibrancy and crudeness, was a deliberate crudeness. And one horrified critic described these artists as wild beasts or fauves and they rather like that and they adopted that name for themselves. So this is Derain, this is Vlaminck, artists, I think both these fauves are artists and most of the fauves artists, they had quite a short period of working at their best from about 1905 to 1907. But these are top quality fauves paintings. You won’t find better ones anywhere. There are some lesser fauves artists. This is Valtat, and he obviously liked the work of Albert Marquet 'cause there were about a dozen pictures by Marquet in the show. And he’s, yeah, he’s not an artist on the level of Picasso or Matisse, but a wonderful artist.

Actually, he’s an artist who I think is consistently good. He doesn’t lose his inspiration in the way that the other fauve artists did, in his later career. Matisse. Now, if it were not for you would Shchukin, you would say, “Wow, the Morozov Matisses are pretty amazing,” but they’re not quite. Shchukin really, he has the absolute greatest paintings by Matisse. There are some very good ones with Morozov, and it’s quite interesting again to be able to follow through. This is Matisse’s career. This is a Matisse from around 1900. Quite conventional in a way. Obviously very indebted to the 18th century French still life painter Chardin, which you can see on the left-hand side. But there’s some amazing mature Matisses. These commissioned by Morozov, again, mural size pictures. They were painted on a trip to Morocco and they were directly commissioned from the artist by Morozov. And Picasso. And again, we have a wonderful selection of Picassos, although he doesn’t go quite as far with Picasso as Shchukin does. You can see a blue period picture, more depressed people sitting around in a cafe. Very lovely Rose Period picture, this delicate, slightly melancholy poetry, the Rose Period. This actually, now this is the great Picasso that’s in the Morozov collection and this is his portrait of the dealer, very influential dealer, Ambroise Vollard.

There will be a nice exhibition, I don’t know if it would be possible in the future 'cause I can’t see there being much cooperation between Russian museums and Western museums, but it would be wonderful to have an exhibition of all the portraits made of Ambroise Vollard, who was painted by many artists. He was painted twice by Cezanne. This is the one I told you about where after 40 sittings, Cezanne said he was pleased with the shirt front. And there’s a Renoir Vollard. The weird thing is, I feel, and of course, you know what he looked like from photographs, I feel that of the three, the portrait where he’s most convincingly characterised, where I feel I know something of him is actually the Picasso, not the Cezanne or the Renoir. Both Morozov and Shchukin are really Paris based and they’re buying most of their pictures sometimes directly from the artists, but often through Paris dealers. But Morozov is also looking around at some other things through Russian artists, of course, Scandinavian artists. This is Finnish artist, Akseli Gallen-Kallela. There’s one very fine painting by Munch of the three girls on the bridge. And as I said, Russian paintings, well, he was directly commissioning paintings from Serov, and this is a portrait of his son. Wonderful portrait really, very touching portrait of a little child by Serov.

This is an artist called Korovin. And in fact, the two Morozov brothers, when they were teenagers, they took lessons from him. They were both quite keen amateur painters. And this is a portrait I’ve shown you before, it’s of the great singer Schaljapin. And as you can see from this and this, Korovin was Paris trained and very much aware of impressionism. So he might also be quite an important factor as well as the influence of Shchukin on influencing the Morozov brothers to buy modern French painting. Morozov is also keen to patronise young Russian talent. This is Mikhail Larionov. This is a self-portrait by Ilya Mashkov. And actually, this is the most radical, most modern picture, probably in either collection. This is a portrait of a musician by Malevich who was going to be one of the pioneers of abstraction. This is, I would say still a cubist picture with clear references to reality. If it’s only the musician’s teeth across the middle of the picture, it’s kind of chopped up in a cubist way, but it’s not yet fully abstract. And in the show, another way in which Morozov was perhaps a little bit more adventurous than Shchukin was that he was willing to acquire nudes, which were definitely disapproved of in Russian society.

Here’s a superb toilette by Degas, one of the series he made through much of his career, what you call them keyhole nudes, where women are going about their daily ablutions. Apparently they’re not posing, they’re not showing off. This is not a pinup picture saying, you know, “Come and get me big boy.” This is a woman who’s unaware of being observed. And a version of Rodin’s “Kiss.” But an artist that he had obviously a very special connection with was Maurice Denis. Maurice Denis’s best pictures actually were in the 1890s. And he’d moved on to a style which is kind of more traditional, more classical. For me, there are a bit too many Maurice Denis’s in this exhibition. This was the final room in the exhibition. It was a music room in the Morozov’s palace for which he commissioned these, again, these mural sized canvases showing the story of Cupid and Psyche. And so that’s it. And again, I’ve run out of time and I’ve run out pictures just in time. So I’m going to see what questions we have.

Q&A and Comments

Thank you very much, Sue. “A ugly building.” Yes, it’s interesting, some people really love the building and I can see it’s impressive in the outside. For me it just really doesn’t work as an interior space. Shchukin, yes, I’m not going to pretend that I’m a good Russian speaker. I do remember that, there were, but it was nothing like on the scale, the London exhibitions were nothing like as complete or on the scale of the French ones. “To what extent did these…” They influenced them very much indeed, Louise, the Russian avant-garde because both of them were very open to young artists and members of the public or young artists were free to come and look at pictures. So yes, they had an absolutely crucial influence, these two collections, on the development of the accessible, in the sense that even people who might find cubism very difficult and who might be disturbed by the cruelty and the violence and the distortion of Picasso’s later work.

I think people, a wider part of the public are able to like and enjoy the Blue Period and the Pink Period, maybe even more the Rose Period 'cause the Blue Period pictures are of rather depressing subjects. The New York MoMA recently had neighbours at Red studio. And do you know, I’ll tell you a a thing, the Red Studio was offered the Tate Gallery and there was a fuss at the time, New York was such a conservative country. I’m not sure whether this was before or after, I think it was actually even the middle of the 20th century. Anyway, the Tate lost its nerve and failed to buy the Red Studio. So much the better for New York and MoMA. “Ontario Art Gallery in the early spring featured Picasso’s Blue Period, showed the poverty and starvation in Spain and Portugal in the 1900s.” Well, it doesn’t really actually because the Blue Period pictures are mostly set in Paris, I would say, rather than Spain or Portugal. Valdamar did not answer, unsurprisingly.

Q: “Did Monet influence Lowry?” A: There are very early works by Lowry who are influenced by his teacher who was a French artist, whose name I can’t remember, I think it was in Manchester. And his teacher was certainly influenced by Monet. But I would say, the more famous characteristic Lowry’s that we all know, I wouldn’t say that they had very much connection with Monet.

Thank you very much for your nice comments, which I greatly appreciate and they encourage me. “His screen is not working.” I’m not sure what that means. Thank you.

Q: “Did these collectors have a sense of the future value of the paintings they purchased?” A: That’s interesting. I’m not sure about that. It’s a very interesting thing to think about. Of course, there’s descendants have been struggling for years, you know, through the courts in America and in Europe, to try and get some compensation, but without any luck.

Yes, they both collected Russian artists. “Korovin is the correct,” yes, I’m sorry about my pronunciations. “Were they…” No, they weren’t related to Betmore. So it’s spelled differently. Thank you. This is Helena. “You saw that too many people were let in during the Corona crisis, but building at wrong place should be at Seaside.” I agree with you. It’s a very odd place for it to be in Paris. I’ve not been to the Guggenheim in Bilbao, but I know a lot of people really love it. It’s the Louis Vuitton. V-U-I-T-T-O-N. You know, the luxury goods manufacturers. Thank you.

Q: “And will I talk about Russian abstraction?” A: I think that Wendy’s going to get somebody from the Guggenheim to talk to you about Kandinsky and that will be much better 'cause that’ll be a specialist and be somebody who will know about it more depth than I do.

Yes, whether it’s beautiful or not, or ugly, that’s, I think, in the eye of beholder, isn’t it? Yeah, I think a great van Gogh, I agree with you Susan. They have a sort of visceral impact when you see them from the other side of the room. Adolphe Valette, that was the name. Thank you, Norma. God, I’m impressed, you know the name of Lowry’s teacher. Thank you, everybody, and that’s it. And I’m back to music, but there’s a visual arts component in my lecture on Sunday Sabine, who is very interested in synesthesia, the connections between the visual arts and sound and taste and so on.

So that’s it for today. Thank you very much indeed. And see you again on Sunday.