The Birth of Modern Art: Sergey Shchukin`s Choice

By 1914, Sergey Ivanovich Shchukin’s collection was one of the finest in the world. There was nothing to compare with it in Europe or America. The exhibition in the State Hermitage will present more than 150 works from that world-famous collection: 30 paintings by Henri Matisse, 40 works by Pablo Picasso, the celebrated “iconostasis” containing 15 of Paul Gauguin’s pictures, some of the best paintings by Vincent van Gogh, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, André Derain and many others.

The exhibition, which has been organized by the State Hermitage in conjunction with the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts and Sergey Shchukin’s grandson André Marc Delocque-Fourcaud, is unique because Saint Petersburg specifically is home to some of the most important works by Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse that cannot leave the Hermitage due to their state of preservation. That has allowed the organizers to create a display that is as close as possible to Shchukin’s original version: paintings kept in the Hermitage and the Pushkin Museum will be on show for the first time in such a complete array.

Mikhail Piotrovsky. General Director of the State Hermitage, comments: “The reason for Sergey Ivanovich Shchukin’s fame lies not only in the quality and innovative character of Shchukin’s collection, but also in the dramatic history of the Shchukin family and the no less dramatic fate of the collection. Had there not been such a life, there would not have been such a collection. This Russian merchant from the Old Believer milieu had a great influence on the development of new art in Europe. Everyone knows that without his commissions many masterpieces would not have appeared. We know that it was not only Matisse who took his artistic wishes into consideration. More than that – Sergey Ivanovich provided everyone with a superb example of the way an influential and confident person does not reject the abstruse, seeks meanings, vacillates in his choices, agonizes over things and makes his decision. The textbook story of how he forced himself to look at a Picasso painting that he found irritating in order to understand it contains echoes of the way Tsar Peter the Great forced his fellow countrypeople to look at the Taurida Venus that was strange and disturbing to them.”

The exhibition is constructed around the idea of presenting not just an account of Shchukin’s collection but also the look of his celebrated mansion on the street called Znamenka in central Moscow. The display opens with Cornelius Krohn’s portrait of Sergey Ivanovich, who greets visitors in the manner of a host and invites them, as it were, into his mansion. That splendid building had been built even before the great fire of 1812. It had a succession of different owners and was repeatedly redecorated. When Shchukin acquired the place, it had interiors in the style of Napoleon III’s Paris, with opulent stuccowork, large quantities of indoor sculptures and bronzes. The new owner was fairly indifferent to the trimmings of his home, but he did engage in experiments with the colour scheme and display. As a result, paintings were often hung directly over the plaster mouldings or mirrors, forming eccentric, at times clashing combinations with the antique carpets, outmoded furniture and décor.

Shortly before the 1917 revolution, as if he had a premonition of the collapse of the old world and the difficult fate that awaited his collection, Shchukin drew up a plan of his home and a detailed catalogue with descriptions and photographs of how he had arranged the artworks taken by the professional photographer Pavel Orlov in 1914. It was this unique set of material that became the basis for the display in the Manege of the Small Hermitage. The curators have reconstructed the main parts of the house on Znamenka, with the display divided up into “rooms”. Visitors will be able to see for themselves how detailed the reconstruction in the Hermitage has been made: each “room” contains reproductions of the original photographs of the corresponding areas.

From 1907–08, Sergey Shchukin threw his mansion open to visitors. At first they needed to book in advance, announcing their visit by telephone, a means of communication that wealthy Muscovites and Petersburgers were already using enthusiastically in the early 20th century. With time, the popularity of Shchukin’s collection grew to such an extent that the visiting rules became less strict. Pre-1914 guidebooks of Moscow already included Shchukin’s mansion among the main sights of the old capital.

Life in the home changed from the moment that it became a public space. Shchukin retained the old names of the halls (Large Dining-Room, Music Salon, Forehall), but the rooms where he himself resided were in a wing at the back. Before the revolution, he moved to another house altogether. After a series of family tragedies (the deaths of his son Sergey, his beloved wife Lidia, his son Grigory, his brother and close friend Piotr), the former way of life in the mansion on Znamenka with musical soirees, dinner parties and large gatherings faded into the past, and the place gradually turned into a museum.

For the run of the exhibition “The Birth of Modern Art: Sergey Shchukin`s Choice”, the Manege of the Small Hermitage will be transformed into Shchukin’s mansion. Visitors will pass through a succession of “rooms” that differ only slightly from their original counterparts on Znamenka in their contents and layout.

The first thing that Shchukin’s guests encountered was a great staircase where Henri Matisse’s famed panels Dance and Music were hung. That decision required considerable boldness on the collector’s part. As he wrote to Matisse, “Moscow is Asia. And people don't like nudes there; well, there are some, all the same, in Moscow, a few nudes. […] I can't have [them] in my own house.”[1] In the end, however, Sergey Ivanovich resolved to “disregard our bourgeois opinion”[2] and confirmed his order for the two panels. In the exhibition in the Manege, Dance and Music also occupy a place of honour and will be visible at once and from practically every spot in the hall.

After the staircase and the Forehall with its small arrangement of Matisses, visitors arrived in the Music Salon that contained Impressionist paintings. Shchukin bought the works by Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro and Puvis de Chavannes in his early years as a collector (1898–1904). That period saw the appearance in his home of such masterpieces as Monet’s Meadows at Giverny and Luncheon on the Grass, Degas’s Woman Combing her Hair, Pissarro’s Avenue de l'Opéra and many others. The entire set of works from the Music Salon, with just a few exceptions, will be presented to visitors in the Manege.

Next after the Music Salon in Shchukin’s mansion lay the Pink Drawing-Room. In the exhibition the two spaces are placed opposite each other. Henri Matisse personally took charge of the decoration of this room when he visited Moscow at Shchukin’s invitation in 1911. It was here that the owner’s experimentation with colour schemes manifested itself most strongly. The classic grand interior was hung with Zorah Standing, a Portrait of the Artist’s Wife, Nymph and Satyr, Game of Boules, Figurine and Vase on Oriental Carpet – in all more than 20 of the most modern paintings by one of the early 20th century’s most fashionable artists.

A unique space in Shchukin’s house was the Large Dining-Room decorated with an ensemble of works by Paul Gauguin. Contemporaries dubbed this an “iconostasis” (after the wall of icons separating the sanctuary from the main body of an Orthodox church) and that name has stuck. “Gauguin’s Iconostasis” will be on show in its entirety for the first time since Shchukin’s collection was divided between the Hermitage and the Pushkin Museum. One of the foremost premieres of the exhibition will be The King's Wife, a painting of which Gauguin himself was very proud. “I think that in terms of colour I have never yet produced anything with such a powerful festive resonance,” the artist wrote.[3] Shchukin bought The King’s Wife from Gustave Fayet for the fabulous sum of 30,000 francs in 1908. The painting is kept in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, and its participation in the exhibition was made possible by the very highest level of trust existing between the two museums and lengthy preparations. Another important Gauguin painting – the Hermitage’s Scene from Tahitian Life – will be on show to the public for the first time after a lengthy and complex restoration. For a long time, the painting’s condition and outward appearance were dispiriting: it seemed as if the paint layer had been washed off; the picture looked bleached and stood out for the wrong reasons among the other works by Gauguin. Scene from Tahitian Life was entrusted to the Hermitage’s Laboratory for the Scientific Restoration of Easel Paintings. After lengthy investigation, it was established that the thin layer of wax which Gauguin used to cover his paintings had partially deteriorated and lost its properties, but the artist’s paintwork had survived beneath it. Thanks to the skilful efforts of Victor Korobov, the head of the laboratory, the wax was restored and cleaned, giving the painting back its power and vividness.

An inimitable atmosphere reigned in what was probably the most unusual spot in Shchukin’s mansion – the Picasso room. This was home to that part of the collection that was developing intensively on the eve of the First World War. Sergey Ivanovich did not immediately appreciate Picasso – the collector himself said that he might buy a painting and them spend several months forcing himself to look at it, get used to it and try to understand it. Nonetheless, Picasso’s art did interest Shchukin strongly. It was the subject of prolonged contemplation on his part and on the part of many Moscow philosophers and intellectuals who visited the mansion on Znamenka. Forty Picasso paintings were installed in a space of just 25 square metres, which produced a stunning impression on many who saw it. As the exhibition curators have noted, it was in this room that the “sound” of the time could be heard most keenly – the fracturing of the old, accustomed ways before the worldwide catastrophe. In the Manege of the Small Hermitage, the pictures by Picasso will be displayed together with works by Georges Braque and Henri Rousseau.

The exhibition “The Birth of Modern Art: Sergey Shchukin`s Choice” completes a triad of exhibitions of Shchukin’s collection. The ambitious project began in 2015, with the organization of the joint displays “The Keys to Passion” and “Icons of Modern Art, the Shchukin Collection”. After the historic success of the exhibition in Paris in 2016–17, which drew 1,250,000 visitors, and in Moscow in 2019, the exhibition in the Manege of the Small Hermitage will sound Sergey Ivanovich Shchukin’s final triumphal chord. On 28 June, the exhibition “Brother Ivan. The Collection of Mikhail and Ivan Morozov”, organized jointly with the State Hermitage, will have its formal opening at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow.

The exhibition can be visited by holders of tickets to the Main Museum Complex, irrespective of their chosen route, during the museum's working hours, and separately with tickets to the additional evening and morning time slots, as well as with separate tickets on Mondays between 11.00 am and 6.00 pm (ticket offices are open until 4.00 pm). Guided tours of the exhibition are also available.

The exhibition curators are Mikhail Olegovich Dedinkin, deputy head of the State Hermitage’s Department of Western European Fine Art, and Olga Dmitriyevna Leontyeva, a researcher in the Department of Western European Fine Art.

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