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The Russians are coming ...
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Complete article at following URL:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/4dd8c7cc-ba6b-11dc-abcb-0000779fd2ac.html
The Russians are coming
By Jackie Wullschlager
Published: January 5 2008 01:39 | Last updated: January 5 2008 01:41
Writing his memoir of Moscow life, singer Feodor Chaliapin remembered the mujik – peasant – who sets out “to make a fortune selling honeyed tea in the Khitrovo bazaar”. Watching “on the sly and from every angle, the life swirling round him, he finds himself spending the night among vagrants, freezing cold, and going hungry. But ... he does not groan ... and before long he’s got himself a shop or a small factory. After that he becomes a leading merchant. A bit later his eldest son is buying Gauguins, becomes the first to want Picassos, the first to bring Matisse to Moscow. We the educated look at one another and go on sneering: little uncouth tyrant! Still, he and his kind have gathered up marvellous artistic treasures ... ”
[ ... ]
Morozov did not long survive exile, dying in 1921. Shchukin lived in Paris until 1936, part of the émigré generation whom Vladimir Nabokov called “hardly palpable people who imitated in foreign cities a dead civilisation”. Matisse sought him out but the collector stuttered miserably that he was no longer able to buy and proudly kept his distance. He himself never sought legal redress: “I have built up these collections for my country, for my people”, he said in the 1930s. “Whatever may happen on Russian soil, there my collections must remain.”
‘From Russia: French and Russian Master Painting 1870-1925’, Royal Academy, London W1, opens January 26
Jackie Wullschlager is the FT’s chief visual arts critic
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