André-Marc Delocque-Fourcaud, the grandson of Sergei Shchukin
morozov.shchukin@gmail.com 
Pierre Konowaloff, the great grandson of Ivan Morozov
morozov.shchukin@gmail.com  tel.
with their lawyer Maître Bernard Jouanneau

will stay in London from Monday 21 at 2pm. till Wednesday 23 a 9am.
Hotel Athenaeum, 116 Piccadilly tel. 0207 499 3464

 

 

 

Press communiqué.

 

André-Marc Delocque-Fourcaud, the grandson of the collector Serguei shchukin and, Pierre Konowaloff, the great-grandson of the collector Ivan Morozov, welcomethe arrival of the exhibition entitled FROM RUSSIA to the Royal Academy in London. To have deprived a British audience of master works such as The Dance by MATISSE or the Portrait of Jeanne Samary by RENOIR, which were taken from their families' collections would have been a heavy loss for all lovers of Art and Beauty.

This exhibition gives the opportunity to recall the circumstances of the confiscation of these works from our family’s private collections by the decree of LENIN, just ninety years ago. The Soviet ruthless legal order was the unexpected guest of the exhibition, when on Dec 31 2007 Her Majesty’s Government hurriedly gave into pressure from the Russian Government and agreed to block any judicial action during the paintings’ stay in London.

Although we have remained silent during the run up to this major exhibition, we stayed bewildered by the extremely nervous reaction of the Russians when confronted with potential problems created by their own recent past.

We would now like to be allowed to speak, albeit from a position of legal limbo imposed on us by the British Government.

Our demands can be summarised by the three following points:

1° The heirs of the Russian collectors do not ask for the restitution of the paintings confiscated by Lenin. We have accepted and we agree that our paintings are housed in great Russian museums. This is well known and understood by the Russian authorities, because in 1993 Irina Shchukin, Serguei Shchukin's daughter, wrote a letter to the president, Boris Yeltsin, clarifying our position.

2° What we are questioning is the extremely violent way in which this extraordinary collection gathered over many years by our forefathers was taken along with the confiscation of all property & land from collectors who had shown great genius & foresight in its formation.
In a civilised world, when a private collection becomes of national interest, there has to be an acceptable form in which it can be transferred to the state that follows a legal process respecting the moral and material rights of the collectors and their families. And an agreement made that reasonably compensates and pays a percentage of the material benefits that accrue from exploitation of the works.

3° This violence done to the families is even more unjustified today as times have changed since the days when the Red Commissars snatched our property for the « People's education ». The great art exhibitions are not anymore purely cultural enterprises for the edification and education of the people. They are huge economic machines, crucial for the budgets of the lending museums, who are supported by super sponsors, here like E.on, a giant of the gas industry. These exhibitions are also essential for the income of exhibiting institutions around the world like the Royal Academy of Arts, which expects one million visitors at £11 per ticket .Plus of course the use of many of the images in various merchandising enterprises.
The aggressive marketing around the « Dance » by Matisse can be easily compared to the promotion of the latest book of Harry Potter or the next Hollywood blockbuster.
Our collections, seized by the Soviet Union in the name of the communist utopia, are being exploited to generate huge incomes for the Russian museums and major art institutions worldwide.

We are private individuals, without financial backing or support who are at a real disadvantage when facing the great museums of the world, and opposed as we are by governments who enact laws of exclusion against us. However, this fight goes beyond our personal situation. Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov left us a heritage of absolute Beauty. We owe it to their memory, and to their genius to bear witness to the fact that men are born, grow, dream, suffer and die to leave to their children some part of the fruit of their extraordinary labours.

19 th of January 2008