Morozov masterpieces exhibited in Paris for the first time outside Russia

The Morozov Collection, a major art collection, among the largest in the world dedicated to modern art, put together in the early 20th century by brothers Michail and Ivan Morozov, heirs to a thriving textile industry, is coming out of Russia for the first time in history and will be on display at the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris from September 22, 2021 to February 22, 2022: the exhibition is titled La Collection Morozov. Icônes de l’Art Moderne and brings together works by Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Claude Monet, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Maurice Denis, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and other great artists of the time, including Russian avant-gardists such as Kazimir Malević, Il’ja Repin, Michail Vrubel’, and Michail Larionov.

Curated by Anne Baldassari, the exhibition is organized with the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, and the Tretyakov National Gallery in Moscow. The exhibition unfolds along a path that evokes the atmosphere of the late twentieth century by also presenting to the public works that not only leave Russia for the first time, but are also exhibited for the first time outside their context: this is the case, for example, with the panels in the “Music Room” of Ivan Morozov’s Moscow palace, commissioned in 1907 from Maurice Denis, who depicted there the theme of the Story of Psyche between 1908 and 1909, or the four sculptures made for Morozov by Aristide Maillol. Special sets were specially created for these works.

In addition, following a study of the important unpublished archives of Michail and Ivan Morozov kept at the Pushkin Museum and the Tretyakov Gallery, the exhibition will also collect unpublished texts and documents that testify to the unique history of the Morozov family with the aim of establishing the general catalog of French works in their collections. Philanthropists of the arts, the brothers Michail Abramović Morozov (1870-1903) and Ivan Abramović Morozov (1871-1921) dominated Moscow’s cultural life at the dawn of the 20th century, along with the Tretyakovs, Mamontovs, Riabushinskis, and Sčukins. They distinguished themselves in particular by their unconditional support for contemporary European and Russian art, which made an important contribution to the international recognition of modern French painters.

With the advice of leading Parisian art dealers such as Paul Durand-Ruel, Ambroise Vollard, Georges Bernheim, Eugène Druet, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, and others, the Morozovs collected more than 250 paintings and sculptures by artists such as Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Renoir, Monet, Matisse, Marquet, Derain, Picasso, Rodin, Claudel, and Maillol. They also undertook to collect contemporary Russian art by bringing together nearly 400 modern paintings of the Russian school represented by artists from the realist, symbolist, impressionist and post-impressionist movements. Their collections, nationalized in 1918, led to the creation of the world’s first museum of modern art: the National Museum of Modern Western Art - GMNZI in Ivan Morozov’s palace in Moscow in 1923. From the 1930s until 1948, their the collections were gradually distributed among the Russian public museum institutions of the Hermitage Museum, the Pushkin Museum, and the Tretyakov Gallery.

Organized by the Louis Vuitton Foundation, the exhibition marks a new stage in the institutional partnership initiated by the Louis Vuitton Foundation with the State Hermitage Museum, the Pushkin Museum and the Tretyakov National Gallery. The exhibition also benefits from substantial loans from the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg, the Museum of Fine Arts of the Republic of Belarus (Minsk, Belarus), the Museum of Fine Arts in Dnepropetrovsk (Ukraine), MAGMA Moscow, as well as those from the personal collections of Petr O. Aven and Vladimir and Ekaterina Semenikhin. At the same time, the Louis Vuitton Foundation is supporting the implementation of an extensive program of study, conservation, and restoration of modern French (Picasso, Matisse, Gauguin, and Van Gogh) and Russian (particularly Vrubel) works from the collections of the Pushkin Museum and the Tretyakov Gallery. The Louis Vuitton Foundation is also helping to equip and modernize the premises of the Restoration Laboratory at the Pushkin Museum. The exhibition catalog, a 520-page scholarly publication, is published together by Fondation Louis Vuitton and Éditions Gallimard.

Morozov masterpieces exhibited in Paris for the first time outside Russia

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