French and Russian art on the scale of war and peace
Posted: Wed Jul 09, 2025 9:54 am
PARIS – Sometimes we aspire to the beauty of little things: the haiku, the string quartet, miniature engraving. And then other times tovarishch, you need your beauty as great as the motherland.
“The Morozov collection: icons of modern art“, Which opened its doors last week at the Fondation Louis Vuitton here, brings to Paris an explosion of French and Russian painting on a” War and Peace “scale – and brings together, for the first time since 1918, one of the two most important art collections in pre-revolutionary Russia.
While the French bourgeoisie still despised the Parisian avant-garde, young Russian textile moguls Ivan and Mikhail Morozov bought the city’s most innovative paintings – and wholesale. Gauguin, Monet, Van Gogh, Picasso: all their work came from the East, and will inspire two generations of Russian successors. Alongside their fellow textile boss and friendly rival collector Sergei Shchukin, the Morozovs made Moscow the offshore capital of French modern art in the 1900s.
Then came the October Revolution, when the 200 paintings here were expropriated for the national collection. Ivan Morozov goes into exile. Under Stalin, the paintings were suppressed and scattered as far as Siberia.
Today, the Morozov collection has been mainly absorbed into the job function email database collections of the Pushkin State Museum and the State Tretyakov Museum in Moscow, and the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. Their reassembly here, on four whole floors of Frank Gehry’s glass sailboat in the Bois de Boulogne, is legitimately historic in a way few shows can really claim: as if a whole lost world could be entered, from room to room. .
Just bring your vaccination passport and go! Nearly a decade in the works, twice delayed by the coronavirus pandemic, “The Morozov Collection” is what touts like to call “once in a lifetime” – or, perhaps, twice in a lifetime. Five years ago, the Vuitton Foundation brought together the Shchukin collection in another museum filling exhibition, whose scholarly weight was matched by its massive popularity.
“The Morozov collection: icons of modern art“, Which opened its doors last week at the Fondation Louis Vuitton here, brings to Paris an explosion of French and Russian painting on a” War and Peace “scale – and brings together, for the first time since 1918, one of the two most important art collections in pre-revolutionary Russia.
While the French bourgeoisie still despised the Parisian avant-garde, young Russian textile moguls Ivan and Mikhail Morozov bought the city’s most innovative paintings – and wholesale. Gauguin, Monet, Van Gogh, Picasso: all their work came from the East, and will inspire two generations of Russian successors. Alongside their fellow textile boss and friendly rival collector Sergei Shchukin, the Morozovs made Moscow the offshore capital of French modern art in the 1900s.
Then came the October Revolution, when the 200 paintings here were expropriated for the national collection. Ivan Morozov goes into exile. Under Stalin, the paintings were suppressed and scattered as far as Siberia.
Today, the Morozov collection has been mainly absorbed into the job function email database collections of the Pushkin State Museum and the State Tretyakov Museum in Moscow, and the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. Their reassembly here, on four whole floors of Frank Gehry’s glass sailboat in the Bois de Boulogne, is legitimately historic in a way few shows can really claim: as if a whole lost world could be entered, from room to room. .
Just bring your vaccination passport and go! Nearly a decade in the works, twice delayed by the coronavirus pandemic, “The Morozov Collection” is what touts like to call “once in a lifetime” – or, perhaps, twice in a lifetime. Five years ago, the Vuitton Foundation brought together the Shchukin collection in another museum filling exhibition, whose scholarly weight was matched by its massive popularity.