Les Frères Morozov. Collectionneurs et mécènes - Natalia Semonova

Description

Foreigners could not believe their eyes when, at the Hermitage or the Pushkin Museum, they discovered entire walls covered with masterpieces by Renoir, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Bonnard, Matisse, Picasso ... visitors wondered why and how a regime advocating "proletarian art" had preserved so many manifestations of "bourgeois art" ...
After Stalin's death, with the ideological grip loosening, they were able to discover that in Russia there had been great collectors, like Sergei Shchukin and the Morozov brothers. These serfs' grandsons made their fortune in textile before the Revolution and set out to conquer the artistic "new world" in the Paris of the time. Spending lavishly on their collections, they quickly assembled an exceptional collection of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and Modern works.
Nationalized, these collections were fortunately sheltered - did not it not be said that the Bolsheviks and anarchists were making boots out of the paintings of Rembrandt! Finally, the paintings were sent to the two major museums of the country but have never been exhibited until the 1960s, without ever mentioning the name of their former owners.