FROM MONET TO PICASSO: MASTERPIECES COLLECTED BY MOROZOV & SHCHUKIN
Edward Saunders, lecturer
Part of the wealthy merchant community in pre-revolution Moscow, Ivan Morozov and Sergei Shchukin independently started collecting the works of the avant-garde movements in Paris from the late 1890s to the outbreak of the First World War. These two men amassed some of the finest paintings by Monet, Cézanne, Gauguin, Matisse and Picasso. Today, with few exceptions, these masterpieces are divided between the Pushkin Museum in Moscow and the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg. This course will trace the backgrounds of these two collectors, how they travelled annually to Paris, who they met there and how they acquired the paintings. It is only with the fall of communism that these works were once again fully revealed. With the help of recently discovered
original photographs showing the paintings installed in the mansions of Morozov and Shchukin before 1914, the paintings will be identified and discussed in detail.
LECTURE TITLES
- Introducing Morozov and Shchukin, the Parisian art scene in the 1890s, the collection of Ivan Morozov
- Sergei Shchukin and his paintings from Monet to Gauguin
- Sergei Shchukin and his paintings by Matisse and Picasso
Recommended reading
Whitney Kean, B, 1994 (revised). French Painters, Russian Collectors. London: Hodder and Stoughton Ltd.
Semonova, N. with Delocque A. 2018. The Collector: The Story of Sergei Shchukin and his Lost Masterpieces. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.