Plumbing Van Gogh’s Prison Courtyard

Part 3 on the Morozov Collection stash in Paris, which the French should keep until Putin gets out of Ukraine

T his is the last of three stories on The Morozov Collection: Icons of Modern Art, on view at the Vuitton Foundation in Paris. It’s a brilliant and landmark exhibition. It’s the first time that the art owned by Mikhail and Ivan Morozov, two Moscow brothers, has been shown together. Most of the art has been split among the Pushkin and the Hermitage for 70 years. Few of its hoard of Gauguins, Van Goghs, Cézannes, Renoirs, and Monets have traveled. Together, the Morozov Collection has to be among the most comprehensive, insofar as French fin-de-siècle avant-garde painting goes, and among the best.

Mikhail, the older of the two brothers by a year, died suddenly in 1911 at 31. He collected for only five years. Ivan bought heavily for a few more, going to dealers in Paris, plopping down on a deep-cushioned easy chair, and inspecting paintings as they were showed to him one right after the other. The onset of war in the late summer of 1914 made travel difficult for him. Ivan and his family were in Moscow and St. Petersburg through 1920, when they fled Russia. After the December 1918 Bolshevik coup, his art was nationalized, though Ivan was insultingly appointed its “deputy director.” He died in the Bohemian spa town Carlsbad in 1921, waiting for bad times in Moscow to pass, which they never did.

The exhibition is a collection history as well as a look at great art. What happened to it after the Revolution? For years, Ivan’s home and art were open for public display. Russia had very few proper museums, so the art was displayed more or less as Ivan left it, sans, of course, the family’s furniture and other things, all of which walked. I imagine nighttime guards assigned to the music salon had the best security gigs post-1917, better than working in the ubiquitous pop-up gulags. It was decorated, after all, by Maurice Denis’s big wall murals depicting the voluptuous, nude Psyche and other gods. All that pulchritude, so much titillation, so much salivation, so much who-knows-what-else. Doesn’t the Leninist love of humanity start with self-love? But I digress, naughty me. Under Communism, you grab moments of pleasure where you can

In 1948, Stalin took an interest in not only the Morozov art but the Soviet Union’s vast holdings of French and Russian avant-garde art assembled by others. The Morozovs weren’t they only rich Russians fixated on the latest from Paris in the years before the First World War. In a 1948 decree, Stalin denounced this art as “lacking in idealism, anti-popular, formalist, and devoid of educational values for the Soviet viewer.” It was bourgeois. He ruled that the art was to be parceled out to the Pushkin State Museum in Moscow and the Hermitage in Leningrad, more as a time capsule of capitalist conceit and decadence than as art to be cherished and promoted.

Mikhail Dedinkin, a curator at the Hermitage, writes a good account of the Morozov art’s fate over the decades. In the late ’20s, apparatchiks starting selling Old Masters confiscated after the Reds came to power. Andrew Mellon and Armand Hammer were among the many American buyers. Some 3,000 paintings were dispersed for cash that the Soviets desperately needed. Dedinkin tells us that the tag sale stopped just as Stalin’s money men began to eye the Morozov things. A handful were sold, among them Van Gogh’s Night Café, one of the greatest works of art from the 1880s by anyone, anywhere. It’s at Yale now, a gift from Stephen Clark, one of Matisse’s and Edward Hopper’s patrons.

This isn’t covered by the show, but the tiny staffs of the Pushkin and the Hermitage until the 1980s had a one-word mission statement: “survive.” It wasn’t until the ’90s that these museums emerged from their Cold War sleep. During low points in the ’90s, though, Russian curators often went unpaid for months. Elena Sharnova, a Pushkin curator, was one of the first Russians to get a fellowship for scholars when she came to the Clark Art Institute in 1999 for two months. We sent her back with a trunk of blue jeans and Coca-Cola to sell.

In the past few years, Russia has joined the international museum community, though collaborating with a Russian museum on an exhibition is very difficult. When I was a curator, a big payoff culture existed among Russian museum professionals. Shipping and insuring, say, a $10 million Gauguin was expensive enough. Add a $10,000 gift to the museum, siphoned by who-knows-who, and an American museum would see a $40,000 cost. Not worth it, and, besides, Russian registrars were impossible when they weren’t unprofessional. I think things are better now, but the Vuitton Foundation’s work in getting this show is still a profile in courage.

A friend of mine who worked for the World Bank for years told me that the French should confiscate the Morozov art in retaliation for the Ukraine invasion. This won’t happen. Bernard Arnault, Vuitton’s owner, is the second-richest man in Europe. Putin is probably richer, though Jeff Bezos holds the official title of Richest of All. That said, the rich travel in packs. Arnault owns Dior, too. He might get his fancy knickers in a knot. The Morozov art might stay longer than expected in Paris, but culture shouldn’t be driven by politics, however heinous Putin’s might be.

Last year I wrote about a great exhibition at the Dallas Museum of Art on Van Gogh’s paintings of olive trees surrounding the mental asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, where the artist stayed from summer 1889 to May 1890. Though Van Gogh committed himself, he felt a grim sense of incarceration. So regimented, so confined was he that he could paint scenes very close to the asylum, which was set, like nearly everything in rural Provence, among olive groves. Van Gogh painted the simple trees as lush and fruit-bearing, picked clean by peasants, and then barren and asleep in the winter. He saw this cycle as the cycle of all life writ small, the Dallas show argues, making these beautifully painted but modest scenes spiritual and cosmic. He also painted The Prison Courtyard while he was at Saint-Rémy. Ivan bought the picture in Paris in 1909.

The Prison Courtyard has gone unplumbed in part because it’s in Russia, not New York, London, or Paris but also because it’s based on a wood engraving by Gustave Doré, the best-known and most accomplished French illustrator. It appeared in 1872 in London: A Pilgrimage, a book by Doré and British journalist Blanchard Jerrold about everyday life in London by the docks and in slums, churches, and factories, in an opium den, and in Newgate Prison.

While Van Gogh was in the Saint-Rémy hospital, his brother, Theo, mailed him either the book, which had a chapter on prisons, or just Doré’s illustration, a full-pager showing the prison exercise yard. Art historians tend to look with scorn at copies, and especially copies after illustrations, and doubly so Doré’s, the schlocky Cecil B. de Mille of French illustration. Best to put all of this aside. Doré is wonderful.

Van Gogh, the catalogue tells us, doesn’t mimic Doré’s work or simply color it in. His view backs up, enlarging the prison yard. This doesn’t make the scene more spacious but, rather, accentuates and accelerates the narrowing of space. Shadows are longer. Van Gogh had been using black, verboten among Impressionists, since 1888. Black and Prussian-blue and cobalt-blue contours make the figures seem more weighted, but his emerald greens, cadmium, lemon yellows, and Sienna earths create what Anne Baldassari, the head curator, calls a “greenish aquarium.” Going from this look to a spirit of hopelessness and wreathed confinement isn’t a leap.

Van Gogh did something similar in The Night Café, a picture that Ivan bought and the Communist regime sold in the ’30s. There, he uses citrus yellow and neon green to heighten a sense of entrapment in the dive bar populated by losers. In The Prison Courtyard, the lines creating the pavement look like the ciphers that prisoners sometime make in graffiti, each line marking another day. The brick walls seem to go up and up forever. Van Gogh wrote to his brother about the exercise yard at Saint-Rémy, saying he could see a patch of a wheat field through it. In The Prison Courtyard we see nothing.

The strawberry-blond prisoner in the foreground who is looking at us is said to be Van Gogh. In Doré’s print, the prisoner next to him looks at us, so Van Gogh has fiddled with the scene. Jerrold’s text doesn’t name him but says he was once a colonel in the British army. I think Jerrold wanted to emphasize that prisoners weren’t always from downscale backgrounds, as much as incarceration stripped them of freedom. Van Gogh, it bears repeating, committed himself to the sanitarium. There were times when the doctors there thought he wasn’t fit enough to leave for an outing to paint, confining him for days at a time, but he was free to leave for good anytime.

It’s a one-off picture for Van Gogh. He never did anything like it. He painted it in February 1890, so he had six months to live. It’s not easy to see the downward slide in his mental state in his work. Yes, he painted The Prison Courtyard, Worn Out, At Eternity’s Gate, and the creepy thunderstorm scene, Wheat Fields with Crows, during this time, but he also painted versions of Millet pictures, Dr. Gachet, flower still lifes, irises, and landscapes. There is something to be said for Van Gogh painting whatever presented itself, using whatever materials he had. He didn’t have an endless supply of paint and canvas.

Ivan owned five Van Goghs. The catalogue authors aren’t mind readers, so we don’t know why he bought The Night Café or The Prison Courtyard, beyond The Prison Courtyard’s having been recommended to him by the Russian painter Valentin Serov, who sometimes advised him. They’re the toughest things he owned, juicy and colorful but also two views of despair. Ivan also owned Gaugin’s Night Café in Arles, painted at the same time and place as Van Gogh’s Night Café — the two artists in competition.

Gauguin’s take is entirely different as he focuses on the bar’s owner looking at us pensively, not like the ghostly, legless bartender in Van Gogh’s café, who wants to lure us into an eternity more like hell than paradise. As Van Goghs go, The Night Café is very structured, which, the book tells us, appealed to Ivan. The Gauguin is an outlier itself since it’s not a Tahitian scene. Natalia Semenova, the Russian biographer of the Morozovs, said the two works, bought within a couple of months, were a red moment for Ivan in that they’re united by the color red, and Ivan had color phases. Some things we’ll never know.

Van Gogh, erudite as he was, didn’t practice prophecy. He could not have imagined the world of the Gulag, the concentration camp, and delusional groupthink, only 50 years later. He was a prisoner of his own mind, in his case mental illness that he couldn’t control but of which he was painfully aware. The Prison Courtyard speaks to today’s proliferation of mass hysterias, our easy susceptibility to hoaxes and lies, and the will among young people not just to conform but to acquiesce. Many people today are no less prisoners of false values than Van Gogh was a prisoner of his hallucinations, nightmares, euphorias, and anxieties.

In the Vuitton Foundation show, the prison painting has a darkened, chapel-like gallery to itself and a rope line and guard admitting half a dozen people at a time. I sat entranced near the painting, and it wasn’t Stendahl’s syndrome, in which I’d grow faint from a surfeit of aesthetic stimulation. I was just relieved that the space wasn’t packed. I’m not sure that the curatorial team’s strategy built excitement, as exclusivity and rationing do, since the line was short. It’s at the end of the show, so I think most people skipped it from exhaustion.

This is a tiny quibble in an exhibition I can only call majestic, and it has a great book, too. All the essays were written in either Russian or French. I know nothing about translation as a science or art, but the three or four translators didn’t, as far as I can tell, lose the distinct voice of the scholar writing the essay. These translators must be the very best.

Ivan’s purchases were not without a blooper here and there. Big paintings by Georges-Henri Manzana Pissarro, one of which depicts a zebra, are ugly indeed. Albert Marquet was a favorite, as was Aristide Maillol. Neither is bad, but a little goes a long way. Ivan was on his way to collecting Matisse in the same depth as Gauguin and Cézanne. He owned Matisse’s Moroccan Triptych, big panels painted in 1912 and that are ensembles like the ones Bonnard and Denis did for him.

Matisse is a taste that has, even in my dotage, escaped me. I think he painted lots of clunkers. Ivan’s only American paintings are by Alfred Maurer, both done in Paris in 1905. He must have gotten them as a gift when he bought something big.

I was happy to see the work of Russian Cézannists such as Ilya Mashkov and Pyotr Konchalovsky since I hadn’t heard of either and the paintings are strong and dynamic. These weren’t in the Morozovs’ collections but, rather, are in the exhibition to show how avant-garde Russian artists from 1910 to the war were inspired by Cézanne. This isn’t a bad point, but in so big a show they’re a tangent that might have been eliminated.

Still, I learned a lot about Russian art from the exhibition, and this is what we want. Serov, Korovin, the Russian Cézannists, and Mikhail Vrubel were new names to me. Vrubel is a superb artist I’d call a Symbolist but, like, say the American John LaFarge, he’s good at everything and defies classification. His Lilacs, from 1901, holds its own against any of the Impressionists for freshness.

A Malevich from 1913, also not a Morozov painting, is there, too. Does the presence of these pictures imply that Ivan was stuck in the decorative, colorful rut of Denis, Bonnard, and Matisse? If so, well, that’s an exquisite rut. We don’t and can’t know where Ivan would have gone and why he wasn’t buying bleeding-edge art. Ivan was collecting Gauguin and Cézanne while we could still call them contemporary artists — but barely so as they’d just died and, anyway, Ivan was buying their work years after it was truly revolutionary.

We don’t know how much wealth he moved out of Russia and, of course, the debacle of the First World War changed everything and everybody. Why wouldn’t it have changed Ivan’s taste? Having escaped from Moscow without his collection, he’d have had to start anew.

I want to conclude with the catalogue. It’s a masterpiece. The essays are very good, but the book also includes obituaries and tributes published when Mikhail died, one written by Sergei Diaghilev. These are important and almost always missing, even in artist retrospectives. Yes, they’re all flattering, but they tell us what contemporaries saw in Mikhail.

A short memoir of Mikhail by his widow, written in 1956, is also important. She stayed in Russia, kept an art salon, and reflected on her husband and his art philosophy with some considerable perspective. A detailed, illustrated chronology is at the end, too. I’ve done these, and while they’re not as critical as the scholarly essays, they complement them and are mighty useful. A book of this complexity takes as long to fashion as the show and is the thing that lasts. Once the exhibition closes, it’s a memory.

My friend from the World Bank might have a good point. Putin has committed the crime of the century in attacking Ukraine, though it’s hard to compete with September 11 or Bashir al-Assad’s brutal suppression of the rebellion in Syria. Putin is the last whiff of Soviet Communism, a KGB man whose father was Stalin’s food taster. I hope the Russian oligarchs, pushed by the beleaguered Russian people, push him out. Until then, keep the art in Paris. It’s a fitting way to draw a line under the utopian hell that started in 1917.