Sergei Shchukin
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Sergei Ivanovich Shchukin Сергей Иванович Щукин (27 May 1854, Moscow – 10 January 1936, Paris) was a Russian businessman who became an art collector, mainly of French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art, following a trip to Paris in 1897, when he bought his first Monet. He later bought numerous works by Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, and Paul Gauguin, among others. These paintings decorated the walls of his palatial home in Moscow.
Shchukin was particularly notable for his long association with Matisse, who decorated his mansion and created one of his iconic paintings, La Danse, specially for Shchukin. Henri Matisse created one of his major works La Danse for Shchukin as part of a two painting commission, the other important painting being Music, 1910. An earlier version of La Danse (1909) is in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
The collection also featured about hundred choice works by Pablo Picasso, including most of his earliest Cubist works, such as Three Women and major landscapes, but some key pieces of the Blue and Rose periods as well. In 1909, Shchukin opened his home on Sundays for public viewings, introducing French avant-garde painting to the Muscovites.
After the 1917 Revolution, the government appropriated his collection, while Shchukin escaped to Paris, where he died. In 1948 his collection, which by then had been combined with Ivan Morozov’s to form the State Museum of New Western Art, was divided between the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts and the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg.
Irina Antonova, Director of the Pushkin Museum, once remarked about Shchukin: "He started to collect unpopular art, which was snubbed by the Louvre and other museums. It was his personal taste. Perhaps he heard foreshocks that would change the world. Such a collector could appear only in a country that awaited a revolution. He collected art that prefigured the global cataclysms".
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