Word: shchukin
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Greatest of all the Russian capitalist collectors was Moscow Tea Merchant Sergei Ivanovich Shchukin, a neat little man with a big head and striking features, who had an uncanny eye for art. One of his earliest modern art enthusiasms was for Henri Matisse, whom he first met in 1906 when Matisse was 37. By 1914 Shchukin had loaded up with 36 Matisse paintings. Collector Shchukin's second stroke of luck happened when Matisse passed him along to Picasso, and the Russian merchant became one of the young Spanish painter's first important patrons. Shchukin had the good sense...
Collector's Ghost. "Whenever I had some particularly fine pictures for sale," recalls Paris Art Dealer Henry Kahnweiler, "I would send Shchukin a telegram. He generally arrived in Paris within a fortnight." Shchukin's rococo 18th century palace in Moscow was packed with art, including eight Cezannes, three Renoirs, 16 top Derains, 50 Picassos, Degas' Dancers in Blue, Matisse's Music, Gauguin's What! You are jealous? and Rousseau's Tropical Forest (see color pages...
...Soviets in 1918 wasted little time expropriating the treasures of Shchukin and other wealthy collectors, pooled them to form Moscow's famed Museum of Modern Western Art. Used as tourist bait for years, the museum was closed during World War II by Stalin, who liked his artists regimented and realist. Only in the post-Stalin years have the paintings begun to reappear in Leningrad's Hermitage and Moscow's Pushkin Museums...
Treating audiences abroad more freely, Soviet commissars of art shipped out for loan exhibitions paintings still considered explosive at home until, in 1954, the ghost of Shchukin rose to haunt them. During a huge Picasso retrospective in Paris, Shchukin's daughter, Irene, demanded back 37 Picassos formerly in her father's collection. In a panic, the Russian embassy dispatched a small black truck to the exhibit, whisked the Picassos off the wall and to safety inside their embassy. Said Comrade Picasso: "After all, what would happen if the Count of Paris claimed the chateau of Versailles...
...Another great Russian capitalist collector was Ivan Abramovich Morosov, who competed fiercely with Shchukin for the paintings of Matisse and Picasso, fell behind because he could not accept cubism...