The Exceptional Morozov Collection, A Once-In-A- Lifetime Exhibit Worth The Trip

It’s unlikely ever to be assembled again and promises to be the blockbuster exhibit that will wow the art world this fall in Paris: The Morozov Collection, Icons of Modern Art, has opened at the Fondation Louis Vuitton.

A year after the original inauguration date — which had to be postponed three times due to Covid restrictions — this extraordinary show devoted to French and Russian icons of modern art and their Russian collectors is possible thanks to a confluence of important factors starting with a love of art but also significant injections of money, power and politics.

The show, presented for the first time outside Russia and expected to be one of the flagship exhibitions of the year, includes some 300 impressionist, post-impressionist and expressionist masterpieces brought together at the turn of the 20th century by the vastly wealthy Russian brothers Mikhail and Ivan Morozov, pioneers of Western art, before being swept away by the Russian Revolution.

Iconic works of incalculable value

Organized in partnership with the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, Moscow’s Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts and the State Tretyakov Gallery, the Morozov Collection is the second in the ‘Icons of Modern Art” series by the Fondation Louis Vuitton devoted to major Russian collectors, and follows the 2016 Sergei Shchukin show that attracted a record 1.3 million visitors.

The landmark exhibition could, according to Vanity Fair, set “records in the cultural world: That of a determination to defy the Covid pandemic, diplomatic tensions, extremely complicated logistics to transport to Paris these paintings which are among the most beautiful of their time and have an incalculable value today.”

Love of art, money and politics

Installed in every gallery in the Fondation Louis Vuitton’s breathtaking building designed by Frank Gehry, The Morozov Collection assembles a selection of rarely-seen works by renowned French artists including Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, Paul Cézanne, Paul Gaugin, Vincent Van Gogh, Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, Aristide Maillol, Henri Matisse, Albert Marquet, Maurice de Vlaminck, André Derain, Auguste Rodin and Camille Claudel and alongside Russian masters including Ilya Repin, Mikhail Vrubel, Konstantin Korovin, Aleksandr Golovin, Valentin Serov, Mikhail Larionov, Natalia Goncharova, Kazimir Malevich, Ilya Mashkov, Pyotr Konchalovsky, Piotre Outkine and Martiros Saryan.

The exhibition includes the music room in Ivan Morosov’s Moscow mansion, for the first time replicated outside the State Hermitage Museum, in a special installation of seven panels commissioned by Ivan Morozov in 1907 from Maurice Denis on the subject of The Story of Psyche, and four sculptures by Aristide Maillol “providing a rare window into the life of the prominent collection,” explains the organizers.

The Morozov Collection, considered one of the finest in the world, was possible with the help of the most important art dealers of the time and thanks to the immense Morozov fortune — and the brothers’ taste for the avant-garde.

Arguably, the exhibition also is a tribute to the financial power of the French LVMH Group that has made it possible for a private player to meet the challenges of such an exceptional exhibition.

Almost lost to war and revolution

“After the First World War and the October Revolution, the Morozov’s collection suffered the same fate as that of Sergei Shchukin,” explains Bernard Arnauld, President of the Fondation Louis Vuitton, in the foreword of the exhibit’s catalogue. “Starting in 1918, they were seized, nationalized and then broken up by the Bolshevik regimen.

They were nearly lost. However, starting in the 1930s, they found their way into the collections of the HermitageMuseum, the Pushkin Museum of Fine arts and the Tretyakov Gallery.”

For almost a century, these masterpieces were shuttled between Moscow and Saint Petersburg until they were reunited for this world premiere.

The making of the collection

Mikhail and Ivan Morozov were born in 1870 and 1871 into a Muscovite family of textile manufacturers, yet of serf origin.

According to Anne Baldassari, the curator of the exhibition, they could owe their artistic acuity to their mother who gave them drawing lessons by Russian artists from an early age.

When he was only 20 years old, Mikhaïl acquired his first paintings by Van Gogh and Gauguin, who were not yet famous, in Paris. When he died from a heart attack at age 33, he already had collected 39 remarkable works by masters including Monet, Toulouse-Lautrec, Renoir and Degas.

Ivan, who then took over the family business — leaving behind his vocation as a painter — added French impressionists, post-impressionists, Nabis (young French artists moving to more abstract art at the end of the 19th century) and Fauvists to the collection.

At the same time, he became close to Russian artists of his generation who advised him on his acquisitions and contributed their own masterpieces to his collection.

In the introduction to the the Morozov Collection catalogue, curator Baldassari explains that for Ivan Morozov there was “an emotional and aesthetic shock that permanently transformed his vision, making him a militant modernist” when he visited the Salon d’Automne in Paris in 19o7 and saw Cézanne’s work, which “made the scales fall from his eyes.”

“He became a convinced Cézannist, acquiring 18 outstanding canvases that he hung in a ‘secret’ study next to his private apartments. From that decisive day his purchases steadily increased and their quality became unimpeachable.”

Between 1904 and 1914, he bought 240 works by French artists while his Russian art collection, begun in 1891, amounted to 430 pieces.

Picasso fans will be happy to see the three pieces included in the show that, according to Baldassari, are “masterpieces and markers of Picasso’s body of work from key evolutionary moments in his career.”

A tortuous history

But as France 24 writes: “It all came crashing down with the Communist revolution of 1917 in Russia. Ivan was reduced to being ‘assistant curator’ of his own collection as his home became a state museum.”

In 1918, the Morozov manufacturing company, whose real estate value was estimated at 26 million rubles, was taken over by the state and later that year the collection of artworks was nationalised by official decree.

In the summer of 1919, Ivan and his family secretly crossed the border to Finland and then emigrated to Switzerland.

When the Nazis invaded Russia in 1941, the paintings were sent to be hidde in the Ural Mountains, where they stayed fairly well-preserved by temperatures that often fell to -40 degrees.

It wasn’t until 1950s that the Soviet government decided to redistribute them among the Hermitage, Tretyakov and Pushkin museums.

Although separated, the collection consisting of 460 works of Russian art and 240 French, has been kept intact.

The Morozov Collection: Icons Of Modern Art will be displayed at the Louis Vuitton Foundation until February 22, 2022.