Cézannes, Van Goghs, Gauguins Galore, from Russia to Paris

The Morozov brothers were pathbreaking collectors of modern art, and their treasures are getting a rare viewing in the City of Light.

W hen I got to Paris a couple of weeks ago, I asked my French friends what was special to see. I had a rough itinerary, places I’d never visited, such as Gustave Moreau’s house, the Nissim de Camondo Museum, and the mythically sublime but in-the-flesh genuinely sublime Foundation Custodia. Then there’s the Louvre, of course, and Sainte-Chapelle’s stained glass, probably the work of art dearest to me. “You have to see the Morozov show,” they said. “Étonnant,” “incroyable,” “invraisembable,” they sputtered and cooed. “Chimérique,” an artist friend called it, the stuff of inconceivable fantasy.

And they were right. Mikhail (1870–1903) and Ivan (1871–1921) Morozov, two fantastically rich Moscow brothers, each assembled a dazzling group of avant-garde French paintings in the 20 or so years before the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Each is different but on a parallel track. A hefty selection, usually living at the Pushkin State Museum and the Hermitage, is in Paris now, at the Louis Vuitton Foundation.

I vaguely knew the name “Morozov” and some of the things the brothers bought. Ivan, for instance, owned Van Gogh’s Night Café. It’s now at the Yale University Art Gallery only because the Bolsheviks who confiscated the brothers’ art sold it in the early 1930s to Stephen Clark, desperate as they were for cash. He later gave it to Yale, where it’s the most eloquent painting of a dive ever. At the same time and place and in a friendly competition, Gauguin painted Night Café at Arles, also bought by Ivan, never sold by the Soviets, and now shown in Paris in all its splendor. I also knew that the brothers, in a buying spree, re-created the first Impressionist salon, held in Nadar’s photography studio in 1874.

I didn’t know much else, but I’m a simple country soul, a scholar of early American art, and, honestly speaking, few know much more since the art’s in Russia and almost never lent. The exhibition and book are, together, the first as well as the definitive look at the two brothers and why they bought what they did. Anne Baldassari, the curator and editor of the catalogue, is the scholar-of-the-year for lucidly and elegantly interpreting a cache of art like no other. She was the director of the Picasso Museum for years. She’s dynamic, and, alas, obdurate enough to have aroused her staff to rebel. With more than a dollop of misogyny, France’s culture minister fired her in 2014. To handle a topic like the Morozovs and their art, though, conviction, grit, and vision are essential.

In only a few years, Mikhail and Ivan bought the very best by Monet, Degas, Sisley, Pissarro, Manet, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne, and Picasso. Ivan commissioned a massive Four Seasons cycle from Pierre Bonnard for the grand staircase of his Moscow palace and another cycle, The History of Psyche, from Maurice Denis for its Music Salon. Ivan owned The Prisoners Courtyard, painted by Van Gogh in 1890. Not to overexercise my superlatives, but I think it’s the most prophetic painting of its time. It’s got its own chapel-like space in the exhibition.

Another revelation. The Vuitton Foundation is located on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne, once a royal forest and now a park, in a spectacular new glass building designed by Frank Gehry. I’d never been. I’m not a big Gehry fan, but it’s impressive and a 21st-century tribute to Paris’s distinguished fin de siècle glass-roofed buildings like the Grand Palais. Manet, Renoir, Van Gogh, Morisot, and other artists painted Bois de Boulogne scenes. The Duke and Duchess of Windsor lived in a house in the park, if readers need more glamour.

The exhibition is immense. It covers about ten palatial galleries on two levels. It’s an abundantly layered show. There’s so much art, with nary a clunker and each demanding a star turn. Then there’s the history of French avant-garde painting from the Impressionists to Picasso and Matisse, itself the foundation of European and American modern art. And we have the two collectors, making the show a never-before-told biography. Mikhail and Ivan are the twin threads, the golden boys, running through the story, never colliding, never discordant, but different enough to intrigue.

Mikhail is the mercurial one, the oldest by a year and the collecting trailblazer.

He was a Renaissance wunderkind, at 21 a multimillionaire through his share of the family’s textile fortune, a gambler, bon vivant, egoist, and patron of the arts. At 24, he published a biography of Charles V and a history of science. At 25, he wrote a novel called “In the Darkness,” so lightly veiled a take on Moscow’s high society that the government confiscated and burned every copy. He was a born entertainer, using his opulent home as a host-with-the-most stage, and genuinely affable and curious.

Mikhail is the critical access point for three themes. First, he’s the charismatic hook, as young, impossibly rich men are, and, as the oldest brother, he introduces us to his family. Through him we learn about the Morozov money. Mikhail’s and Ivan’s great-grandfather, Savva (1770–1860), was a serf working as a household servant. He married a woman with a five-ruble dowry and used the money to fund his own silk-ribbon workshop, first supplying his master’s family, then the other local grandees. Word spread, and while keeping house, herding cattle, and chauffeuring, he built a tiny ribbon factory. He expanded into evening-gown trimmings, bought his and his family’s freedom in 1820, and, before long, cornered the cotton market in Russia. By 1917, the family business sold cotton, velvet, yarn, carded cloth, and wadding from London to China.

Theirs isn’t an aristocratic family. Rather, the Morozovs, for all of Mikhail’s grand living, were observant Old Believers, a Russian Orthodox branch valuing premodern liturgy. They had a work ethic that would rival any Mormon’s, as well as a passion for philanthropy and public education. The Old Believers, disliked by aristocrats, autocrats, and ecclesiastics, tended to be very rich, so, while seen as outsiders, they thrived as insider outsiders, much as rich Jews.

Family portraits in the initial big gallery introduce us to the second theme: the state of fin de siècle Russian painting. As much as Gauguin, Cézanne, and Van Gogh get the headlines, The Morozov Collection is an exhibition about Russian modern art, too. A 1897 portrait of Maria Feodorovna Morozova, Mikhail’s and Ivan’s grandmother, by Valentin Serov, and Konstantin Korovin’s portrait of Ivan from 1903, both very nice, are indebted to Carolus-Duran and Sargent. Serov’s portrait of the grandmother is the less flashy since he was older and painting a widow. Korovin is showing Ivan in white tie, serious and formal but with a brushy finish suggesting a free spirit for a subject. What Mikhail and Ivan inherited in money they lacked in good looks. Even in his early 30s, Ivan looks like William Howard Taft. Mikhail at 30, painted by Serov, is fat and bald.

Art by Serov, Korovin, Vasily Perov, and others inspired the Morozov brothers not only because they knew their work, being local, but because these artists, loosely called the Wanderers, had themselves traveled to Paris and absorbed French style — a history that’s much more developed in the catalogue. For all his Champagne guzzling and card-playing, Mikhail, basted in Old Believer ethics, viewed himself as a cultural modernizer. By supporting young Russian artists, he and, later, his brother, sought to pry Russian taste from provinciality and aristocratic conservatism.

Finally, by focusing first on Mikhail, we’re introduced to the Morozovs and Impressionism. Mikhail naturally wanted to collect art. This interest didn’t grow from his passion for contemporary music or his ambitions as a writer but was concurrent with them and, together, defined him as the connoisseur savant of his time and place. Korovin’s memoirs report that Mikhail started buying Old Masters. At a dinner party hosted by Mikhail, Korovin said of the Old Master market, “They say it’s by Raphael or Murillo, but who knows . . . you don’t know what to believe.” Besides, the Old Masters, he felt, were “old, brown, and dark.”

Visiting Ambroise Vollard’s and Bernheim-Jeune’s galleries in Paris, Mikhail began as a dabbler. He bought an early, beige Bonnard and modest things by Corot. Mikhail’s impulsive. The key work for him is Renoir’s large Portrait of the Actress Jeanne Samary, from 1878, followed by Degas’s La Toilette, from 1884, both luscious pictures of women. Then he bought Monet’s Champ de coquelicots, from 1890.

I would call these billboard or summation pictures, suggesting that Mikhail looked at lots of work by each and bought the best, representative things. Renoir’s is his best and most beautiful and brushiest full figure, Degas’s has all the bells and whistles of his bathing scenes, and Monet’s doesn’t focus on one landscape element but treats field, sky, and mountains as a sweeping unity. In 1900, Mikhail proved himself as a trailblazer. He bought a Gauguin Tahitian landscape with goats, and a Tahitian family scene. He also bought Van Gogh’s La Mer aux Saintes-Maries, from 1888, the catalogue’s cover image. Ivan would eventually own eleven Gauguins and five Van Goghs, but his brother beat him to the punch.

The curator Baldassari negotiates all of these themes to create a coherent storyline, meatier than a preface, while keeping Mikhail in the spotlight. Mikhail, self-dramatizing, flamboyant, insatiable, and curious, died at 33. Compared with his brother’s, his French collection is small. It’s a propellant in two respects. First, Ivan, careful, private, and focused, was inspired by his brother.

That Mikhail didn’t much go for depth might have been a function of dying young, but it seems characteristic. He wasn’t a flitter but had many passions to indulge. Ivan went for depth, and my next story will consider his Gauguin and Cézanne purchases and his Denis and Bonnard cycle commissions. The exhibition also deals with the confiscation of Ivan’s art by the Communists and its journey from the Lenin and Stalin years to today.

Second, in keeping with the Morozov family’s commitment to education, Morozov’s widow Margarita, herself from a loaded Russian family, gave most of Mikhail’s art in 1910 to the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow’s only public modern-art museum, which, until then, specialized in Russian art. Until then, aside from random dinner parties at Ivan’s and Mikhail’s Moscow mansions, new panting from Western Europe was more mythic than real.

How in the world did the Vuitton Foundation get this show? Vuitton must have outfitted the entire Russian army with designer rucksacks. If you’re going to invade Kyiv, I guess, best to do it in high style. For the exceptionally good catalogue, President Putin and President Macron wrote short introductions. The exhibition’s a very big deal.

Hellava guy, that Putin. He personally approved the Morozov loans, probably relieved to take time from running job placement for Hunter Biden, that renowned oil-and-gas expert, beneficiary of Putin make-work schemes, and crack-pipe connoisseur. You know, Hunter “10 percent for the Big Guy” Biden.

All said in good fun, though Putin keeps reminding his apparatchiks that the 10 percent goes to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Putin and Macron did indeed write introductory letters in the book. The Morozovs’ collecting represents a period in time when newly rich Russians viewed Paris as the heart and soul of the best in modernity. The most adventurous among cultured Parisians, in turn, hummed Tchaikovsky and watched slack-jawed as Nijinsky danced.

That the art is back in Paris makes sense. It’s got a place of immense pride in the dramatic Gehry building with no competition from the Mona Lisa at the Louvre or, at the Musée d’Orsay, with lots of other Impressionists. Not that what the Musée d’Orsay displays is serious competition. When the Morozovs (alongside the Havemeyers, Palmers, and other Americans) were buying art, the high-society, establishment French collectors weren’t much for collecting the avant-garde art of their own country. That’s why so many of the best paintings from Manet to Matisse landed in America or Russia.

A few years ago, the Vuitton Foundation displayed the collection of Sergei Shchukin (1854–1936), another heavy-hitter Russian collector of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art. Shchukin was one of Matisse’s fondest patrons and owned The Dance. He also bought dozens of early works by Picasso. The Bolsheviks nationalized his collection, too. Russia sent it to Vuitton for a first-ever show in 2016, so the relationships were there before the Morozov show.

Why not America? Russia hasn’t lent art to an American museum since 2011. Its museums, run by the government, fear that American courts would confiscate Russian loans as hostages aimed at the restitution of the Schneerson Library, an important collection of Judaica, including rare rabbinical books, seized by the Communists in 1917 but rightfully belonging to the Lubavitch Library in Brooklyn.

Russian oligarchs, I’m sure, love Vuitton, and Moët Hennessy and Bulgari and Tiffany and Château d’Yquem and Dior and all the other companies staked by Bernard Arnault. I can’t argue with quality. Through the Vuitton Foundation’s connections, money, and commitment to scholarship, we’ve got the Morozov show, one of the best art exhibitions I’ve ever seen.