Riches from Russia

By ROBERT HUGHES

One of the legends of modern art--its El Dorado, both in riches and inaccessibility--belongs to the U.S.S.R. It is the stupendous collection of early French modernist painting amassed on trips to Paris by two Russian millionaires: Sergei Schuhkin and his younger friend Ivan Morosov. After the revolution, Schuhkin fled to Paris, where, stripped of his capital and without his collection, he survived until 1937. Morosov died in 1921 in Carlsbad.

The two exiles' Cezannes, Picassos, Matisses, Gaugins and Van Goghs--356 paintings in all--were appropriated by the state and divided between the Pushkin Museum in Moscow and the Hermitage in Leningrad. The fortunes of these unrivaled hoards have fluctuated with politics. Stalin had them banished to the cellars as decadent Western formalism. After 1954, the collections were slowly reinstated, and now the Soviet Union has begun to use them as a cautiously played trump in the diplomatic game of cultural exchange.

Convictions. Last year, a group of more than 80 impressionist and post-impressionist works from the Hermitage and Pushkin collections traveled to Holland's Kroller-Muller Museum. On April 2 a smaller version of that show with a few additions--41 paintings in all--opens at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., before going to New York's M. Knoedler & Co., Inc. in May. It is an event not only for the National Gallery but also for Knoedler's, whose chairman, Occidental Petroleum's Armand Hammer (TIME, Jan. 29) was instrumental in persuading the Soviet government to show these spectacular works in the U.S.

The exhibition spans 50 years of French art, from an early Monet, Lady in the Garden, Sainte-Adresse, 1867, to a superbly rigorous and almost abstract design of what appears to be architectural motifs--pillars, blocks, steps--painted by Fernand Leger: Composition, 1918 (see color). To look at the stately procession of now-certified masterworks that falls between is to realize how inquisitive and catholic a taste Schuhkin had. This pudgy, stuttering Moscow importer held passionate convictions about the value of the "new" school of Paris, and backed them with an enthusiasm shared by no other collectors of his time except the Steins. Morosov's tastes were slightly more conservative. He had 18 Cezannes, no fewer than five of which are in the present show, but he balked at Cubism. Schuhkin, however, absorbed it all, from the primitive and enchanted jungles of Henri Rousseau to the most difficult early cubist Picassos, from the bustling impressionist streetscapes of Pissarro to the dense, darkly resonant and sinister vision with which Gauguin, in Tahiti, could invest even a subject like Still-Life with Fruit, 1888.

The glory of the show is, however, its early Matisses from the Schuhkin collection. Almost from the day the two men met (in 1906, in Paris), Schuhkin's appetite for Matisse's pictures was ravenous. Over the next seven years he bought at least 37 of them. It is still the best Matisse collection that exists, partly because it embodies the zeal with which, around 1909, this greatest of all modern French artists applied himself to the issue of large-scale, "decorative" figure compositions. Matisse's fauve years, with their hot drumfire of broken, dissonant color, were behind him. Now he was engaged in calming his art, endowing it with a magisterial breadth of form and outline, a simplicity of hue and an archaic, pre-classical subject matter. His Nymph and Satyr, 1909, belongs much more to the world of Hesiod than to the Renaissance vision of antiquity. Three colors: pink for the skin, blue for the strip of lake and green for the fields and hills. Two figures: the nymph tripped and falling, the satyr reaching down to seize her. It is the most basic of schemes, but the subtleties of expression it discloses are almost inexhaustible: how the satyr's muscular determination, for instance, is summed up in a single inflection of drawing, the grasping hands given a shade more density than the rest of his body; or how the falling curve of the nymph's back and arm, diving out of the frame, is also a rising arch that offers itself to the pursuer. One line becomes an epigram of flight and surrender.

This sense of primitive energy permeated all Matisse's work, even a still life like The Blue Cloth, 1909; the whorls and cusps of the fabric, ultramarine laid into azure, twist and leap with the exuberance of dolphins, and are duly stabilized by the squat, familiar forms of coffeepot and flask. "Our only object is wholeness," Matisse declared. "We must learn, perhaps relearn, to express ourselves by means of line. Plastic art will inspire the most direct emotion possible by the simplest of means." And once art gained that absolute concreteness of sensation, it could become the "subject" for other art, just like a bowl or a figure.

Matisse's still lifes were populated by his own sculptures, and he painted pictures of his own paintings. So with Nasturtiums and 'The Dance' I, 1912; the figures dancing in a ring in the background are actually one of the mural-size canvases Schuhkin commissioned from Matisse in 1909 to decorate the stairwell of his house in Moscow, the gloomy, florid Troubetzkoi Palace. Matisse's frank acceptance of art as art's subject was most prophetic.

But the difference between Matisse's contemplation of his own works and the arid feedback one gets in so much art today is enormous. It is a matter of sensual wholeness. The blue of the Dance invades the painted room, drenching its space in an oceanic full ness of hue. In it, the hot pink of the chair back and table legs and vase glows with preternatural intensity. Color for Matisse was not a property of objects. It was the stuff of which they were made. And space itself was less a describable structure--which it was for Picasso or Braque--than a color-filled void in which the eye immersed itself. Years later, Matisse summed up the difference in one mild and cryptic phrase.

"A man looking for a plane with a searchlight," he observed, "does not explore the vastness of the sky in the same way as the aviator."

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