Breaking the Boundaries of Public Taste: Russian Collectors of French Avant-Garde

At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, two collectors from Moscow families of wealthy merchants, Shchukin and Morozov, pioneered the works of French unconventional artists in Russia. Predictably, the Moscow exhibits of Paul Gauguin, Henry Matisse, and Pablo Picasso caused scandals among the unprepared public and raised a powerful wave of criticism. On the other hand, the negative reception of these artists by the general public stirred curiosity in young and creative Russian artists who were just developing a new taste for bold experimentation that would eventually shape into Russian Avant-Garde.
After the turbulent Revolutionary years, two World Wars, and the wholesale denunciation of abstract art in the Soviet Union these works found home in two largest art museums, the Hermitage in St. Petersburg and the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow, in 1948.
The lecture will tell the dramatic story of how the paintings were originally purchased and then rejected, how they were threatened with sale and destruction, and how the long struggle with public opinion in Russia finally succeeded in including them into the canon of fine arts.