Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov are pre-revolutionary Russian entrepreneurs, whose names were largely forgotten for the most part of the 20th century. But both of them managed to amass such unique collections of turn-of-the-century art that today they still constitute the bulk of impressionist and post-impressionist collections at Russia’s two major museums: Pushkin Museum in Moscow and Hermitage in St Petersburg.
The collections were not always split between Russia's two capitals, after 1917 the paintings were nationalized and they all ended up at the Museum of New Western Art, a branch of the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. However, in the aftermath of the Second World War, the branch was closed to stop “the spread of decadent bourgeois art” and that’s how Shchukin and Morozov’s collections were mixed and divided between the Hermitage and the Pushkin museums.
This summer the collections are reunited for the first time since 1948. Morozov's collection is exhibited at the Hermitage till October 2019, while the Pushkin Museum is showing the reunited Shchukin’s collection till September 2019. Next year Morozov’s collection will travel to Paris, to Fondation Louis Vuitton, where a test run of the Shchukin's collection exhibition took place in 2016. The Paris exhibition turned out to be a record breaker: more than a million people attended it and it was officially labeled as the most popular art show in France in the past 50 years.
Sergei Shchukin was born in 1854, one of ten children in a family of old believers, well-off merchants. His older brother Pyotr was also a collector, but lost interest at some point and sold some of his paintings to Sergei. In 1898 together with their younger brother Ivan, who lived in Paris, they bought their first paintings by Camille Pissarro and Claude Monet. By 1918 his collection included 269 paintings.
Just like Shchukin, Ivan Morozov was born in 1871 into a family of old believers, who also happened to be a prominent dynasty of merchants and industrialists. In 1903, when his brother Mikhail, who was also a collector, died, Ivan Morozov started taking collecting seriously. In Paris he had a reputation of “a Russian, who doesn’t bargain.” Where Shchukin bought 37 works of Matisse, Morozov bought only eleven, but they were all exceptional. All in all Morozov’s collection of French art counted about 250 items by the end of World War I.
Shchukin's collection exhibition in Moscow has two rooms full of valuable Picassos, a room of Matisses, a wall completely covered with Gauguins and much, much more. Many personal items that belonged to Sergei Shchukin and members of his family are also on display. Morozov’s exhibition in St. Petersburg is more about the masterpieces themselves, but an element of family history is presented by two portraits of Morozov brothers - Ivan and Mikhail - painted by Valentin Serov, on loan from the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow.
Words: Andrei Muchnik
