Word: morosov
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...accumulated borrowing power that is the peaceable blackmail of the museum world -- could have produced this show. Its essential component, never seen in such depth outside Russia before, is the paintings bought from Matisse's studio 80 years ago by those two inspired and obsessed collectors, Ivan Morosov and Sergei Shchukin, now divided between the Hermitage in St. Petersburg and the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow...
...bonus, some of the paintings are being seen in the U.S. for the first time. Most of the best work that Morocco evoked from Matisse was bought by those two pioneer collectors Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morosov and has remained in Leningrad's Hermitage and Moscow's Pushkin museums since the Russian revolution. As no reproduction has ever done justice to the peculiar intensity of the thin, washed, yet highly saturated color Matisse developed in Morocco, one is grateful that the components of this phase of his work have at last been reunited. Matisse was a mature painter...
...domes were everywhere; regular human models, harder to come by. Matisse's main one was a girl named Zorah, who worked in a brothel in Tangier. She is most unforgettably commemorated in On the Terrace, the central panel of a triptych he painted in 1912-13, on commission for Morosov. Zorah kneels in front of a bowl of goldfish in the suffused aquamarine light of a terrace. Apparently Matisse was worried that Morosov would object to the use of a prostitute, since the central panels of Russian triptychs often contained figures of the Virgin Mary. But one can hardly doubt...
...true, of course, that the energies of this art sprang full-formed from the head of the Revolution. Moscow, before 1917, was one of the chief condensers of advanced cultural ideas-thanks not only to the artists themselves, but to bourgeois Maecenases like Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morosov, whose enthusiasm for modern French art (Gauguin, Matisse, Picasso, in particular) is still evident in the great public collections of Moscow and Leningrad. There was a steady traffic of ideas, paintings and of the artists themselves between Russia, France and Italy...
...masterworks that falls between is to realize how inquisitive and catholic a taste Schuhkin had. This pudgy, stuttering Moscow importer held passionate convictions about the value of the "new" school of Paris, and backed them with an enthusiasm shared by no other collectors of his time except the Steins. Morosov's tastes were slightly more conservative. He had 18 Cézannes, no fewer than five of which are in the present show, but he balked at Cubism. Schuhkin, however, absorbed it all, from the primitive and enchanted jungles of Henri Rousseau to the most difficult early cubist Picassos...