Baldassari Anne Icons of Modern Art the Shchukin Collection Amazon
Art Review
'Icons of Modern Art': Picassos, Matisses, Monets, Oh, My!
PARIS — The history of collecting, the development of painterly style, the irresolute fortunes of individuals and nations: You lot will think most all these things on your second go-through of "Icons of Modern Art: The Shchukin Collection," which opened final week at the Fondation Louis Vuitton hither.
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 fifteen years, and displayed his collection in a palace in Moscow — capped past "Dance" and "Music," the monumental panels that stand up among Matisse'due south boldest works. By 1918, though, Lenin was in the Kremlin, Shchukin had gone into exile, and the drove was nationalized and dispersed; some works ended upwardly 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'southward French pictures was decisive for the development of the Russian advanced.
"Icons of Modern Art" has been curated past Anne Baldassari, the old manager of the Musée Picasso. Beyond its historical issue, "Icons" is as well a monster exercise in cultural affairs and legal wrangling, and i that has not gone wholly according to plan. The principal holders of Shchukin'southward paintings — the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, in Moscow, and the State Hermitage Museum, in Leningrad — accept been loath to interact in the past, and previous loans to institutions in Western Europe have occasioned restitution claims from Shchukin'south heirs. ("We are the victims of the holdup of the century," one of his grandsons told The New York Times terminal calendar month.)
It'due south 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 costive paintings outside Russia is undisclosed only astronomical. Insurance and shipping lone would exist beyond the reach of Paris's public museums; it savage to Bernard Arnault, the richest man in France and the president of the Fondation Louis Vuitton, to pes the neb.
The capstone was meant to be an inaugural visit from Vladimir V. Putin, aslope 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.") Just this month, afterward Russia vetoed a French-drafted resolution at the United nations Security Quango that sought to end the bombing of Aleppo, Syrian arab republic, Mr. Hollande characterized the Russian-backed strikes as "war crimes." A few days after, Mr. Putin's visit was chosen off, though both presidents accept written introductions for this show'due south cinder block of a catalog.
Over more than than a dozen uncluttered galleries on iv floors, Ms. Baldassari plots Shchukin's acquisitions equally Europe tips into war, though she ruptures the timeline with some thematic presentations, like a gallery of portraits and self-portraits that opens the testify. Cézanne broods. Gauguin flashes his teeth. Amidst them are two portraits of Shchukin, done by the lesser-known Norwegian expressionist Xan Krohn, that interpret him into blocky zones of colour. In the full-length portrait, he appears in a gray morning coat, hands clasped earlier his waist; he stoops, he appears shy. The bold background of orangish and white rhombuses only hints at his avant-garde sensibilities.
Indeed, Shchukin'due south 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 "Lunch on the Grass" of 1866 — the uptight, unfinished cousin of Manet's painting of the aforementioned championship, in which a dozen Parisians practice the new bourgeois art of doing naught. (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 ocean gulls.
In many cases he bought, despite his reservations — and would waver in the face of his own uncertain taste. After "Trip the light fantastic toe" and "Music" netted Matisse terrible reviews at the 1910 Salon d'Automne, Shchukin backed out of acquiring them; and so, via telegram, he changed his heed again and renewed his purchase. (Later they arrived in Moscow, he wrote to Matisse, "I promise to come to like them one twenty-four hour period.") He was plotting out, commencement for himself, and afterwards for the Russian public, how class would become paramount in Modern painting, and how illusionism would give mode to a new artistic autonomy. It was a didactic approach, at odds with our stereotypes of individual 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 i some other on a single wall. The 11 Gauguins here — to a higher place all, "Aha Oé Feii? (What, Are You Jealous?)," a double portrait of languorous Tahitian women from the summer of 1892 — establish a high indicate of this show, though many of them discomfited Shchukin, who was skeptical of nudes. He acquired them anyway. "If a picture gives you lot a psychological shock," he said, "buy it. Information technology's a good one."
Sometimes that rule was too difficult to obey. Shchukin passed on Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon," whose ghoulish prostitutes were too shocking fifty-fifty for him, though he would shortly fill up the Trubetskoy Palace with more than than 50 of that artist'southward works. "3 Women," a tamer counterpart to the "Demoiselles," from 1908, was bought from the siblings Gertrude and Leo Stein. Several cunning works of constructed Cubism, such as a nevertheless life with a bottle of Pernod from 1912, accept been paired here with afterward, purely abstract works by the Russian advanced, like Lyubov Popova'south architectonic layerings of colored panes.
More than Picasso, though, information technology was Matisse for whom Shchukin's patronage would prove decisive. Down and out in Paris, Matisse plant in this Russian patron much more than than a reliable buyer; cheers to his textile business, Shchukin sympathized with Matisse'due south deepening interest in decorative arts, and stood by him every bit 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 absenteeism is fabricated 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 aslope writhing dancers imitating Matisse's boogieing nudes.
Don't waste material a second watching information technology, not when you could exist upstairs with "Red Room (Harmony in Red)," the 1908 thunderclap that began Matisse's great post-Fauvist catamenia. You may think you know it from a one 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 deputed it for his dining room, the ane with the wall of Gauguins, its championship was to be "Harmony in Blue." Matisse delivered a work in a different colour, but Shchukin didn't mind. Personal taste, he knew, was a flimsy ground on which to build a drove; better to trust the artists.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/29/arts/design/icons-of-modern-art-picassos-matisses-monets-oh-my.html
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