Treasuring the Morozov Collection

Part 2 on a Paris exhibition: The color and harmony of Gauguin, Cézanne, Bonnard, and other giants of French art

T he Morozov Collection: Icons of Modern Art is the new and spectacular exhibition on view at the Louis Vuitton Foundation by the Bois de Boulogne in Paris. For the intrepid art lover, it’s well worth going to Paris to see it, if there are not enough reasons to visit already. It’s the first time the Russians have lent the art collected by the two Morozov brothers, some of the very best paintings by Gauguin, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Picasso, and many other giants of the French fin de siècle avant-garde. At almost 200 paintings and sculptures, the show is the art event of the year, unless the queen or the pope decide to send their treasures on the road in the next few weeks.

Mikhail and Ivan Morozov, having a monumentally big textile fortune, bought well and prodigiously. Mikhail (1870–1903) collected for a short time, only five or so years, while Ivan (1871–1921) shuttled from Moscow to Paris, buying from dealers until the First World War made this impossible. Soon after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, Ivan and his family fled. The new regime confiscated the Morozov art, nationalized it, and at the Pushkin Museum and the Hermitage it has lived, never contextualized, never viewed as an entirety, and never interpreted as the vision of these two idiosyncratic brothers. Art isn’t the exclusive province of artists and art historians. Dealers, collectors, and critics are vital, too, in building bonds between great art and the public.

On Thursday, I introduced the exhibition and the Vuitton Foundation’s generosity and erudition. I also foregrounded Mikhail, as the show smartly does, since he’s the elder of the two, if only by a year, collects first and develops fast taste-wise, and, alas, dies at 31. Plus, of the two he’s the fun one and the big, sparkling comet in the sky.

The Morozov brothers weren’t exactly groomed for cutting-edge collecting. The Morozov family, just three generations from serfdom, weren’t dilettantes, either, and they were far from aristocratic. They remind me of old-fashioned, rich Midwestern or New England WASPs, still attentive to business, steeped in learning and charity, and disciplined doers.

At 24, Mikhail wrote a tell-all high-society novel that the government shredded, but he also wrote a decent biography of Charles V. He married well and happily and, his one randy and revelatory stab at fiction aside, spun no scandals. He patronized Moscow’s music schools and symphonies. A dabbling painter, he befriended young Russian artists who’d trained in Paris. He and his brother were social, cultural, and even political modernizers. Mikhail started collecting with Old Masters, moved quickly to Corot, and then in warp speed bought a great Renoir, Monet, and Degas, and then wickedly good work by Van Gogh and Gauguin. Then he died.

The exhibition’s curatorial team sensitively makes Mikhail and the Morozov family top billers in the first two or three galleries but, mostly, it’s Ivan’s show after that. Anne Baldassari, the head curator, and her Russian colleagues also do well in positioning early Russian painters such as Konstantin Korovin and Mikhail Vrubel, not household names, sad to say. The Morozov Collection is blessedly complex and not a simp show like so many in America and the U.K., where the themes are “race, race, race, victim, oppressor, and did I say race.” Call it example, stewardship, or just cooking a stew that smells delicious — Ivan was a transformative figure in antebellum Russian art.

A good art exhibition is many things, but one of them is a story of interest, well told. Mikhail might have shuffled off this mortal coil early, but his spirit lingers in a lollapalooza gallery that represents in flavor and type, though not in exact content, Impressionist salons in the 1870s into the early 1880s. It’s everything you’d want from Impressionism. Pissarro’s Terrains labourés from 1874 is a dash-and-dab scene of nothing but tiers of earth, a road with farmers, and a squat hill in soothing, harmonious greens and browns.

No one conveys the Impressionist theory of optics better than Alfred Sisley, and there are four or five of his best. Sisley isn’t a flashy painter — his work doesn’t grab or startle. No one annihilates the contour line more effectively, so what seems blurry and incomprehensible demands a close look. He’s a color essentialist. La Campagne de Veneux has dozens of variations of blues and teaches us that something very basic can be very beautiful. There’s a Monet view of Waterloo Bridge from 1903 in this space, too.

We’re never far from a basic theme of the exhibition: The Morozovs are Russian. Russian things like Korovin’s In a Boat, from 1888, are in this mix of French Impressionists, near a 1875 Renoir outdoor-café scene. It’s Russian Impressionism with the accent on “Russian,” and in this respect Russian and American art overlap. The Russians never go full hog kill-the-contour gauzy. Like the American Impressionists, they don’t like dismantling the form. Americans respect the integrity of the form and worship realism because of our Puritan heritage. Everything God makes has a purpose, so we must not monkey with it too much. Russians tend to keep blur at bay. That gives In a Boat a nice snapshot, secret-moment feel.

This big Impressionist gallery is refreshing enough but more so given outlier artists who will be new names to most visitors. Korovin is very, very good, was Paris-acculturated, and spent his post-1917 life in Paris. But Russian Impressionism is merely a footnote. I’d never heard of the Finnish painter Akseli Gallen-Kallela, but his 1896 Lake Ruovesi, owned by Mikhail, is dark, moody Nordic Impressionism. Frits Thaulow is there, too. He’s very underrated and Norwegian. That Mikhail also owned his Night, from 1880, might speak to his diffusion but also to his catholicity. Mikhail, as a personality, was far-ranging.

I don’t glimpse any one-upmanship in Ivan’s buying, but early in his collecting he bought a bust portrait of the actress Jeanne Samary by Renoir from 1877. It’s very different from the more formal full-length portrait of Samary that his brother bought in that Renoir’s Samary is so direct and informal, with a dazzling color contrast of pink and teal. We, of course, can’t know where Mikhail would have gone, but I tend to look at him as the more intrepid, acquisitive, and quicksilver of the two. Ivan, and here the show moves from what seems like an insurmountable high point to another, is all about depth and harmony.

There are two ways of looking at depth and harmony, intertwining in Ivan’s view. One is through his passion for ensembles. Both men had happy home lives, but I sense that Ivan was the homebody by instinct, and, of the two, he was the one who actually lived to middle age. Ivan’s commission of The Story of Psyche, painted by Maurice Denis in 1907 to go in his Music Salon; Bonnard’s Mediterranean Triptych, from 1910; and his Spring and Autumn, from 1912, are big ensembles fitted in the architecture of Ivan’s home. They are site-specific, occupy lots of real estate, and convey his rootedness, not a trait seen in such depth in Mikhail. The exhibition re-creates the Music Salon to display Denis’s panels.

You’ll never go wrong with Bonnard, and as with Gauguin and Cézanne, Ivan collected his work in great depth. The show does what it can, and does it well, in showing us how the Bonnards looked in Ivan’s Moscow home, installed flanking and at the top of his grand staircase.

These old photographs, blown up here and there, are useful for a few reasons. Ivan wanted to create an immersive environment, a sense that his home was landscaped, and it’s an immersive environment of French warmth and color, obviously in contrast to the feel and look of Moscow. They underscore Ivan’s devotion to permanence as a domestic theme. Yes, he bought lots of art, but the work by Denis and Bonnard wasn’t going to be removed and replaced with something else as part of a spring cleaning. Finally, if there was a competitive bone in Ivan’s body, it wasn’t his dead brother who activated it but Sergei Shchukin, his rich Moscow contemporary. In 1908, Shchukin commissioned Matisse to paint big things for his own grand staircase. The artist provided The Dance and La Musique, massive things though figural and not immersive and not an homage to nature.

If viewers hadn’t noticed this before, the Vuitton Foundation’s galleries are spacious and flexible. They’re given to contingencies like creating the ambiance of a Moscow palace. Beyond looking fabulous, the seven panels of Denis’s Story of Psyche, with figures more than life-size, present a Morozov that surprises.

Psyche is the Greek goddess of the soul. If we are given to think of Ivan, who thrills at avant-garde art, as a man of the modern world, embracing reason, progress, empiricism, and whatever else we think forms what we call modernity, we have to pause. His taste for the French art movement Les Nabis — founded by Bonnard, Vuillard, and Denis — is a taste for mysticism, metaphors, symbols, dreams, and all things cryptic, subtle, and profound. (The word nabi comes from the Hebrew navi, meaning “prophet.”) And the Psyche panels show that there is still in Ivan a love of the nude woman that seems otherworldly to us today and that situates him, more than any other work of art in the show does, as a man of the 19th century.

Psyche’s story is about love since she marries Cupid. From Raphaël’s opus at the Villa Farnesina, depicting their wedding, to dozens of subsequent Old Master takes leading to David’s and Bouguereau’s Psyche paintings, she’s certainly a staple of years gone by. Denis’s cycle ends the exhibition, more or less, and leaves us thinking pink and pastel blue. Thinking Ivan’s taste is too decorative, too twee, and too irrelevant is wrong.

That Denis and Bonnard loom so large might be simply a case of timing, given that the start of war in 1914 halts Ivan’s collecting and the French avant-garde in its tracks, but Ivan does buy one Cubist picture — Picasso’s 1910 portrait of Ambroise Vollard. It’s as cerebral, cool, and dissective as Picasso could get. Ivan doesn’t buy anything else like it, and he might have bought this in large part because Vollard was his favorite art dealer. He’s not chasing bleeding-edge anyone. His two other Picassos are a gorgeous, surreal Family of Saltimbanques painting from 1905 that has much of Puvis de Chavannes in it, and a figure picture inspired by Gauguin’s citrus palette. Ivan is moved by sensuality and beauty. Call this bourgeois, but sensuality and beauty make life worth the trouble.

There’s depth of spirit, thought, and feeling, and these big ensemble commissions express these, and then there’s depth that comes from focus. Buying 18 Cézannes shows focus. Ivan covers his career, too, from the riveting, creepy Interior with Two Women and a Child, from 1861, to Blue Landscape, from about 1905, the year before Cézanne died. He collects portraits, still lifes, nudes, forest scenes, and a view of Mont Sainte-Victoire.

Taking the “one of everything” approach is methodical, as is the idea of progression of one artist’s career. Cézanne’s landscapes are displayed in one gallery. They’re harmonious, to be sure, but it’s harmony that compels a spirit of contemplation. Cézanne’s palette is more monochromatic than extensive. What he makes of few colors is bewitching.

And then there’s the harmony of Gauguin. Mikhail bought two important Gauguins just before he died. The two brothers’ collecting was independent, but after Ivan saw the 1906 Gauguin retrospective three years after Gauguin’s death, he decided to build on his brother’s two works. He bought eleven and, displayed together in Paris, they’re something to see. It’s intense Arcadia and modern exotica in contrast to Orientalism’s academic exotica.

Beyond this, though, Ivan was smitten by Gauguin’s color. Gauguin, Cézanne, Bonnard, and the Impressionists don’t convey space and volume through perspective, chiaroscuro, or figures in the round. They do it largely through color. Ivan’s and Mikhail’s Gauguins are mostly Tahitian, so the theme of Eden unites them with Bonnard’s immersive nature paintings but also with Denis, who painted for Ivan the lives of gods and goddesses.

Syncretism of this kind is expansive, but I hesitate to say it’s something particularly Russian. Tahiti, the Mediterranean, and Parisian streets are as far from Russia as anything. It’s easy to say that all Russians have rustic, earthy souls, but that would be a snooty American observation. Suffice it to say that remembering the Morozov family’s Old Believer roots comes in handy. The Old Believers are big on old liturgy and ritual, but it’s dogma invested with intense mystery. Little is objective, in your face, or à la mode. Denis’s Story of Psyche is highly decorative, mythological, and a bevy of nudes so it seems the most old-fashioned part of Ivan’s collection, but Psyche is, after all, the goddess of the soul. The soulfulness of Ivan’s taste defines his collection and makes it feel not avant-garde, not cutting edge, but timeless.

Next week I’ll focus on Van Gogh’s Prison Courtyard, painted in 1890 and bought by Ivan in 1909. It’s a good segue to the other Van Goghs that Ivan collected and of course the Morozov art after the Bolshevik Revolution and Ivan’s death in exile in 1921. This isn’t the first time I’ve written three stories about a single exhibition. I wrote four on the Raphaël retrospective I saw in Rome in 2020. The Morozov show is that kind of once-in-a-lifetime event.