Word: schuhkin
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...legends of modern art-its El Dorado, both in riches and inaccessibility-belongs to the U.S.S.R. It is the stupendous collection of early French modernist painting amassed on trips to Paris by two Russian millionaires: Sergei Schuhkin and his younger friend Ivan Morosov. After the revolution, Schuhkin fled to Paris, where, stripped of his capital and without his collection, he survived until 1937. Morosov died in 1921 in Carlsbad...
...superbly rigorous and almost abstract design of what appears to be architectural motifs-pillars, blocks, steps-painted by Fernand Léger: Composition, 1918 (see color). To look at the stately procession of now-certified 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...
...glory of the show is, however, its early Matisses from the Schuhkin collection. Almost from the day the two men met (in 1906, in Paris), Schuhkin's appetite for Matisse's pictures was ravenous. Over the next seven years he bought at least 37 of them. It is still the best Matisse collection that exists, partly because it embodies the zeal with which, around 1909, this greatest of all modern French artists applied himself to the issue of large-scale, "decorative" figure compositions. Matisse's fauve years, with their hot drumfire of broken, dissonant color, were behind...
Matisse's still lifes were populated by his own sculptures, and he painted pictures of his own paintings. So with Nasturtiums and 'The Dance' I, 1912; the figures dancing in a ring in the background are actually one of the mural-size canvases Schuhkin commissioned from Matisse in 1909 to decorate the stairwell of his house in Moscow, the gloomy, florid Troubetzkoi Palace. Matisse's frank acceptance of art as art's subject was most prophetic...
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