In Memory of Alexandra Demskaya 

      Critic Abram Efros dubbed Ivan Morozov "a man, footnote needed" ("chelovek c popravkoi"). Efros' sharp eye had caught the essence of a thoroughly contradictory personality. Worldly, yet extremely reclusive, Morozov blocked access to his life and his collections, quite the opposite of Sergei Shchukin, who kept his magnificent collection of art open to the world.

    No letters to shed light on Morozov's character have come down to us, except perhaps the short, tersely businesslike notes in French to Henri Matisse in the calligraphic hand of a secretary.

    No photographs, except family photos, have been found of him or of the halls of his closed mansion-museum. Even the date of his birth is uncertain and the site of his grave in some French cemetery is unknown. How then patch together a life?

    There are the more than 600 paintings, drawings and sculptures in Morozov's museum-quality, comprehensive collection. Morozov savored his treasures alone, rebuffing every attempt by the world to get to them. But if the Morozov museum could be recreated, all of it, not just the French part, about which Morozov cared most (in fact, the French paintings are not all that hard to trace, given the annotations at the Hermitage and Pushkin museums) but the Russian collection, too. . .

    Fortunately, Boris Ternovets managed to make a complete list of the Russian side of the collection before these pieces were carted out of the Morozov mansion as unsuitable for the Museum of New Western Art that would open there. Most of the Russian art went to the Tretiakov Gallery, where they remain, mostly on permanent exhibit. But how learn about the buyer and collector? I have not been able to fill every blank, but I think that a portrait of Ivan Morozov, collector, comes through. 

    I wish to express my thanks to the late Alexandra Andreyevna Demskaya. This book is inconceivable without her.

    Thanks also to the descendants of Ivan Morozov -- the family of his grandson, Pierre-Richard Konovaloff, and especially his wife, Katya, and her mother, Lidia Yermakoff. Only through concerted efforts -- theirs in Paris, mine in Moscow -- were we able to bring together the few documents that remain of the great collector. 

    I wish also to thank Sergei Shchukin's grandson, Andre-Marc Dellocque-Fourcaude and his wife, Christina, who have compiled the first full listing of the Morozov collection. 

    Thanks also to Margarita Aksenenko, the head of the Manuscript Department of the A. S. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, who shared with me her knowledge of the Museum of New Western Art.   

    Thanks, too, to my editors -- literary editor Yeveniya Gershkovich, and art editor Natalya Klubnikina -- and artist Sergei Yegorov and collector Mikhail Zolotarev, who helped me in everything.

       Finally, thanks to my colleagues, Kira Dolinina, Anatoly Sapronenkov, Irina Tarakhanova and Aleksei Petukhov. 

SKETCHES FOR A PORTRAIT 

It is not easy to sketch Ivan Morozov. But from the fragmentary recollections of contemporaries and what we know of his marriage and, of course, from his extraordinary collection of paintings, a picture emerges. 

Ivan was the son of Abram and Varvara Morozov. His older brother, Mikhail Morozov, was renowned, or notorious, for a palatial home on Smolensk Boulevard, a glamorous wife and sometimes outrageous behavior, and his younger brother, Arseny had a passion for hunting and built a Moorish-style castle on Vozdvizhenka St. that stung their mother into exclaiming that at least now all Moscow would know her son to be an idiot.

Aspects of the mother's life and character may well have been at the root of many of the various Morozovs' "eccentricities." 

Unlike his brothers, Ivan looked forward to joining the family business. The difference can be traced to schooling and character. Mikhail (Misha) studied at a classical gymnasium, Ivan (Vanya) at a science-oriented modern school. While Mikhail, still a student at Moscow University, came into his share of their late father's millions at 21, Ivan was enrolled in chemistry at Zurich's Higher Polytechnical School. Chemistry was not a frivolous choice. The family business, after all, was textiles. An uncle, the extraordinary Savva Morozov, also trained in chemistry. Ivan, a hard-working student in Zurich, also found time to study drawing with the architecture students and accompanied them on Sundays to do plein air landscapes in oil. 

In 1895 Ivan, a 24-year-old graduate in chemistry and the hope of his family, returned home briefly to Moscow and then moved on to Tver, where thousands of Morozov workers produced cotton and linen fabrics and where the shops of Tver Textiles Partnership, the famed Morozov empire, sprawled.   

THE MOROZOV DYNASTY 

The dynasty began with one Savva Vasilyevich (the Morozov was added later). Savva, a serf who would become a First Guild (the wealthiest rank of merchant) Merchant in Bogorodsk, had begun by weaving lace at a loom in his native Zuyev, a village in Bogorodsk District, and carrying his product on foot 50 miles to Moscow. Year by year, the business grew. Yet it took 23 years for Savva to save the money needed, a fantastic 17,000 rubles, to buy the family's freedom.1 

Savva's variety of dyeing and weaving enterprises were spread about in Zuyev, Moscow, Nikolsk Town, Bogorodsk and Tver. And when his four sons took over the properties, each showed a full complement of entrepreneurial gifts: all did well. "Morozov" became an indication of quality.2  

In one of the regular family divisions of property (the fourth), the textile mills in ancient Tver (through which the first line of the Nicholas Railway connected Petersburg and Moscow, the two Russian capitals) went to the brothers Abram and David in 1872.3

Abram was the active partner and ran Tver Textiles Partnership, doing so with the confidence and scale typical of the Morozov business style: the newest weaving machinery came from England and Sweden, foreign specialists were recruited. With its own dye works and related facilities, the company was a major source of a wide range of textiles. 

Business success often involved a good marriage. The brothers, well off but not widely known in the world of merchants, made a careful search among the "great names." Abram's marriage to Varvara Khludova was a good one, strengthening the family's existing connection with the Khludovs and their textile empire.4 

The Khludovs were famous for their wealth and the scale of their operations. Their firm, A. and G. Ivan Khludov Sons, was now run by two brothers, Gerasim and Aleksei (Varvara's father). The two were the heirs of Ivan Khludov, a peasant-artisan from Ryzansk Province who had settled in Moscow in 1817 and run a business producing coachmen's silk sashes. They were now part of Moscow's merchant class and, in 1845, gained control of the Yegorevsk Cotton Mills, one of Russia's most important cloth-producing enterprises. They also were the first Russians to open a branch firm in England, easing access to new machinery and related technology. 

The Khludovs were progressive-minded and philanthropic, like many Russian merchant dynasties. Collectors of art, they also gave handsomely to hospitals, shelters, asylums and schools. Aleksei Khludov, the father-in-law, had a priceless library of ancient Russian manuscripts and early printed books. The library eventually went to the Historical Museum.5 

TVER MILLS 

Young Ivan Morozov took to his work: he increased the capacity of his mills and widened the reach of his sales, and the owners -- the brothers held equal shares in the business -- thrived. As already noted, Mikhail, a year older than Ivan, was uninterested in business, and Arseny, who had studied in England and done some practical training, devoted himself to hunting and his beloved dogs.

Ivan, however, was the typical factory owner of the Russian novel. And he delighted in the role. For all his outward softness -- the artist Sergei Vinogradov described him as "a calf with kind eyes" -- Ivan at work was intellect and calculation personified and could be harsh and stubborn, especially on the matter of wages. "The Slavic dreaminess natural to the Russian" he scorned. It was, he thought, bad for business.  

Widely seen as a "convinced capitalist and conservative," Ivan often figured in jokes about miserliness. One anecdote has him lending his brother five rubles in church for the collection on condition that it be repaid with interest. 

Ivan, who had taken on the running of a giant firm at the age of 25, would continue to run it (his mother, Varvara, chaired the company board) until November 1917, when he handed it over to a committee of workers.

As director, Ivan faced the company's first strike in 1897, then a far more serious one in 1899 and finally the upheavals of 1905, the first Russian revolution. In his memoir, the artist Vinogradov noted that the owners avoided physical visits to the factory after 1905. The artist himself saw workers taunting Ivan:  "Misha was already dead, and Vanya was prematurely heavy, and this was the subject of the workers' coarse, obscene language. That was a vile time, rebellious."6 

That did not keep Varvara from giving millions to improve the workers' lives. The Morozovs created "a whole city near the city of Tver. There were about 20,000 workers. The factory city was amazingly well run and supplied. There was a vast theater that could seat thousands, splendid reading rooms, a library, fine, exemplary apartments for the workers."7

Neither unrest nor political turmoil stopped the company's growth; the value of the company doubled in less than 10 years. By the eve of the revolution of 1917, Ivan had tripled his father's wealth. 

Ivan spent almost five years in Tver without a break after he took over. He must have yearned for change. For he was a young man who enjoyed lively company, was interested in the latest fads and fashions and loved to eat (weight was a family problem). Yury Bakhrushin described him as "a fat, pink sybarite" and "a lazy good fellow." Ivan's outlets were the society of women, foreign trips and purchases of paintings. This last soon eclipsed the rest. 

MOSCOW 

Ivan Morozov lived in Moscow just under than 20 years. He began with visits to the city from Tver, but in 1899 he bought a home in Moscow  -- rather more estate than house -- and moved permanently to the ancient capital. Ivan Morozov greeted the 20th century as a Moscow homeowner. 

The Prechistenka St. mansion, severely classical in style, once belonged to the widow of his Uncle David. It suggests Ivan's tastes and ambitions. It was the complete opposite of the lavish palace of his brother Mikhail on Smolensk Boulevard with grand apartments furnished "in style." And it was yet more different from the fantastic Moorish castle that brother Arseny built. 

Sadly little is known about the relations between the brothers. Every memoir writer, however, mentions the mother's despotism.

VARVARA  

A merchant's daughter, Varvara Khludova was properly educated but not a graduate, as the men were, of a university. She had elegant manners and the knowledge considered proper for a young lady of good family. Hers was the fate of a typical Ostrovsky heroine, whose romantic desires are sacrificed to mercantile considerations.

Her parents gave the obedient Varvara, then 20, in marriage to the older son of the "Tver Morozovs" (or "Abramoviches"), who was also her distant relative (Abram was a nephew through his mother of the wife of Gerasim Khludov, and Varvara was a niece of Gerasim's through her father). Abram Morozov was a person of little culture and difficult personality. This, as soon became clear, was a result of a serious mental illness that deepened over time. Twelve years after the wedding, the director of Tver Textiles died in a psychiatric hospital. He was not yet 43. 

With a vast inheritance and full rights to Tver Textiles Partnership until her sons came of age, the 35-year-old widow, "a beautiful woman with large, dark-brown eyes and sable brows," might have devoted herself to her sons. Instead, Varvara took control of the business. She was a Khludov. 

Khludovs gave generously to hospitals, shelters, schools. Varvara did, too. A year after her husband's death, Varvara proposed to the Moscow City Council the idea of a public reading room honoring Ivan Turgenev. Russia's first free library-reading room when it opened in 1885 on the square at Myasnitsky Gate, it stood as a lasting memorial to the memory of the great writer, who also wrote the program for the Society for the Spread of Literacy and Enlightenment.8 

Varvara Morozova was a classic example of forward-thinking Moscow woman philanthropist with "slightly liberal inclinations." Following the traditions of the Moscow merchant class to which she belonged, she gave only "to heal or educate." Thus, to the Society of Governesses and Teachers, Varvara donated money to build schools. She was also active in the Society to Help Juveniles Released from Places of Confinement. In Tver, Varvara Alekseyevna supported a general hospital, a maternity hospital, an old-peoples' home, an academy and a library. Her yearly Tver donations came to more than 100,000 rubles. A building at the A. L. Shanyavsky People's University in Moscow was named for her. 

The Prechistenky Courses for Workers, which opened in 1897, were a major project of hers. She paid for its three-story building on Kursovoy Lane. She also helped finance the emigration of the Dukhobors, a religious sect with whom Leo Tolstoy sympathized, to Canada. But to get her help for anything outside her interests was unlikely in the extreme. She flatly rejected a plea for money for the Moscow Art Theater from Stanislavsky himself, but this "misunderstanding" would be more than made up by the benefactions of her late husband's cousin, Savva Morozov.

As good as she was to strangers, Varvara was hard on her "own." Sympathetic to needy students, poor girls attending the Higher Women's Courses and humble teachers, she showed little tenderness to her boys. Relations with them were always strained. The home situation had always been difficult with a cold mother and an irritable father. Then came a stepfather, a new sister and brother and Varvara's determination to fit into her new professor-husband's circle. This only heightened the antagonism of the three Morozov sons. 

The new family was probably the chief subject of the quarrels at home. Stepfather Vasily Sobolevsky, an aristocrat, economist and journalist, was editor of Russkiye Vedomosti (Russian News), Russia's most popular newspaper (dubbed the professors' paper because of its considerable reliance on university faculty). A man of liberal views, Sobolevsky saw the development of Russia as hinging on an ever-widening dissemination of education and culture. He sought to promote these ends in the paper.9 

His wife, of course, financed the newspaper, whose dignity and restraint, Vasily Nemirovich-Danchenko tartly commented, influenced her to organize her personal life "in that same noble taste."

The Sobolevsky-Morozova marriage was not formalized in church. As a result, the couple's own children were Morozovs, although the other Morozovs did not accept them into the clan because of the parents' failure to marry in church. Abram Morozov's harsh will had made a church marriage practically impossible. If she should marry again, he stipulated, Varvara would lose the Morozov name and her entire inheritance. 

And so this celebrated partisan of women's equality and founder of Russia's first women's club, Varvara Morozova, was perhaps the only woman in her society who dared live openly in a provocative, scandalous civil union. Morozova made no apologies. But when her sister left her own husband to marry another man, Morozova was personally offended and broke off relations. She did not even wish to walk behind her sister's coffin when that time came. 

While Varvara led a life of merchant sweep and power, her liberalism was more radical than many of the friends that gathered at her home at 14 Vozdvizhenka St. Like the heroine of the Boborykin novel who was modeled on her, Varvara strove mightily to reject her past. 

Many Morozovs served as models for Russian writers. Varvara was admittedly the model for Pyotr Boborykin's Anna Serafimovna, the heroine of his novel, Kitai-Gorod, although, the author noted, "the original was very much more distinctive than the copy." In a Nemirov-Danchenko play, The Price of Life, the writer Solonchakov is given a publishing house as a kind of dowry from his wealthy, factory-owning bride.

Bursting from the "merchants' corner," or area, beyond the Yauza River after the death of her husband, Varvara now lived at the very center of Moscow on the former property of the Dolgoruky princes. Her 23-room mansion was built at her commission by the fashionable architect Roman Klein. Among other things, the house had a hall big enough to accommodate up to 300 people. There the professors of Moscow gathered and with them the best of the nation's writers and artists.10 

Was it the second marriage, the lavish philanthropies or her liberalism that made Arseny, Mikhail and Ivan so "rabidly hate" liberalism and their "mamasha"? Whatever the cause, those "unkind feelings remained to the end of their days."  The young Abramoviches made their lives as offensive to their mother as possible. Was this not what lay behind the incredible Moorish castle, the heedless spending and mindless sprees -- and the collecting of ultra-modern painting?

MISHA MOROZOV, BROTHER 

"On the day he came of age, Misha Morozov went from being a poor student who got his 70 rubles a month from his strict 'mamasha' to millionaire several times over. Immediately, at 21, without having finished his course (in history and philology), he married the 18-year-old beauty Margarita Mamontova in a wedding at the university chapel attended by 'all Moscow.' "1

Mikhail and Margarita honeymooned for a month at the Europa Hotel in Petersburg, frequenting theaters and concerts in the evenings. From Petersburg, they headed abroad, stopping in Paris, Nice, Monte Carlo.

Back in Moscow by early spring, the couple were in their own home at the corner of Smolensk Boulevard and Glazovsky Lane by the fall. The residence was palatial with its winter garden, grand halls and facade of snow-white columns.

HISTORY OF THE HOUSE ON SMOLENSK BOULEVARD

The house, built in 1877, stood on a lot that had belonged to the widow of Major Gen. Glazov. Mika Morozov, one of Mikhail and Margarita's four children, believed the mansion was built on the foundation of an older structure, a replica of the palace of the Gagarin princes on Novinsky Boulevard with a secret underground entrance emblazoned with Masonic seals.

The lot was purchased in the 1870s by Konstantin Popov, head of K. and S. Popov Brothers Partnership. Popov was the heir of Russia's largest tea-merchandising company, an inheritance from his uncle. The uncle, Konstantin Abramovich Popov, who had started as a shop clerk, left his nephew tea plantations in China and several dozen bulk tea and sugar shops in Russia and abroad. The heir himself created Russia's own first tea plantations near Batum and, with the assistance of specialists from China, produced Russia's first native tea in 1895.

To build the house, Popov used architect Alexander Rezanov, who worked with Konstantin Ton on Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow. After building Grand Prince Vladimir Aleksandrovich's palace on Palace  Embankment in Petersburg, Rezanov, a professor of architecture and rector of the Academy of Arts, became one of the country's most popular architects for building "in styles."

Eclectism has often been described as "the architecture of wise choices." The palace in Petersburg, which used many styles subtly linked together, elicited great praise. Hardly surprisingly, Rezanov enjoyed incredible success among Moscow's high-aspiring merchants: to use a Grand Prince's architect was a coup of the first order for a Moscow millionaire. Kuzma Soldatenkov was one of the first. In the late 1850s, Rezanov built his Greek-style mansion on Myasnitsky St.

In 1891, newly hatched millionaire Misha Morozov became the master of the stylish Popov palazzo. His wife is the best source about it: "The facade was a semicircle with a terrace extending outward at its center that was fronted by white marble columns. The foundation was finished in dark-red granite. Inside, the house was oddly and, in my view, very unhandsomely finished. . . . There was a mixture of styles: the foyer was Egyptian; the great hall, a kind of Empire; the hall antechamber, Pompeiian; the dining room, Russian; and there was a Moorish room. All the while I lived there, I dreamed of redoing it. . . . Gradually, we began to receive on Sundays. At 1:30 my husband would invite everyone to brunch. At first a relatively small circle of people came to brunch in the little dining room. Gradually, the circle of guests widened, and brunch was moved to the large dining room. There were usually about 20 guests, but there might be as many as 30. The table was very long; I sat at one end and my husband at the other. . . . My receiving day started after brunch, and rather a lot of people would come by. Often we organized little games in the great hall and enjoyed ourselves immensely.

"After brunch, my husband's friends would all go to his large office, hung with paintings, to continue the conversation."2

Moscow took in stride the eccentricities of great wealth. Some things, however, like Misha Morozov's amazing loss in a single night at the English Club of more than a million rubles to Mikhail Bostanzhoglo, a tobacco manufacturer and passionate card player, excited the imagination of even the most jaded residents of the Old Capital. It was said that when Misha Morozov ("Misha" was how he was generally referred to, plus the epithets, "the merchant" and "wild") booked into a hotel, his first demand was to clear his floor. "I am paying for it all, and I do not wish anyone nearby." This from the grandson of Ryumin serfs.

Even the consistently diplomatic Margarita found her husband's character rather wild. The boiling "Khludov-Morozov blood" "stormed" in Mikhail's huge, warrior's frame. Extremely talented but excessively extravagant,  Khludovs could not always manage their emotions.

Unable to find a direction for his "boiling energy, temperament and general talent," Misha was forever seeking attention. He did so largely  in ways designed to annoy his mother and her admirers.

Thanks to generous donations, Mikhail was elected elder of the ancient Assumption (Uspensky) Cathedral in the Kremlin, site of coronations. "At last, it was done! Misha was as happy as a child, laughing and repeating: 'Now mamasha and her liberals will go crazy. They'll be gnashing their teeth,' " Vinogradov recalled. Morozov had gone to all the trouble just to show the world, and he soon resigned the position in favor of lawyer Fyodor Plevako. His donations continued.

Misha tried many things in seeking a place for himself. He threw himself into scholarship (his mother dreamed of seeing him a professor, like her new husband), then suddenly emerged as the author of studies of Charles V or of acidulous art-exhibit reviews, signed "Mikhail Yurev." His novel, V Potemkakh (In the Dark), was banned from publication by the censors: the models for the characters were widely known and high placed.

Mikhail Morozov was also interested in the ballet, classical music and the theater. He wrote reviews of plays at the Maly Theater. In the early 1890s, he and his wife were among the leaders of the Russian Music Society. Misha was treasurer of the Moscow Conservatory.

For all his endless activity, Morozov was seriously overweight. "Mikhail Abramovich sits on a chair and is breathing heavily; it is not easy for him to catch his breath, especially when, God save us, he is excited. He is very fat. From the rear, one can't make out where his head ends and his body begins, such are the rolls of fat. His stomach is of similarly impressive dimensions," the acid-tongued Perepletchikov wrote in his diary. "Despite the . . . weight, M. A. is glowing. His face is glowing, pink, ruddy, the huge bald spot that covers his head glows. At exhibitions, Mikh. Abr. speaks loudly, he loves to be known in Moscow, i.e., known to the people who attend exhibitions, the theater, the stock exchange, the city. Everyone looks. This gives him pleasure. At art shows, he races about as if he were a king, and he is, indeed, a king, the king of cotton-prints, Tver Textiles produces millions of them a year."

Morozov was also deeply smitten with painting. As a boy, along with his brother Ivan, he took lessons from a young Konstantin Korovin. Mikhail Morozov began collecting art in 1894.

His first purchases were by Russian artists, and his close adviser was the artist Sergei Vinogradov, who was considered a great connoisseur of art. In his old age, Vinogradov loved to reminisce about Misha as collector. "He was the real thing. He threw himself into collecting. His understanding snowballed quickly, and our art is the most difficult of all to understand. I know only two people who have an absolute understanding of painting: Pavel Tretiakov and Sergei Diaghilev."

The Morozovs eliminated their huge winter garden to create room for a picture gallery. The art collection grew fast. Before long, artists took it as an honor to have something in it. Misha was highly selective. According to Vinogradov, the unfortunately brief absorption in painting  changed Mikhail. He had at last found his occupation (he had long since estranged himself from any part of running Tver Textiles) and an aim in life. All the eccentricities and extravagances, all that had at times annoyed, angered and amused the world, receded. Art consumed him increasingly. The "crowd of nobodies" around him disappeared, simply faded away. Instead of classmates from the university ("belopodklachniky," a term of disrespect, "the white-linings"), the visitors to Smolensk Boulevard now were more likely to be young artists and the then little known young poet-"symbolists".

While "mamasha" Varvara was courting the professorate on Vozdvizhenka St., the famous Sunday brunches at Mikhail Morozov's drew all of "painting Moscow." "Ah, those wonderful, unforgettable Sunday brunches! How much real talk about truly interesting things there was. . . . The beauty Margarita Kirillovna sat at the head of the table -- a magical adornment. She was the only woman present, except for an occasional appearance by her sister, Yelena Kirillovna. Toward the end of these very long brunches that lasted into the twilight on winter days, other people would begin to arrive -- these were mostly to see M.K., brilliant officers, prominent ladies. The talk was mostly in French, and M. K. and her guests would sweep majestically into their half -- it was her receiving day -- and we with M. A. would go to the gallery, where conversations, disputes, judgments about art of all kinds went on relentlessly. . . . What a treasury of art M. A. would have put together if he had lived."3

Passing through the large Sphinx-lined Egyptian corridor, where, as son Mika Morozov recalled, "an actual Egyptian sarcophagus stood next to a telephone, an awful contrast, the sarcophagus containing an actual mummy (unless it had been faked by the Cypriot dealer)," guests found themselves in the Empire-style antechamber or the imposing marble-lined Pompeiian room. 

There were rooms of the most varied styles in the house: a blue drawing room in the style of Louis XV and an Arab room of pink marble with low settees, the big Russian-style dining room and the small dining room a la Henry IV with colorful display cases decorated with knights with particolored legs. "The sweet aromatic smoke of English tobacco and fine cigars" wafted through the house, and a river of pink Champagne now flowed (classic pink Champagne was not to be drunk during the daytime -- that would have been "wrong"). The long tables of the gallery, where hardly a Sunday went by without a showing of paintings acquired that week, were heaped with stacks of art journals and papers.

If Mikhail Morozov's political views, as opposed to his mother's, were conservative, his artistic inclinations were decidely radical. From the first, he was an impressive collector, no less certain of himself than Sergei Shchukin. Immediately he took a place among those who would continue the work of the Tretiakov brothers. 

The list of artists whose work now hung in the house on Smolensk was impressive. The Russian artists included: Vasily Surkov, Ilya Repin, Mikhail Vrubel, Isaak Levitan, the brothers Sergei and Konstantin Korovin, Mikhail Nesterov, the brothers Viktor and Apollinary Vasnetsov, Igor Grabar and Konstantin Somov. Among the non-Russians: the French Eduard Manet, Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Paul Besnard, Forain, Toma, Gaugin and van Gogh; the Spaniards, Gandara,  Anglada and Albert; and the Norwegians Fritz Thaulow and Edvard Munch.

Mikhail Morozov's interests were not confined to West European painting, as Sergei Tretiakov's were, or to works of contemporary Russian artists, like Pavel Tretiakov. Mikhail was interested in both. He was the first person in Russia who dared to buy a work by van Gogh -- unfamiliar, nervous clots of color depicting the sea. Even allowing for influence, it was Morozov who made the final decision to buy the exotic Gaugin. And he truly was excited by Besnard's Fierie intime that he brought back from Paris; and, like most of Moscow's nouveau riche, he liked the heightened sensuality and eroticism of French Salon painting.

And he had the special gift of finding masterpieces. A real triumph was his acquisition of Renoir's Portrait of Jeanne Samary. Ambroise Vollard sold him the giant canvas for 20,000 francs. Vinogradov, the only witness to the purchase, described it: "And now came the negotiations over  the Samary. How interesting it was, really poetic, several times a day to examine this divine work in the gallery-shop on famous rue Laffitte. This Samary is a charming blonde, Parisian to the core, wearing a light-pink dress in the absurd fashion of the '70s, all light and perfectly painted without shadows; few of the French can do that. The bargaining began. Vollard asked 24,000 francs. We offered less and, finally, bought it for 20,000. . . . When Misha and I were buying a Renoir at Vollard's, we also saw our first things by Gaugin. They'd come from the island of Tahiti, where Gaugin was living as a half-wild Tahitian. The things were very interesting in their colors but so unusual and with so wild a rendering of form that it really took courage to buy such a thing then. Yet, taking myself in hand after the first strange, unsettling impressions, I felt that this was genuine art and somehow important. I began to try to persuade M. A. to buy a particular painting whose colors were especially wonderful: the things cost pennies. Misha chortled and refused. So I said I would buy it myself. At that point, Misha gave way, and the painting was purchased for 500 francs. . . . We sent a whole load of splendid things to Russia, to Moscow . . . but, of course, reigning over it all was the genius Renoir."4

Was his collecting just another Morozov indulgence? Perhaps the purchase of pictures did start was a way to kill time, but it soon grew into something more.

We know very little about Mikhail Morozov as collector. Typically, the world has relied on the fanciful anecdotes concocted in old age by Konstantin Korovin. Whatever one chooses to believe of Korovin's exaggerated impressions of Morozov, the rich young Muscovite's gift as a collector cannot be denied. Vinogradov, a professional, respected his taste. The collection of slightly more than 80 works included Russia's first Eduard Manet, The Little Restaurant/ The Bar, and the only Toulouse-Lautrec in any Moscow collection. Morozov bought Toulouse-Lautrec's Portrait of Yvette Gilbert/ Yvette Gilber singing Linger, Linger, Loojust after the French singer toured Moscow. In addition, in the house on Smolensk Boulevard, next to landscapes by Corot and Claude Monet, Gaugin's Dugout Canoe and van Gogh's The Sea at Saintes-Martin, hung ancient Russian icons, landscapes by Isaak Levitan and Konstantin Korovin and a masterpiece by Vrubel, The Tsar's Daughter-Swan, which Vrubel refused to other buyers because he wanted to see it hung in the Morozov gallery and which he sold ridiculously cheaply.5

Morozov did collect paintings with the same apparent recklessness as he played cards. And, because of his wealth, many people doubted the sincerity of his attraction to art and thought his understanding of painting superficial -- "more cotton-prints." Perepletchikov jeered: "Those cotton prints are good material, but they're not velvet!" Certainly, Mikhail Morozov wanted all the pleasure out of life that he could get. His eating and drinking were out of control, although he knew he was killing himself (he had known that his kidneys were diseased since childhood). Still, he downed his vodka backed by raw meat and pepper.

Sergei Diaghilev called Morozov "an elemental but expressive" figure. Not surprisingly, Misha Morozov, like his mother, turned up in the pages of literature. The closest of the portraits was the character of Larion Denisovich Rydlov, owner of a mansion with a winter garden, a lover of oysters and Champagne. "We are now the cream of society. I can be a critic, a musician, an artist, an actor, a journalist -- and why? Because I am a Russian natural, slightly gentled by civilization," the hero of The Gentleman declares.

In the main character of the play by Sumbatov-Yuzhin, which ran for several season at the Maly, Muscovites immediately recognized Misha Morozov as the owner of the palace with its own power station, a man who could "work for the papers" and make a splash with a witty book. "This man has his own style, his own trotter, wheels of rubber, a coachman, a confection of a house and writes a review of an exhibition with all the colors of impudence," Vasily Perepletchikov, obviously not well-disposed to the Moscow millionaire, noted in his diary.

Mikhail Morozov died in the autumn of 1903. He was 33. Serov's picture of this giant, "with his feet set firmly in the ground as if rooted," makes it seem impossible that he can have expired in a matter of days. "He seems to have been fired from the Tsar-Cannon," the shrewd Serov said about his model.

MARGARITA MOROZOVA

The brilliant and complex life of Margarita Kirillovna is worthy of its own chapter.

Her childhood and youth were darkened by tragedy. Her father, Kirill Mamontov, committed suicide. After quitting the family business and taking his share of the capital with him, his own attempt to organize a business failed. His property was tallied and sold to cover the debts. Mamontov fled Moscow, turning up in the south of Russia, where he tried to lease a vessel to carry troops during the Russian-Turkish campaign. This son-in-law of Pavel Tretiakov and first cousin of the powerful industrialist and railway builder Savva Mamontov was an inveterate gambler. He shot himself in the head after losing at Monte-Carlo.

He had squandered his daughters' inheritances. His widow, despite her link to the great merchant families, was left with little. Unwilling to be a burden, however, Margarita Ottovna Mamontova found a most untypical solution for patriarchal Moscow in the 1870s: she began to sew for women she knew. A descendant of the Campionis, great Italian sculptors and architects, she had talent and later opened a dressmaking studio and still later a school to teach dress design and cutting.

The daughters of the merchant's widow had fine manners, evident nobility and a somehow strange, un-Russian, beauty. Naturally, the Moscow's most eligible bachelors came to call once the dowryless sisters debuted. When Margarita Mamontova married Mikhail Morozov at the university chapel in the fall of 1891, she instantly had everything at her command: wealth, a palace, balls, receptions, costume parties, concerts, trips to Europe and Africa, her own apartments in Paris, the best spas of Europe, clothes, jewelry. . .

From outside, the life of the young couple appeared to be one long holiday. But the husband-wife relationship was not idyllic. In her recollections about her husband, Margarita tactfully notes only that her husband's character was "stormy."  

When in the fall of 1903 her 33-year-old husband suddenly died, Margarita Morozova, one of Moscow's most beautiful women, found herself the sole heir to his 3-million-ruble estate. She was expecting their fourth child.

Andrei Belyi, who proclaimed himself "mystically" in love with Margarita, said the death of her husband was the start of a new era for her: ". . . before, she had been a lady moving sadly through life; after, she was a devoted student of A. Scriabin in Switzerland, even to some extent . . . modeled herself on him; back in Moscow, she hastened after various philosophies of life, often silly, but often colorful; in her, Nietzsche, Kant, Scriabin, Vladimir Solovyev combined in most ridiculous ways. . . ."6 According to Belyi, Margarita was seeking "self-definition . . . the direction in which to point her interests (toward art or philosophy or social change)," and she attracted to her drawing room personalities who otherwise migh avoid each other. These artists, philosophers and prominent socialites made the house on Smolensk something more than a salon. It was a center of culture.

There were literary-musical evenings at the mansion; in the spring of 1905, there were lectures about the constitution and the house became "the arena for cockfights." Under the influence of the philosopher Yevgeny Trubetskoi (Margarita and his 10-year-long affair is revealed and described in the letters that she kept), she decided to finance the prince's publishing house, Put (The Way), which published great books of the past and present. 

Morozova also financed the journal, Questions of Philosophy and Psychology, and the highly political newspaper, Moscow Weekly. The Moscow groups and publications backed by the grand "lady with a plume," as Andrei Belyi called her, largely made up the philosophical and, to some degree, the religious mind of Moscow at the turn of the century. With Europe engulfed in war, "evenings, amid lilies of the valley abloom in January . . . at a long table with a green tablecloth, against a background of Vrubel's Faust and Margarita in the Garden, members of a religious-philosophical society gathered with representatives of the Russian intelligentsia to try to resolve the burning questions of the age."

Margarita especially loved music. After her husband's death, she studied piano with Nikolai Metner and Alexander Scriabin. She considered Scriabin, the composer of Poem of Ecstasy, her teacher and helped him for many years: during his years abroad, Scriabin received annual pensions from her of 2,000 rubles in addition to what she paid for the publication of his music and the scheduling of his concerts. If only for giving Scriabin the freedom to work, Russian culture is in the debt of Margarita Morozova. And she did much else.

In 1910 Margarita gave most of her late husband's collection of paintings to the Tretiakov brothers' gallery. Although sometimes thought to have been acting on a bequest in Mikhail Abramovich's will, no such stipulation existed. The decision was Margarita's. Contemporaries rated the gift a major event: for it meant that Moscow might become the site of a great museum of the new Western European art. Moscow's critics and art historians relished the thought: "The high honor will fall to Moscow to be the first European city to realize the idea of a museum of painting of the new epoch."

After parting with the pictures, Margarita sold the grandiose and uncomfortable home on Smolensk, moving first to Novinsk Boulevard and then, just before the outbreak of the First World War, to a small private house in Mertvaya Lane built for her by Ivan Zholtovsky. She had earlier wanted to commission the young architect to redesign the Smolensk Boulevard house.

Margarita continued active as a philanthropist right up to the revolution: she gave the "land" of Mikhailovskoye, her small estate in Kaluga Province on the Protva River, to a teacher, Stanislav Shatsky, who had organized a school and club for peasants in a nearby village and, later, a children's colony, which Morozova helped support financially.

The Mertviy Lane house was nationalized in 1918 and taken over by the Department of Museum Affairs and Protection of Antiquities and Art. The few masterpieces from Mikhail Morozov's collection that the widow had kept for herself during her lifetime were confiscated and went to the Tretiakov Gallery.

The final stage of her life now began. It would last 40 years.

With the first floor of the house now occupied by the Commissariat of Enlightenment's Museum Department, Margarita and her sister moved to the half-basement of the residence, with windows at sidewalk level. They did not want to leave Russia.

In time, the Museum Department, which was run more like a salon than a government office, was disbanded, and the house became the Danish embassy. Margarita continued to live there. The wife of the Danish ambassador was an admirer and invited her to state receptions.

But change occurs, and the moment came when the former Moscow beauty to whom Nikolai Metner had dedicated his romance to words by Andrei Belyi, "I Believed in the Golden Glitter," had to sell the last of her  possessions to buy two rooms in a dacha in Lianozova outside Moscow.

At Lianozovo the sisters sawed wood for the stove and carried water from winter-frozen stanchions. They lived in the dacha until the end of the Second World War. In the end, there was an almost royal gift -- a room in a new building on the Lenin Hills. "Here we have a splendid view and fresh air," Margarita wrote in her last letter to her daughter, Marusya, in the United States, contact with whom resumed after the war.

Margarita never complained and accepted her lot with Christian resignation. Old but still beautiful, she was often seen in an old, threadbare dress sitting in the first rows of concerts at the Conservatory. She had faced many tragedies: her oldest son lost, missing in action, in the First World War; Prince Trubetskoi dying of typhus in the Crimea during the Civil War. Her older daughter, Yelena, married and left Russia before the revolution. The younger girl,  Marusya, a fine pianist, had received a much coveted visa to travel abroad in 1927 (thanks to the intercession of Avel Yenukidze, a member of the government) and went to Germany, where she married Alexander Fidler (son of the director of the celebrated Rukavishnikov brothers' shelter in Moscow) and later moved to the United States.

Margarita's other son, Mikhail, remained in Moscow. Mikhail Morozov was one of Russia's leading scholars on Shakespeare and the English theater, although he was not a university graduate (his class origins had ruled that out). But he had learned English at home from the age of 2. Margarita outlived her son.

He would always be Mika Morozov, the boy in the famous portrait by Serov.

PARIS ENTHUSIASMS

Ivan was a bit jealous of his brother -- the beautiful wife, children, a home open to the world, brilliant friends. Ivan, too, arranged "bachelor suppers," brunches and evening parties attended by writers, actors and artists, the very people whose presence adorned the salon of Mikhail and Margarita. Ivan's visitors soon included actors from the Maly Theater, the rising opera star Fyodor Chaliapin and artists: Apollinary Vasnetsov, Perepletchikov, Vinogradov, Ostroukhov. Sometimes the sessions went on deep into the night, over cards (for small stakes) and talk about politics and art.

Ivan enjoyed his new friends, indulged their influence, supported them by buying pictures. For artists, Ivan always felt a special regard. When he and Misha studied drawing together, they had worked at it much more seriously than was usual in merchant families.

The brothers took lessons at the studio of Ivan Martynov. For two years, the adolescent Morozovs were given weekly lessons by Konstantin Korovin, only 10 years their senior, a fact that he later found uncomfortable.1 The painter, Yegor Khruslov, one of the so-called Wanderers, later gave lessons at the house. Summers, Vanya painted under the guidance of his new teacher at the family's Tver estate. In the best traditions of gentry upbringing, Khruslov also took his pupil on a trip along the Volga to the Caucasus. While Misha Morozov abandoned painting early, Ivan as a student in Switzerland used every spare minute to grab his box of paints and head for the mountains.

"To become a real artist requires working a very, very great deal, dedicating  your life to painting. It makes sense only if you look at everything in life with the eyes of an artist, and that is not given to everyone. And it wasn't given to me, and I must find inspiration in other work. . .", Ivan acknowledged to Bakhrushin.2 He was always very severe with himself.

Ivan had a rare ability to feel and understand art. His taste was trained by the temperamental Korovin, the theoretical Grabar, the gentle Vinogradov, the taciturn Serov. Who can say whether, without their influences, the future collector would have come down with the "sickness" of modern art, so daringly collected by his brother and Sergei Shchukin?

The brief prelude to the Morozov collection consisted of canvases by Simon and Cottet. These were the same artists that Shchukin began with in the 1890s. Pictures by Russian and foreign artists began to go up on the walls of the Prechistenka house. At first, Morozov bought "modestly and carefully," choosing "quiet" things, as Igor Grabar would have called them. He began with the little-known landscape artist Manuil Aladzhalov, which he bought at an exhibition of the Company of Wanderers, and to pair with it, Seashore, by the German Dukker in the Wanderers' manner.  He bought landscapes by Zhukovsky and Vinogradov (the landscape artists of the Union of Russian Artists always remained his favorites) and studies by Levitan. The dramatic work of the Spaniards Sorolya and Suolaga coexisted with Korovin's studies of Don Quixote. Spanish subjects with their typical cast of characters and effects were then much in fashion.

Incidentally, the closest friend of Ignacio Suolaga was none other than Ivan Shchukin, a Russian Parisian and the younger brother of Sergei and also a collector. At first, Ivan Shchukin bought the work of contemporary artists but was later drawn to the Old Masters and simply sold off his moderns. By the beginning of the century, Ivan Shchukin had turned his back on the Barbizon painters and the impressionists. Now his apartment on Avenue Vagram greeted guests with old Spanish paintings and the gray and ochre canvases of his beloved Suloaga. It was under the influence of Suloaga that Ivan Shchukin lost his interest in the impressionists, but his occurred only after he had "converted" his older brother, Sergei, to the new art, with all that would mean for Russian culture.

Ivan Morozov, too, had his "cicerone." For Morozov, it was Sergei Vinogradov. The son of a country priest, Vinogradov was a man of the world. Accepted at the great houses of Moscow, Vinogradov was entirely at ease with such as the sugar tycoon Pavel Kharitonenko or the family of Savva Mamontov. He was at home, too, with contemporary art and had expert knowledge of the work of the impressionists. He frequented the art studios of Paris. Vinogradov's landscapes were much in demand and highly regarded.3 

Somehow Vinogradov had simply appeared beside Ivan, a kind of inheritance from Mikhail, whose interest in art Vinogradov considered his own personal accomplishment. Why then not guide the brother?
Vinogradov, a generous giver of advice, encouraged Ivan in the direction of the more innovative and deflected him from things of no consequence. Together they visited the Durand-Ruel Gallery. Anyone could wander through the gallery and look at the pictures on the walls at their leisdure. They made their choice. A landscape, a winter landscape. The name of the artist, Alfred Sisley, said nothing. An Englishman, an admirer of Constable and Turner, a friend of Monet and Renoir, Sisley had died in 1899, quite recently. He was not yet famous.

Ivan bargained. Durand-Ruel, to Ivan's surprise, readily acceded and agreed to sell Frosty morning in Louvisienne for 11,500 francs. The Paris dealer obviously was looking ahead, hoping to please his new client, the brother of "Michel" Morozov himself. Apparently, the guileful Durand had no doubts that "the sacrifice offered," as he put it, would be more than "compensated" at some point by Monsieur Morozov.

The date of the purchase is easily established by a letter that has been preserved. The sale happened in the summer of 1903. Four months later Mikhail Morozov suddenly died. As a collector, Ivan would always consider himself as following his brother.

The next year Ivan and Vinogradov again made their accustomed trip to Paris. Again they visited Durand-Ruel, where Morozov chose a second Sisley. He would buy these lyrical landscapes for several years, buying but sometimes also returning a picture if it did not fit in with the collection, as specially privileged clients were allowed to do.

The elderly Durand-Ruel sold Morozov his last Sisley in 1907. Prices for impressionist works were soaring, and St.-Mamme Shore cost the collector 20,000 francs. At that point, Ivan was already taken with Claude Monet. Waterloo Bridge. The Effect of Fog was the first of six Monets bought by Ivan and testimony to the subtlety of his perception. Morozov paid 18,000 francs for the first Monet. A year later, for the Boulevard des Capusines and The Corner of a Garden in Montgeron, he would pay Durand-Ruel 80,000 francs. Always there was gossip that Ivan didn't really understand art and that the Paris dealers took advantage of this to sell him what they could not otherwise dispose of. In fact, Durand-Ruel, a very shrewd dealer, consistently offered Morozov exceptional things. And the Russian client had the eye to recognize what was good immediately. And he made no mistakes. What was miraculous about buying an acknowledged masterpiece, Portrait of Jeanne Samary, by Renoir?

Ivan bought a total of six canvases each by Monet and Renoir, four Sisleys and two Pissarros. Year after year, for 10 consecutive years, the main office of the Morozov business on Varvarka St. would disburse tens of thousands of francs to its Moscow bank, which would then transfer the sums to Paris. The far-seeing Durand-Ruel had not miscalculated. The sacrifice offered was fully repaid.

In 1905, the position of the planets found to be extremely unpropitious, astrologers saw trouble ahead. Then Moscow experienced a terrible hurricane: one more fateful sign. Political parties of all stripes stepped up their activity. An amnesty to mark the birth of the Tsarevich Aleksei allowed political exiles to return to the capitals. Talk of popular rule and a constitution grew louder.

The talk in the clubs and circles was all of politics. "We live in a terrifying time of crisis," Sergei Diaghilev declared with feeling in a speech at a Metropole  <resto> dinner honoring him organized by, among other Muscovites, Ivan Morozov. "We are witnesses of the great and historic moment of reckoning in the name of a new, unknown culture that we have brought about but that will sweep us aside."4

That March at Mukden some 30,000 Russian troops died, and within a month the Russian fleet was almost entirely destroyed off the island of Tsusima. Port Arthur fell. The war was lost, and Prime Minister Sergei Witte signed the peace with Japan. The war had brought Tver Textiles a huge order for cloth for the army, considerable profits . . .

In the autumn of 1905, factory workers went on strike, rail traffic stopped, water and electricity were cut off, newspapers failed to appear. The government retreated, and with the Oct. 17 Manifesto granted citizens of the empire a constitution. The upheavals extended to Tver Textiles, where more than 2,000 workers had struck. Ivan Morozov always sought to distance himself from politics, but the December disorders forced him to drastic measures. Soldiers were brought in from Moscow to control the workers. Troops were in demand everywhere. There were barricades in Moscow on Arbat St., at Bronnaya and Sadovaya, at Presnya. At the foundry shop of the Academy <School> of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, on Rozhdestvenskaya St., people were making bombs. The traditional Christmas exhibition season was canceled. No one was allowed on the streets after 4 p.m. Patrols arrested anyone suspicious. 

With the arrival of the new year, life in Moscow gradually returned to normal. The interruptions of gas, electricity and food supplies were over. Transportation resumed. The streets were themselves again. Janitors cleared the areaways; for a long time, hastily hidden bombs and bullets would turn up. Agitators were arrested. The strikes had come to nothing.

Not everyone had gone unscathed. In 1905, the Morozov clan lost their most celebrated representative, Savva, Bolshevik supporter, financier of  the Moscow Art Theater building and a mysterious suicide. 

A graduate in science from Moscow University, Savva Morozov studied chemistry at Cambridge University in Britain and made a study of textile production in Manchester and Liverpool. After his return to Russia, he ran the Nikolsk Textiles Partnership Savva Morozov Son and Co. However, his position was purely nominal. His mother, Maria, the company's principal shareholder, remained at the helm. After the massive strikes of 1905, Savva demanded that the plants be put completely in his charge. His angry mother then managed to separate him from the affairs of the firm. Savva was forcibly moved from Moscow. In the company of his wife and private physician, he traveled to the Riviera for medical treatment. In May of that fateful year, he committed suicide in the Hotel Royal in Cannes.

The life of Savva Morozov sometimes seems proof that the mysterious Russian soul is not merely a figment of the imagination. His parents were patriarchal Old Believers. His mother, who was one of the richest women in Russia with an estate valued at about 30 million rubles, is said never to have used electricity, read any newspapers or journals and refused to bathe with hot water and soap, preferring to make do with cologne. 

The life of Savva, who as a gymnasium student had already learned "to smoke and not believe in God," was a complete opposite. He was avid about science and almost completed a dissertation. Passionately in love with the wife of his nephew, he arranged her divorce, a feat then practically impossible. He was a friend of Maxim Gorky, gave refuge in his fashionable castle on Spiridonovka St. to the revolutionary Nikolai Bauman and helped deliver illegal literature to his own factory. Leonid Krasin, the future commissar of foreign affairs, worked there as an engineer.

In January 1905 Savva Morozov, believing that Russia was about to overtake Europe, put together a program of social and political reform. As it happened, he also insured his life for 100,000 rubles, with the beneficiary to be the actress Maria Andreyeva. After his death, she gave a large part of the money to the Bolsheviks.

The name Morozov means almost as much to Russian theater as the name Pavel Tretiakov does to Russian art. Savva Morozov responded eagerly to the request of those very "founding fathers" whom his aunt, Varvara Morozova, had flatly rejected and gave generously to the new Moscow Art Theater. He matched the contribution of all other contributors combined, including that of the owner of the Alekseyev Gold Thread Mills, Stanislavsky himself. Gorky, observing Morozov from backstage as he agonized over "the success of the play," said he was ready to forgive the merchant all his factories. 

The new Moscow theater was a limited partnership, with Savva as managing director. He arranged a 12-year lease for the theater on the former mansion of the oil tycoon Lianozov on Kamergersky Lane. Remodeling the building, which had formerly housed a small theater and restaurant, cost about 300,000 rubles, an enormous sum. And this notwithstanding that the architect, Franz Shekhtel, creator of the familiar Moscow Art Theater seagull-emblem, charged nothing for the plan. With the Morozov money, the most up-to-date stage equipment was ordered. For the first time, a Russian theater had special stage lights. In all, Morozov spent about 500,000 rubles on his beloved Moscow Art Theater building.

"A businessman dare not indulge his fancies. He must be faithful to the basics -- self-control and dollars and sense. Failure to do so inevitably will lead to tragic contradiction," observed Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, whose profile is on the seal of the Art Theater (along with those of Stanislavsky and Savva Morozov). Savva violated the rule throughout his life. "It's easy to get rich in Russia but hard to live," Morozov, "that European Russian," complained as he dreamed of Russian talent awakening "tired and feeble" Europe.

His death came with a bullet to the heart at age 44 in his fashionable quarters on the Riviera.

Ivan Morozov, in his visits to artists' studios, galleries, exhibitions and in the process itself of buying pictures, found great pleasure. Especially after the upheavals of 1905.

The year 1906 -- called "the triumph" -- has gone down in the history of Russian art. The credit belongs to Sergei Diaghilev, organizer of the Russian exhibition at the Autumn Salon in Paris. An impresario of vast ambition and energy, Diaghilev felt cramped in St. Petersburg and sought to conquer Paris. His idea would be costly, but who could refuse Diaghilev? . . . His backers, all of them collectors -- the industrialist Vladimir Girshman, the physician Sergei Botkin, Vladimir Argutinsky-Dolgorukov and Vladimir von Mekk -- spared nothing. The fifth member of the organizing committee was Ivan Morozov, who provided money and loaned paintings from his collection for the giant Russian retrospective consisting of almost 750 works.

The exhibition, Two Centuries of Russian Painting and Sculpture, opened on Oct. 6, 1906, in 12 halls of the Grand Palais of the Champs-Elysee. The halls were the work of Lev Bakst (somehow Morozov never bought any Bakst), whose Eastern vividness and European sophistication were quickly to conquer Europe and America. Paris was stunned by the icons laid out on gleaming golden brocades, and by paintings from the times of Peter the Great and Catherine II and by the portraits by Levitsky, Borovikovsky, Kiprensky and Brullov. But most of all -- and it was reason for the show -- by current Russian art by Levitan, Serov, Vrubel, Somov, Bakst, Malyavin, Rerikh and Yuon.

It was only at this exhibition that Ivan Morozov realized that he had truly put together a genuine collection in the past five years. The Paris show included his Portrait of a Lady in Blue, by Borisov-Musatov, Apollinary Vasnetsov's views of old Moscow, Golovin's Black Sea Castle, Korovin's Cafe in Yalta. . . Then there were Benois' Versailles studies, Grabar's March Snow and Lime Tree and Korovin's Portrait of Chaliapin. As the owner of what was judged the "outstanding collection," Ivan was elected an Honorary Member of the Autumn Salon and awarded the Order of the Legion of Honor, that barely visible red ribbon in the buttonhole. He had reason to feel well.

Morozov did not hurry home. He bought paintings that fall in Paris with special verve, daring and originality. He was thoroughly engaged, almost in the manner of the late Misha. His second Monet came from  Durand-Ruel, Corner of a Garden at Montgeron. At Vollard's he took a fancy to two landscapes by Pierre Bonnard, an artist he first noticed at the Autumn Salon.

Through the Russian exhibition, Morozov acquired a mass of acquaintances. He was constantly being invited somewhere. He visited Baron Cochain at Diaghilev's suggestion. He had long wanted to see Maurice Denis' panels there (he had purchased a painting by Denis at the Salon of the Independents in the spring). The wall paintings and stained glass of the baron's townhouse impressed Morozov. He began contemplating commissioning the like for himself in Moscow. The visit to Cochain had another consequence. He had found his artist: Paul Cezanne.

Morozov, it is said, when asked to name his favorite artist, would always quickly reply, Cezanne. In number of works in the Morozov collection, the "hermit of Aix" led all other French artists. In seven years, Ivan Morozov created in his home a virtual Cezanne museum, the paintings representing almost every period of the artist's work. Sergei Shchukin had a similar weakness for Matisse.

Paul Cezanne died in 1906. Morozov was frequently sighted at the  posthumous Cezanne exhibition held a year later. The exhibition was outstanding. Sergei Shchukin, in Egypt and unable to get to Paris in time, was devastated by this failure. He had been collecting Cezanne for three years already.

Morozov obtained his Cezanne from Ambroise Vollard. An experienced dealer, Vollard had been sure of the commercial viability of Cezanne and had stocked up. The walls of his tiny gallery on rue Laffitte were covered with Cezannes. Ivan was a respecter of opinions: he seemed to test the rightness of his own thinking against the advice of those competent to hold an opinion. For a time, his consultant was Valentin Serov. The artist recalled that he would make notes of interesting names and might modestly suggest buying something. All he had to do was mention a new name, and Morozov would make the purchase. Or he might make a note that, for example, Mashkov, "our Moscow Matisse," is not bad and his Plums "is vitally and resonantly painted," and Morozov would immediately reserve it.

Unlike Shchukin, who would make Vollard show him everything, Morozov asked to see only what the dealer considered his best.

On that first visit Morozov bought four canvases immediately: two landscapes of Mount St. Victoria, which Cezanne painted year after year in Aix, the impressionistic Road at Pontuaz and Still-Life with Drapery. Five years later the collector acquired his second still-life, Peaches and Pears, and gave it the most prominent position in his collection. Morozov did not bargain. He was an ideal client. From Vollard, he bought Cezannes in each of six consecutive years, paying for each 20,000 to 30,000 francs. Only Monet and Renoir cost more in those days.

The Cezanne "museum" in Moscow grew almost by the day. Its high points were Girl at the Piano, done in the "romantic" manner, dark tones and thickly applied colors; Pine Tree Near Aix, which Nikolai Punin described so wonderfully in his lectures, a salute to French art that would cost him dearly; Blue Landscape. . . Ivan Morozov had searched for several years for something from Cezanne's so-called "blue" period.  He looked at everything but could not find what he needed. Those were odd times: supply exceeded demand. Still-lifes -- just take what you like; landscapes -- help yourself. There were, however, no "blues." One had to wait. But one could rely on Vollard, and he found what was wanted. In 1912 the space that had long been left empty at the end of the wall was filled with the greatly longed-for Blue Landscape.

That story shows the characteristic, almost absurd, Ivan Morozov approach to collecting: to hold a place empty knowing exactly what work must at some point make its appearance. . . Morozov reserved, it seems, particular spaces for particular artists. Was it not thus that Matisse painted just the right size pictures? Could they really not fit?

Fearing that he might miss something, Morozov often bought paintings  "unseen," working from black and white photographs.5 Dealers sometimes were angered when Morozov returned paintings because they did not harmonize with their neighbors. There was no changing Ivan's mind, and there was no use tempting him with "passable" work. He could afford masterpieces.

Morozov certainly did not lack for advisers. Moscow whispered that he was "invisibly surrounded" by them, each recommending something else. Some people thought that the merchant almost followed orders. But not so. Always with Morozov there was the "golden amendment." The whole secret lay in this little Morozov "correction."  

THE RUSSIAN WHO DOESN'T BARGAIN

Ivan Morozov, a millionaire and a sociable and pleasant man but with a  personal life sealed to outsiders, was at heart a romantic. How otherwise explain his marriage?

It began at Yar, a restaurant on the Petersburg Road famed for its Russian and Gypsy choruses, magicians and circus strongmen. Ivan Morozov was a frequent visitor to the restaurant, which was situated in what was then almost a Moscow suburb. The restaurant had its own automobiles and would send them to pick up customers. Morozov, 30, met his charming future wife when she was singing at Yar. Their daughter, Dosya Little, was born two years later (mother and daughter were always known as Dosya Little and Big).

Few knew about the child, whom the mother's married sister agreed to raise. An out-of-wedlock child was a serious scandal. As late as 1916 Ivan listed his daughter as adopted on an official document.1 A secret liaison, a child given away to be raised. . . But the romance had a happy ending: the millionaire and the singer married.

Ivan Morozov and Yevdokiya (Dosya) Kladovshchikova (stage names Lozenbek and Lozin) were quietly married in July 1907 in an out-of-the-way Moscow church. The only witnesses were a couple, the Bakhrushins. Aleksei Bakrushin was about the same age as the groom and a serious collector, having begun "on a bet" but in the end creating  Russia's first theater museum. The Bakrushin son, Yury, often told the story of his parents persuading Ivan to marry Dosya by telling stories about happy couples, all of them with a merchant as groom and an actress as bride.2

The Bakhrushins adored their "Dosya-la-la-la" for her lively and positive temperament. And the joking appellation stuck. But Dosya was capable of eliciting a range of reactions. Valentin Serov thought her "a painted doll," which is reflected in the portrait he made of her after the wedding. Other painters sincerely sought her opinion of their work.

Ivan, still at the helm of Tver Textiles and now elder of the Merchants' Club, adored his wife. His decision to commission Frenchman Maurice Denis to create panels for the Music Room may have been meant, in part, as a tribute to his wife. The painter, of course, suggested love as the theme.  

The old mansion on Prechistenka, basically unchanged since Ivan acquired it, needed remodeling to accommodate the growing number of paintings. Morozov deliberated among the three most popular Moscow architects -- Zholtovsky, Shekhtel and Kekushev -- and chose the latter, a designer much favored by wealthy industrialists and merchants. Kekushev's structures are distinctive for their lavish use of fancy plasterwork and lion figures and masks (references to the architect's name: Lev, lion). For the Morozov mansion, however, Kekushev had to rein in his fantastic indulgences. (Two years later, Sergei Shchukin also chose Kekushev to redo his mansion.)

At the Morozov house, Kekushev gave the main enfilade a neutral, museum-like look, the second floor's baroque plasterwork and other decorative touches altogether eliminated. Only the Gothic dining room kept its original appearance. Kekushev used a wall-covering of gray-green canvas, which struck a properly noble and solemn note. In the largest of the rooms, the Music Room or Concert Salon, as it was variously called, the gallery was removed. The ceiling now rose in places to a height of six meters. A glass skylight, built into the roof, was the final touch. With the halls now bathed in natural light, the Morozov mansion was on par with the most modern picture galleries of Europe.
For the residential quarters, on the floor below the enfilade and the paintings, Ivan was as particular and methodical as he was in choosing paintings.

The Morozov whom everyone knew was a mild-mannered man. The "passionate temperament" of the Morozov-Khludovs was hidden. Only when the director of Tver Textiles, almost without thinking, spent hundreds of thousands rubles on paintings did it reveal itself. There were no million-ruble gambling losses for Ivan, a la Mikhail, no absurd bets, in the manner of Arseny. Ivan Morozov's "follies" were of a different kind. And we know the details because he carefully preserved all documents relating to his finances. Not a single receipt from his French dealers, not even a minor chit signed by Bychkov, the permanent secretary of the Union of Russian Artists, was destroyed. This scrupulous attention to detailed recordkeeping made it possible for Ternjvets, who managed the collection after it was nationalized, to compile a full list of the contents and to make a sound judgment of its worth.

The estimate was for an extraordinary sum: 1.5 million French francs.3 Not for nothing did Vollard call Morozov "the Russian who does not bargain." The money that "that Russian" actually spent on his collection, was far beyond what any European collector, let alone any museum, could have contemplated spending.

Ivan Morozov was one of the richest men of the early 20th century. "We have far more than enough to live easy lives," he once told a reporter, "but, despite that, most of us work nine to twelve hours a day. We have very little free time." 

But for relaxation from "business and a very monotonous life," Ivan had the Paris of exhibitions, auctions, galleries, studios. . .  Another Moscow collector, the thoroughly Russified Frenchman Henri Brokar, once said: "Crossing the border, you seem to put on a fresh shirt." (As for shirts: while Mikhail Morozov may have sent his shirts to be laundered in London, Ivan preferred Paris and the laundry of the Grand Hotel and, later, The Majestic on the Champs-Elysee, where Ivan stayed for many years.) Truly, almost as soon as he got off the train, Ivan would head for a gallery, where the invaluable client would be graciously seated in a deep, low chair. Within minutes, almost as if he were at a movie, he would begin looking.

But these were canvases, not film, and "toward evening, M. Morozov is quite tired. He has not the strength to go to the theater," Felix Feneon, then the art director of the Bernheim the Younger Gallery, commented. Later Morozov would visit Vollard, then Durand-Ruel and, finally, Kahnnweiler. The scene would be the same in each. Then, back to the Gare du Nord, the Northern Express and three days of travel. "The secret Paris storehouses" had yielded another masterpiece.

It is absurd to ask whose collection was better, Shchukin's or Morozov's? One was a teacher, spreading light; the other the creator of a private and personal museum. One regularly fell in love with one artist only to "cast him out of his heart" later to make way for the next. The other claimed never to have been totally enthralled by "my artists" or "my mission." But he patiently awaited the appearance of the paintings he needed, paid what was asked and carried them off, satisfied.

Did Shchukin and Morozov bump into each other in Paris at the galleries? Did they ever look at pictures together? Probably not, but the scene is not unimaginable, for they were not rivals. No evidence suggests that Ivan Morozov ever competed with Sergei Shchukin for a painting or that Shchukin ever outmaneuvered Morozov.

They were not rivals and probably could not have been by their very natures: Morozov's caution and "fear of doing the rash thing" vs. Shchukin's high spirits and risk-taking. Moreover, the supply of great art then far outstripped the demand for it. There was enough to go around.

The brilliant Abram Efros, phrasemaker extraordinary, noted that in the famed French portion of the Morozov collection (unlike the Russian portion) "the latest rage is absent": yet the walls were hung with the very same French artists as hung at Shchukin's. Somehow in Shchukin's rooms they "screamed" and "screeched." But the Morozov pictures seemed "very quiet," the artists "very quiet" and Ivan Morozov himself "very quiet." "Nothing had changed; the Shchukin favorites had the same quality as before and were hung similarly, but to their declarative uniqueness, as clotted and unusual as it way, Morozov had added something, his special, subtle, little difference.

"Perhaps one has to put it this way," Efros wrote, "at Shchukin's the great Parisians of the brush appeared as if on stage, fully made up and tense; for Morozov they arrived more quietly, more intimately, more transparently."4

"More quietly, more intimately, more transparently."

That is the essence of the collection of Ivan Morozov. 

Boris Ternovets, the future curator, wrote: "Alien to the passion of Shchukin, always applying caution and strictness in his choice, fearful of the rash, of everything still unestablished, still struggling, Morozov preferred peaceful quests to the wanderings of Shchukin."5

Morozov was more analytical and more cautious than other collectors. He bought the new French art with the kind of detailed knowledge that goes into museum acquistions, deciding in the pleniture of time which artist and which work of that artist must go into the museum. Against Shchukin impulsiveness, Morozov stands for system and thoroughness. If Shchukin was so drawn to a work of art that he felt a "nervous shudder" and an excitement that almost made him faint, Ivan Morozov moved soberly and deliberately. He knew exactly what he wanted. And no authority could sway his faith in his own correctness.

They enter history as a pair: Shchukin and Morozov. Both bought works created by almost the same artists. And there is nothing to suggest a rivalry between them. But can they ever have supposed that the day would come when their collections would be joined?

That is another story.

THE FRENCH IN MOSCOW

Lev Kekushev, the architect, gently brought the Morozov mansion up to date. The falsity of eclectic showiness made way for an interior in the  spirit then fashionable of Art nouveau. The enfilade of rooms were hung with paintings, but the Music Salon seemed to need some kind of wall painting. Ivan began to look for an artist. His friends urged him to choose one of "our own." But Vrubel, who had done panels for the mansions of Aleksei Vikulovich and Savva Morozov, was not available because of illness, and Borisov-Musatov (another name that was mentioned) was dead. Ivan headed for Paris with work on the house still underway. From Diaghilev came a suggestion to look in on Baron Cochin, for whom Maurice Denis had worked on the interior design.1 Denis, founder of Les Nabi, was a Morozov favorites and his second choice if he could not have Cezanne. 

Even as a young man, Denis was determined to be a Christian painter. Later came his organizing the Studios of Sacred Art. Biblical references are in virtually all his paintings, which pleased Morozov.

The collector's first purchase of a Maurice Denis was the small, very beautiful Holy Spring in Guidel, which Ivan bought at the Salon of Independents. Ivan even introduced himself to the artist, breaking with his usual rule. The artist promptly invited the great collector to his studio at St. Germain-en-Laye.2

The trip to the Paris suburb took several hours, but Morozov did not regret them. It was spring. A garden in flower at the artist's home was inexplicably charming. An idyll. . . 

In the studio, Morozov unhesitatingly chose Bacchus and Ariadne and  reserving an as yet unfinished canvas. As a "pairing," he also ordered the Polyphemus. A few months later, the future owner of the estate at St. Germain-en-Laye received an even more substantial commission: decorative panels for the Morozov townhouse.

Almost immediately came the artist's suggestion of a subject: the story of Psyche in the version by Apuleius. The mysterious story of the union of Psyche and Eros was ideally suited to the music room in the Prechistenka St. home. Denis' plan was to tell the story "in a modern form" in five scenes. He indicated that he was prepared to start work immediately if the order was confirmed and his complete freedom as artist assured. Five huge panels, four of them 3-meters tall, is a big job. The painter asked 10,000 francs per panel.

Denis' letter asking for these assurances arrived at Prechistenka on the eve of Ivan's marriage to Yevdokiya. Morozov acceded to the painter's requests just before setting out on their wedding trip. Meanwhile, the artist and his wife Marta themselves set out for Lago Maggiore in northern Italy. There, Denis spent several months doing landscape studies for the panels. The result was 80 studies shown at (and all sold at good prices) the Drouot Gallery in Paris. Moreover, in under a year all five panels were finished, although not without substantial assistance (Denis rather overrelied on studio assistants for work on the immense canvases).

Morozov followed the process intently, occasionally visiting the studio. All was going according to plan. Before the artist's departure for far-off Russia, he showed the canvases at the Autumn Salon. Denis worried about the reaction to his Psyche. Just so would Henri Matisse anguish two years later in showing at the same Grand Palais his panels for the Shchukin mansion. The public viewing of Dance and Music would trigger an outcry loud enough briefly to shake the resolve of Shchukin -- would he, could he accept the blue-red-green panels that shocked everyone? Nothing of the sort occurred with the Denis; the exhibit went well. The panels were rolled up and went off to Moscow.

Not long after shipping the panels, the artist himself set out for Russia, in the first days of January 1909, accompanied by his wife, with whom he preferred to travel.3 Moscow did not much impress the Frenchman: "Arrival in Moscow, a small terminal area, low houses, snow, the weather very mild, the cabmen in thick blue vests stamping their feet around their carts. Berlin and Warsaw, which we passed through quickly, were dirty and full of puddles, but here everything is white, silent, not much traffic on the streets. We went immediately to the Kremlin, it was already 3:30 and growing dark rapidly. Overcast sky, the first lights on, flocks of crows, church bells ringing, interesting silhouettes, but nothing especially impressive, except, perhaps, the view of the city from the terrace before the memorial to Alexander with its many bells under snow."4

Morozov had been unable to meet his guests. He had to make a hurried trip to Tver to bury his younger brother, whose antics had finally led to tragedy. During a drinking spree in a small hunting cabin, where Arseny Morozov loved to spend his time, an argument had flared up over will-power. The master, aroused, declared that he personally feared no pain. Then he snatched a shotgun from the wall and shot himself in the leg. A few days later Arseny, 35, died of blood poisoning. The Honored Citizen, part owner of Tver Textiles Partnership, member of the Moscow Philharmonic and other societies was buried in the village of Vlasyevo near Tver. A further scandal immediately emerged.

Arseny left his wealth not to his legal wife or daughter but to a certain Konshina. There was talk about a huge amount of money: 4 million plus the mansion on Vozdvizhenka St., whose value was at least another million. It was all typical of Arseny, the most unpredictable of the three Morozov brothers. A man of no outstanding accomplishments, he was no less widely known than they. Even Leo Tolstoy, in his novel Resurrection, mentioned the Arseny's Moorist castle, built for a "foolish and useless man." Arseny has turned out to be right when he declared to Misha and Vanya that the future of their collections was hardly certain but his house would stand forever.

It may have the most unusual house in Moscow. The land had been a gift from his mother, Varvara, on his coming of age, and they chose the architect together.5 Then, in 1897 Arseny and Viktor Mazyrin went traveling in a search for "ideas." They spent time in Spain and Portugal. Morozov was taken with the notion of building a mansion in the style of "manuelino" or, as it was also called, "cable style" (expressing the spirit of the time of the great discoveries). The Pena Castle in the ancient city of Sintra near Lisbon deeply impressed Arseny with its fantastic mixture of Moorish and Gothic. In the end, the mansion on Vozdvizhenska was copied from Sintra. To obtain the plans, Arseny is said to have seduced the daughter of the owner or manager of the property.

While Maurice Denis was getting acquainted with Moscow, Ivan was spending his days and nights with lawyers. The legal tangle so gripped the newspapers that the arrival of the popular French artist didn't even get a mention.

Morozov asked Prince Sergei Shcherbatov and his friend Vladimir von Mekk to take care of his guest. Their "cultural program" included visiting the churches of the Kremlin, the Granovitaya Palace, a service in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior and a visit to Novodevichy Monastery. In the evenings, there was the Morozov box at the Bolshoi. Then came the Tretiakov Gallery, a tour of Peter Shchukin's museum of antiquities on Gruzinskaya St. and Sergei Shchukin's collection on Znamenka. And, finally, there were visits: to the Shcherbatovs, to the von Mekks, to the editorial offices of The Golden Fleece and Ryabushinsky and to Ostroukhov in Trubnikovsky. Ostroukhov had more French art than icons (which had delighted Matisse). Then there was a memorably lavish cold supper with caviar, jellied fish and a whole jellied pig. Denis did better than Matisse, who did not see the real Russian winter he had dreamed of and never got into the Hermitage.6

The sightseeing, including two days to "run over to Petersburg," did not interfere with work. Thanks to his Moscow hosts, Denis enjoyed Petersburg. The curator of the Imperial Hermitage, the father of the artist Konstantin Somov, gave the French artist "the complete freedom" of the museum. Alexander Benois showed him around the museum reserve and had him to tea at home. Sergei Diaghilev invited him to dine at Kyuba on Great Morskaya St., the favorite restaurant of grand princes, artists and theater folk.

On his return to Moscow, Denis once again carefully examined the collection of "my Ivan Abramovich" and recorded his impressions in his diary, thanks to which we now can imagine what the halls of the Morozov mansion looked like (they were never photographed). The Frenchman noted the "large number" of Russian artists on the first floor. He mentioned the "subtle landscape artist Levitan" as well as Somov, Vrubel and Golovin. He singled out the vivid Devka (Spinster) of Malyavin. He praised the simple furniture in fabrics of modest gray tones and the abundance of flowers -- lilacs, lilies-of-the-valley, cyclamen.

His own tiny Spring hung among several paintings by Cezanne (Yellow Apples, The Music Lessonand Green Landscape in Aix) and a Gaugin from Tahiti. "The placement with Cezanne is not good for me, it's true, but the Gaugin is absolutely not all that superior to mine. My Italian or French forms among the colors of Eastern rugs." To Renoir, Denis showed more grace, calling his three paintings "very beautiful," especially The Girl with a Fan. He was quite unmoved by the Monets and Sisleys. He praised the frieze, The Toilette, by his friend Bonnard, although toward paintings by Valtat, Vuillard and Matisse, he was merciless, calling them weak. He gave special note to two Arles Cafes: "one by Gaugin, with an Arlesienne, a bottle and smoke," the other by Vincent (that is how van Gogh is always referred to in the diary), "blinding and quite incorrect, but so experienced, so felt, that it makes Gaugin's Cafe seem academic."

Denis was unhappy with the decoration of the Music Salon. The main fault he found were the empty spaces over the doors and between the panels. His five scenes were clearly not enough. "My large wall painting is somewhat isolated in that spacious, cold hall of gray stone and mouse-colored furniture. Something is needed to pull everything together." The conclusion was obvious: he would paint supplementary canvases. At first a limit of eight was set, but in the end 13 were done. This "harmonizing and connecting with the architecture" cost Morozov an additional 20,000 francs.7

Something was still lacking. Denis suggested placing large ceramic vases in the corners; he would paint them himself with naked female figures. Then the suggestion was to complement the vases with large bronze statues. Denis proposed Aristide Maillol as the sculptor. Because there were no areas in the hall to accommodate sculptures, the artist offered to paint panels that would create the impression of embrasures for the sculptures.

And so the panels were ready, the colors muted. The fault lay with the assistants, to whom Denis had trusted part of the wall painting and who were unable to maintain his level. Their errors would be corrected. The matter of the vases and sculptures was settled. The last orders -- to get rid of the old furniture -- were given. Denis sketched the new arrangement. It would use narrow, armless benches. On another piece of paper, he made several color splotches with watercolors. This was the sketch for the fabrics -- white and gilt in the tone of the panel. The artist demanded that the banquettes be upholstered with a silk of that kind. Sergei Vinogradov recalled that the old furniture, which he thought "in not at all bad taste," was soon gone, replaced by "these terribly uncomfortable" white bench-banquettes along the walls. Nothing would now distract from the panels.

Two years later, the Music Salon had taken on its famed look, with the bronze figures of Pomona and Flora in the corners, the banquettes, chairs and the vases raised on supports.8 There were those who thought the panels looked like "a rosy caramel" or "horribly sweet frescoes," but most visitors were enthusiastic. So great was the success of the Music Salon that Sergei Shchukin felt a twinge of  envy.

The Salon taken care of, Ivan Morozov turned his attention to the stairway. The long, narrow flight of steps ended in two massive half-columns. Morozov wanted to fill the small niche between them with another panel. This time the artist chosen was Pierre Bonnard, the "last impressionist."

In general, Ivan loved light and intimate paintings. It is no wonder then that he bought so many canvases by Bonnard: a total of 13, some 6 of which were done to order. On the other hand, Shchukin, who preferred everything "sharp and disturbing," bought no Bonnards. Or, rather, he did buy a Bonnard but couldn't "live with the picture" and sent it back to Paris. That was part of Shchukin's way: buy, bring home and and wait to see if the painting stirred him at home as it had on first viewing.

The upper landing of the Morozov staircase was now a vision as seen from below. One opened the main door and looked up, and a fairytale picture was revealed: a blue strip of sea, sun, golden sand, frolicking children. The panel, called The Mediterranean, tricked the eye in its way: there were actually three separate canvases behind the real columns. As he climbed the marble stairs, Ivan had the thought: one Mediterranean Sea is not enough; what about two empty walls at the sides. . . one more large panel could certainly fit there. Bonnard executed the new commission with great speed.

The commissions by Denis, Bonnard and Maillol were in place. Matisse would complete the list.

Morozov sent Matisse notes, put together a plan for a "large decoration." Had the world war not begun, the mansion on Prechistenka would have had yet one more panel.

The pictures were ordered from Matisse two years before the war. That Morozov would wait so long was out of character. He had never done so. Bonnard, who got his commission at the same time as Matisse, had painted two panels by the time Matisse had produced a single sketch. Morozov kept his patience. The main thing would be the result. This kind of patience was what had earned him the appelation -- the man who "waits out masterpieces." When the Matisse at last arrived, Morozov was overjoyed.
 
Matisse, over whom the Morozov commission had hung for more than a year, did the job during his second trip to Morocco: two landscapes for Monsieur and a painting for Madame. Yevdokia Sergeyevna, Dosya, had given him the commission personally, hoping for a still-life. Instead of a still-life, however, the great artist painted Zorah, an Arab girl from Tangier, seated on a terrace. Zorah posed for Matisse on both his visits to Tangier. On the second occasion, he found her in a brothel: the Islamic prohibition on women showing their faces does not apply to prostitutes. Thus was born the Moroccan Triptych, a highlight of the Morozov collection.

The pictures painted in Tangier were not conceived as a triptych. But recognizing that he had created a unity, Matisse "brought together" the three canvases with blue and dressed them in simple gray frames. The three large paintings in no way deferred to the panels. The artist recommended hanging them in this order: View from the Window at the left, The Casbah Gate (the Casbah, an ancient part of the city, is the site of the Sultan's palace) at the right, and Zorah  on the Terrace in the center. Morozov did.

Morozov now had a rather good Matisse collection, although not so large as Shchukin's, a total of 11 vs. 37. Incidentally, it was Shchukin who had, a year after himself first visiting Saint-Michel, brought Morozov to Matisse.9

Matisse had already signed an exclusive contract with Bernheim that obliged him to sell his work through his gallery. Nevertheless, the artist still sold paintings directly from his studio, at least to his Russian collectors. Morozov bought his first Matisse, the still fresh Bouquet from Bernheim. At the Autumn Salon of 1908, where Maurice Denis showed his Morozov panels, Matisse showed 30 works. Morozov chose Seated Woman. "Nudes" were a touchy matter. The opulent Nude Female by Renoir, before Sergei Shchukin would hang it in his own home, hung for a time in an isolated room in brother Peter Shchukin's home on Gruzinskaya St. Sergei Shchukin also had once persuaded Matisse to replace nude figures with dressed because in Russia we are "in the East somewhat." They were talking about the huge panels, Dance and Music, for the stairway of the Znamenska St. mansion.

The Shchukin commission took Matisse a long time. But he still managed to paint two still-lifes for Morozov. The background of the first, Fruits, Flowers and the Panel "Dance," showed a portion of Shchukin's Dance. But it did not include the very familiar red figures on a blue-green background. This was the round dance in pink. So the "round dance" was at Prechistenka before the canvas that shocked Moscow.

Fruits and Bronze, with a rug and the Matisse sculpture, Two Negro Women, in the background, was the second still-life. Valentin Serov painted his famous portrait of Morozov against the background of this luscious still-life. Why the choice? After all, Matisse was certainly not thought to be Morozov's favorite artist, and Serov himself acknowledged that he did not really understand Matisse, although he admitted liking several things. And he desperately wanted to understand why, in comparison with Matisse's painting, everything else seemed dull. He sensed that the Frenchman had succeeded "in simplifying painting," and he was, despite himself, moving in the same direction. Abram Efros has called Serov "the most original of the Russian portraitists." His people were different from what they were in reality, and his Morozov was "fashioned" out of a clay different from that provided by nature. The "Serov" Morozov is "a smart and effete European, with the general effect of a chic member of the Assembly or a spruce banker interested in art and buying the latest rages only immediately to hide them, as the code of good taste dictated.

"Ivan Abramovich Morozov, it was thought, had outdone Sergei Ivanovich [Shchukin] on the matter of the latest Paris rages. Access to his mansion was hard to obtain, in no way so open to invited and uninvited guests as the doors of the Shchukin house. Thus, the Morozov mystery, as expressed in the Serov manner, had proved itself."10.

Morozov appreciated Serov as an artist and respected his opinion about painting. On his insistence, he had bought The Red Vineyard in Arles and The Prisone courtyard by van Gogh and other fine paintings. It was also because of Serov that he had rejected many no less worthy works, for Serov, like all considerable artists, had his preferences. In the winter of 1913, with the Morocco Triptych almost ready, Serov was already gone. But Morozov had other consultants.

Shchukin wrote to Matisse that, under the influence of such people (who do not understand your latest work, said Shchukin), Mr. Morozov had become enamored of other artists, was having second thoughts about the commission for the mansion and had bought a large panel from Bonnard.

Matisse chose not to believe Shchukin and offered Morozov Arab Coffeehouse, which called out for proximity to the Morocco Triptych, and he sent both a photograph and an enthusiastic article about himself. It was not Morozov, however, who hurried to the studio at Issy-le-Moulineaux. It was Shchukin, who quickly bought the painting.

        CLOSED TO ALL  

       The Morozov collection grew but remained closed to the public. The owner "guarded his collection with a wary and miserly love." Nonetheless, in the spring of 1912 the unbendable rule was broken. The journal Apollon devoted an entire issue to the collection, including a catalogue of the holdings, reproductions of many paintings, including a portion of Denis' Music Salon, and, most important, an article by the distinguished journalist Sergei Makovsky. Ill. 1,2  

        The critic termed the collection "a museum of personal taste" but "certainly with none of a museum's neutrality." Still, one could not really expect, he said, a private collection to provide an exhaustive picture of French painting during the past 30 years? Many "remarkable artists" were not represented. But, he said, the impressionists, "the beloved and glorious teachers of the generation that is now already past," as well as their heirs -- "Matisse and the 'wild,' cubist-leaning youth" -- were "wonderfully represented" by, moreover, "exclusively exemplary" works.

      "Exemplariness," the best, was the unchanging Morozov credo throughout his methodical assembly of his museum. Ivan Morozov reacted to every new wind that blew in art, but he never turned his back on artists he loved. Shchukin, who went through impressionist and Gaugin "fevers," openly declared the end of his interest in them. 

        Morozov proceeded in the manner of the ideal museum curator. Yes, many places remained unfilled in the mosaic he was creating. There were as yet no Manet, no Toulouse-Lautrec, no Seurat. He had, after all, only been a serious collector less than 10 years, and each year it was becoming harder to find things in Paris, while there was barely any chance of finding something in Russia. Admittedly, the splendid Eduard Manet visited Petersburg for the exhibition, 100 Years of French Painting, organized by Apollon. The organizer, Baron Nikolai Vrangel, brought 600 works (two-thirds of them paintings) from Paris for the show, and the pictures could be purchased.

     Both Morozov, an honorary member of the exhibit committee, and Shchukin, also on the committee, ignored the show and bought nothing. Morozov was not even tempted by Manet's Barre at the Folies-Bergere: the picture somehow did not suit Morozov's conception of his museum. His eye was on other things. Take Breakfast on the Grass, for example, or rather a version of the famed canvas. That was a picture he had to have. Several years earlier, he had sought to make a deal for it. He was now patiently waiting for the present owner to come round. But if Morozov felt something did not meet the level he sought to maintain, he would have no part of it. Thus, he rejected Manet's Portrait of a Lion Hunter, which Grabar found for him. He rejected it on the advice of Serov, who considered it  "a hastily painted study of the Paris street."3    Illus. 3

        Even without these paintings, the museum's presentation of impressionsm was exhaustive. The large hall of the mansion was given over to Claude Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Degas and Sisley. Nearby hung Cezanne and Matisse, the neo-impressionists, two Signaks, one Cross, the Nabis. . . Then there was the large entry hall filled with Denis' work and the stairway and Bonnard.

        The second floor was devoted to the post-impressionists: van Gogh, Gaugin (Picasso would appear beside them somewhat later), Marquet, Valta and Friesz and other fauvistes hung in the dining room. This was where the collector positioned his Derain, of which the critic Aksyonov wrote that the painting "is not easy to love but it is impossible to pass by." Morozov may well have felt similarly when he purchased The Drying of Sails, whose overwhelming colors fit the label "wild" hung on the new direction by the Paris critic Louis Vauxcelles.2 Later Morozov's French art would be "surrounded" by the Jack of Diamonds work of Mashkov, Konchalovsky and Kuprin. The critics found them talented but light-years away from Gaugin and Cezanne.3

        Twice a year, Morozov went faithfully to Paris. In April he would attend the Salon of Independents, in October the Autumn Salon.4 Whatever he considered interesting, he bought. The impressionists were the new classics, and their prices were steadily rising. Morozov's made his main purchases through the galleries, mostly  from Vollard and Durand-Ruel on rue Laffitte. During the early years, he would bring home two or three works. Later there might be as many as 10. The years 1907 and 1908 hold the record: in those two years Morozov bought more than 60 pictures!

       Overall, in 10 years, Ivan Morozov purchased 278 pictures and 23 sculptures. The Russian textile magnate spent 1.5 million francs in purchases for his museum, surpassing every other collector, whether European or American.

        As already suggested, Morozov bought none of his French art in Russia, with the solitary exception of van Gogh's Cafe in Arles, which he saw at the Golden Fleece exhibit.5 The show, organized by the journal called Golden Fleece, which was published by Nikolai Ryabushinsky,6 included the latest examples of Russian and French painting. The show was a standout, as everything touched by Ryabushinsky seemed to be. Boris Pasternak long remembered the narcotic aroma of hyacinths wafting through the half-darkened halls of the Salon of the Golden Rune. Ryabushinsky, this "playboy of the Russian world," had a passion for flowers: there was always a rosebud in the lapel of Ryabushinsky's striped yellow jacket. His table at the Hermitage restaurant on Trubnaya St., where he usually ate, always had a vase of tropical orchids on it.  

        Morozov lent no paintings to the exhibits of the Golden Rune and the Jack of Diamonds. But he did buy paintings from them, directly in the exhibition hall or slightly later, as was the case with Saryan's Pomegranate Tree. Painted with long, parallel brushstrokes, the canvas had something of the look of an Armenian rug and harmonized ideally with the collection. Later, Morozov would buy the same artist's Street in Constantinople, with its luscious and vivid colors in the Jack of Diamonds' manner and the canvases surrounding it by Mashkov, Konchalovsky and Kuprin.

       What guided Morozov in his choices remains a mystery. Sometimes he seemed to have bought paintings primarily to encourage young talent. But the encouragement also was a kind of prediction that great things lay in store. This was Morozov's inimitable and remarkable gift. However one is impressed and made breathless by Shchukin's heroics, Ivan Abramovich Morozov did as much for Russian art as the owner of the gallery on Znamenka Lane.

        The younger artists responded to what they saw on Znamenka like "eskimos to a phonograph," in the phrase of Prince Shcherbatov. The Shchukin collection had, in this sense, an enormous effect on the Russian avant-garde. But Shchukin bought no contemporary Russian artists. Morozov did and did so with gusto.

       At times, Morozov was led to artists by advisers: Yakov Tugendkhold, seeking to help the young Chagall, urged the purchase of pictures from the totally unknown provincial from tiny Vitebsk, "an untouched, naive, provincial backwater" (Efros). The 300 rubles he got  for Barbershop made possible his getting married, the artist  acknowledged.7
        The Morozov mansion held not one but two museums: one in the skylit halls of the second floor (the main museum), the other on the first floor, for Morozov's personal use. That was, indeed, how Morozov related to his "Russian half," downplaying any possible significance it might have. Small sketches by Levitan, Vasnetsov and Vrubel hung on walls covered in gold-stamped leather not far from the huge book shelves of the office. That was where Serov's portrait of Dosia hung. Studies by Vrubel and a gentle female head by Borisov-Musatov were in the bedroom. "If I were you, I'd show the Vrubel," the sculptor Konenkov said.

         "Finding yourself in the Morozov collection, you were at first surprised, then disillusioned, then came a new sense of curiosity and, finally, extraordinary gratification in the face of the quite different human organization . . . that was revealed in this collecting," Abram Efros wrote. "First, there was the discovery of a kind of America, in that half the Morozov collection consisted of typically Russian things, current artists, living artists, exhibiting artists, who by all the Russian rules could never sit at the same table as the artistic aristocracy of Paris."

        The Russian part of the collection did not yield an inch to the Western "half" in size: again 300 pictures, again the same period. If one were to decide who was the favorite artist in quantitative terms, first place would go to Alexander Golovin. Morozov had more than 40 pictures by Golovin, and they were large canvases. If one must make a judgment about genre, lyrical and impressionistic landscapes were clearly the favorite, as in the work of Korovin and Sergei Vinogradov. As for art groups, Morozov remained loyal to the Union of Russian Artists and their favorite theme, Russian nature.

        But the balance of forces in the art world was subject to relatively swift change. "There was a time/a season/our god van Gogh/another season Cezanne," Mayakovsky chanted. Morozov was already buying Larionov, Goncharova, Mashkov, Konchalovsky. He was buying Kuznetsov, Saryan, Sapunov, Anisfeld. He was buying the Petersburgers Somov and Benois of the World of Art, commissioning Kustodiyev for a version of his Maslenitsy (Shrovetide). He was delighted with the landscapes of Grabar, with the picturesque Malyavin, with the Utkin of the Blue Rose, the impressionistic landscapes of Zhukovsky, Turzhansky and Petrovichev. Among the 57 painters represented in the Russian "half" of the Morozov collection, the collector may have been mistaken at most about three, perhaps as many as five. Each of the others would become a classic of Russian art.

        In time, Morozov might have been drawn deeply into abstraction, the direction in which the Russian avant-garde was clearly moving. That is very possible. One of Morozov's last purchases was a cubist portrait by Picasso.

       PICASSO

        Picasso must be thought of as Shchukin's artist. Sergei Ivanovich owned 51 Picassos, although had had "made his way" to the art of the cubist master "with difficulty." Picasso's recent canvases of complex geometrical figures were rebus-like puzzles, and while Shchukin immediately felt their power, he could not at first go beyond that. Their "magic," however, took him over. Competition between Shchukin and Morozov there might have been somewhere, but Morozov could not have competed with Shchukin over Picasso. The tension and concentration of the art of the Spanish painter was simply foreign to the Morozov character. In painting Morozov always sought serenity, acceptance and joy, which is why he so loved the fauvistes.

        Soon, however, Picasso would be hailed as the supreme master of the new time, and Morozov could not fail to hear. How could his collection not hold a single Picasso? In fact, he did purchase, although only in 1913, Picasso's Young acrobat on a Ball, the best painting of Picasso's early "rose" period. Morozov could hardly have made the purchase sooner: the painting had long hung in the famed apartment of Leo and Gertrude Stein on rue Flerus in Montparnasse.8 The Americans were as zealous in hunting down the new art as the Russians. For several years the brother and sister Steins avidly purchased Matisse and Picasso (their friend). Then, somehow disillusioned with their heroes, they sold most of their collection assisted by Kanhnweiler. The dealer, organizer of the first cubist exhibition, held almost a monopoly on the founding fathers of the movement, Picasso and Bracque, first of all. It was through Kahnnweiler that Shchukin bought most of his Picassos.

        By the time Shchukin became seriously interested in Picasso in 1911, the prices of the artist's paintings had multiplied by many times. In 1908, it cost Morozov, buying through Vollard, only 300 francs for one of the most poignant things of the "rose" period, Harlequin and his companion. Paintings by younger Russian artists cost more. Only three years later, the collector inquired how one might get in touch with this M. Picasso. And merely so that Makovsky could put a signature below a reproduction in Apollon. Soon, Vollard would sell Morozov his portrait by Picasso. The dealer did not really care for the work but acknowledged its significance. What made Morozov buy the heretofore alien cubist canvas? Was it out of friendship for the Paris dealer or a decision stemming from his curator's gift? 

       The chaos of world war now erupted. It would have tragic consequences for the future. Immediately it made impossible further travel to Europe. Nor could long-distance purchases be made; the banks would not transfer funds. The only one way out was to switch entirely from French to Russian paintings.

CITIZEN MOROZOV

During the war, production at the factory dropped sharply. Raw materials were scarce. In August 1917, Duma elections were held in Tver. The Bolsheviks gained strength. The factories were at political fever pitch. Things were collapsing.

Varvara Alekseyevna, Ivan's mother, died on Sept. 5. Ivan was now sole owner of the textile empire as well as managing director. In October there were frequent work stoppages because of machinery breakdowns and shortages of cotton, which only added to the growing sense of despair.

Finally, the Bolsheviks took power. By the summer of 1918, it was clear that the new authorities had decided how to deal with the so-called "formers." In June large industry was nationalized.1 Management of the Tver factories was put into the hands of a workers' committee. In December, Ivan Morozov handed over to a representative of the workers, Ivan Rakov, a carpenter from the cotton-stuffing plant, the keys to the safe and the books of Tver Textiles.

The picture gallery was nationalized in the last days of 1918. No special decree was issued for the Morozov collection. It simply was listed together with the collections of a cousin, Aleksei Vikulovich Morozov, and Ilya Ostroukhov. The latter two collections were of lesser quality than the Morozov: Vikulovich's featured porcelains, Ostroukhov's icons. Sergei Shchukin's collection had been declared the property of the republic even earlier, listed as collection No. 1. The Shchukin gallery, generally accessible over the preceding few years, could begin operating as a Museum of New Western Painting practically immediately.

The situation for the year past had been unclear. Upheaval and change had come with such speed that it had been difficult to estimate how things would develop. The general impression was that the changes wouldn't last, that, if not today, then tomorrow things would right themselves and go on as before. Ivan removed what he could from his walls and moved the art to a "fireproof vault" built into the mansion.

An insurance valuation of the collection was made before the war: a half-million gold rubles. The owner of such treasures had to take steps to account for every possible risk. The vault was solidly built: thick stone walls with an arched ceiling of reinforced concrete; double doors that could only be opened by following a secret procedure. A huge trunk (3 meters by 1.5 meters) stood in a corner of the vault. If needed, the most valuable things could be hidden in it. (The vault has, since the 1920s, been used to house the original manuscripts of Leo Tolstoy.)

With the paintings out of the way, Morozov made plain his intention, if necessary, to move them from Moscow. Soon, like all the major Moscow collectors, the Bolshevik authorities presented him with a "preservation certificate."2 Sergei Konenkov brought it. The two men knew each other: Morozov had quite recently bought several of Konenkov's sculptures. As Konenkov recalled it, Morozov "cheered up" a bit at his appearance. He was badly frightened and constantly expected an attack.

The tightening of the screws after the revolution could not be evaded. A decree issued in December 1917 called for the confiscation of all rental properties, with a proviso that all residences not suitable for workers be transferred to state institutions. The first floor of the Morozov mansion immediately became a military barracks. Any number of organizations applied for the second floor.

Morozov accepted the decree on nationalization stoically. Shchukin was more farsighted. Probably the fate of his little daughter spurred him to act. He disappeared from Moscow at the end of August 1918, three months before the declaration that the gallery was now the property of the people. Shchukin's older daughter remained, however, to keep watch over the paintings, a role she played for almost three years.

Morozov had no one he could count on and chose to remain himself with the museum. There was a constant need to defend it -- against comrades from the provinces demanding paintings by Cezanne and Derain because, don't you see?, in our museums in Vyatka or Saratov we have nothing of the kind. Or against the military people occupying the first floor and pressing to be allowed up the main stairway. Only the people's commissar of enlightenment, Anatoly Lunacharsky, who had already saved the Shchukin mansion, stood in their way.

Not long after Konenkov, another sculptor appeared at the house on Prechistenka. A former student of Bourdelle and now part of the Commissariat of Enlightenment, Boris Ternovets was assigned to the mansion to prepare a complete scientific catalogue of the collection. By this time, Morozov had retrieved the paintings from the vault and rehung them.

THE SECOND MUSEUM OF NEW WESTERN PAINTING

The Commissariat of Enlightenment's museum-affairs section sought all that winter to put together a staff for the museum. Not until April 11, 1919, was the Morozov collection officially raised to the status of the Second Museum of New Western Painting. A day earlier, Ternovets was summoned to a meeting of the Commissariat in its nearby headquarters on Mertvy Lane in the former mansion of Margarita Kirillovna Morozova. Ternovets returned to Prechistenka with the news that he had been appointed curator of the gallery. Morozov would be the  assistant curator. "I. A. Morozov is extremely glad," Ternovets noted in his diary.

Curator, assistant, commissar. This was the typical arrangement for Soviet museums. The assistants were generally the former owners, who agreed to stay if the collections were not touched. These "formers" were also obliged to conduct tours. For the first half of the day, Morozov (or his wife or a servant) would lead visitors through the only recently inaccessible mansion. Tanya Lebedeva's visit to Prechistenka happened that spring. The future artist was so struck by what she saw that she described the event in her diary and, being a stickler for detail, drew a plan of the second floor (a priceless witness, as it would turn out). "We were met by the owner himself. Serov did not accidentally depict this Moscow Maecaenas against the exotic background of Matisse's blindingly bright still-life, whose dynamic, insistent rhythm and 'wild' combinations of colors all the more vividly and expressively bring out the roughened quality of the merchant's face and the awkwardness of the characteristically wedge-shaped beard a-la Russe. . . . The invaluable canvases that covered the walls of the great, bright rooms no longer belonged to this last representative of a famous dynasty, three generations of which clothed millions of Russian peasants in bright cottons. Hunched over a bit, for the halls were chilly, and squinting with his nearsighted eyes and weakly smiling . . . he began to speak . . . in French. . . ."3

Morozov served as assistant curator only for a few days. "April 14. An unpleasant complication. Ivan Abramovich is moving downstairs by Denisov (the superintendent of the building)," Ternovets notes in his diary. The family was being forced to move into three rooms left to them on the first floor. This was more than Morozov could tolerate. Less than two weeks remained before the official opening of the museum. "May 3. No Ivan Abramovich to date. June 13. I. A. has disappeared without a trace, his place is vacant," Ternovets continued methodically to note in his diary.

From the records of the Moscow Cheka:
"A search has been conducted at the home on Prechistenka. Inspection of the house shows that the seal on the steel vault and the fireproof safes are in good order, the paintings and sculptures are in the care of B. N. Ternovets. The former owner of the house and property Ivan Abramovich and his family are noted as having left in June 1919 for Petrograd."4

The Second Museum of New Western Painting (the former collection of Ivan Morozov) opened to the public as scheduled on the Day of Workers' Solidarity, May 1, 1919.

LEAVING RUSSIA

Morozov did, in fact, get out of the country. It was a relatively "vegetarian" time in Soviet Russia's history, to use Anna Akhmatova's suggestive word. But it would not have happened without aid from someone well up in the new regime. A well-positioned "comrade" helped Ivan Morozov obtain the documents needed to leave the country "for medical treatment." Other distinguished figures in Russian cultural affairs also left legally in 1921, and some, denied permission, fled across the border to Finland by boat at night, like the writer Amfiteatrov, or across the ice of the Gulf of Finland. In addition, as late as 1922, permission to leave the country was being granted at the request of relatives. All in all, the regime was getting rid of those who didn't fit. In a famous episode, philosophers, economists, writers and literary scholars were placed aboard an ocean liner in Petrograd heading for Germany. They were warned that they would be shot if they returned. These exiles were allowed to take with them two coats, one suit, two day shirts, two evening shirts and two pairs of hose. Carrying precious stones or gold was forbidden. But the Morozovs, who went to Riga, not Germany, almost certainly managed to carry valuables with them. Moreover, they surely had funds available to them in accounts in foreign banks.

The original aim was to settle in Switzerland. Felix Feneon, a longtime Morozov acquaintance, is definite on this: "The famed collector, having left Russia with his wife, daughter and niece, had decided to settle not far from Lausanne."1 The claim is bolstered by a rather miraculously still-intact passport "of the juvenile daughter of the cloth manufacturer-consultant Morozov" issued at the Russian consulate in Geneva in "June 1920." The passport also shows a French entry visa stamped by the Russian consulate in Paris, and other stamps show that in late 1920 the family was in London, where money belonging to Tver Textiles Partnership was held in a bank.

Things went well at first. The family leased an apartment in Paris. That was where they would settle. But, suddenly, Ivan's health broke down. The last, yellowing photos of him, captioned in French, "My father Ivan Morozov," show that almost nothing was left of the "good-hearted stalwart" of Serov's portrait. On April 18, 1921, Morozov completed the preparation of his will at his lawyer's office. The will was brief in the extreme: all the property, real and movable, would go to his wife.

In late May 1921, the family set out for Carlsbad, the Czech spa. The Carlsbad pace remained as easy and unhurried as ever: there were the daily walks to the spring, promenades along the Tepla River, a service at the Orthodox church. The Morozovs stayed at the Pupp, which is still the most fashionable of Carlsbad's hostelries. At the fashionable Kaiser Baths (built for Wilhelm of Germany) across the street, a variety of health-related baths and treatments were available. Ivan died in the midst of one. "Kaiserbad, Lutherstrasse. July 22, 1921, at 11 a.m. at the age of 49 Ivan (Jean) Morozov, Russian, Russian Orthodox, married, industrialist, died. All necessary sanitary measures were taken: temporary placement in a coffin as required for long-distance transportation."

With this tersely official certification in hand, the widow and daughter left Carlsbad. There were formalities to be attended to for moving the body, document verification by the French consulate in Berlin, then in Geneva and, finally, Paris. A first requiem service was conducted on July 24 in the Russian church on rue Darieu. A second, arranged by the Union of Russian Industrialists, took place three days later.

The widow, who was not yet 40, now faced the task of dealing with her inheritance and her life. For one thing, the death of Ivan was the occasion of a final rupture with her daughter. Within six months of Ivan's death, according to family legend, the mother "pushed" Little Dosya into marriage. The wedding of 19-year-old Yevdokiya Morozova and Sergei Konovaloff was registered in a local city hall before witnesses hired by Yevdokiya Sergeyevna.
  
Sergei Konovaloff was the son of the factory owners whose family is described by Melnikov-Pechersky in his novels, In the Woods and On the Mountains. Sergei's father, a textile manufacturer, owned Ivan Konovaloff and Sons and headed the board of the Electrostal corporation, in which he held a controlling stake along with Nikolai Vtorov, whose sister, Nadezhda, he had married.2 In 1916 Vtorov acquired one of Russia's oldest commercial banks, the I. V. Yunker Industrial Bank, on whose board Ivan Morozov also sat. Less than a year later, Vtorov, a descendant of Irkutsk millionaires and perhaps the richest Russian of his time, was found shot to death in his mansion on Spasopeskovsky Lane in the Arbat, which since 1933 has been the residence (Spaso House) of the United States ambassador.3 Leader of the Duma fraction known as "Progressives," a radical liberal and comrade of the chairman of the Provisional Government, Alexander Ivanovich Konovaloff was arrested along with the entire cabinet on the ill-fated day of the October coup. Later, it is true, he was freed, but in March 1921 he was one of the organizers of the anti-Soviet Kronstadt rebellion and fled to France, where he may have been in touch with his future brother-in-law.

In December 1922 a son was born to the young couple and christened Ivan after his grandfather. The marriage itself, however, was shaky from the start and collapsed quickly. "Dosia" abandoned her husband for a Georgian prince, and Sergei eventually settled in Britain, where he was a professor of Russian language and literature at Birmingham University, and, after the war, headed the Russian Department at Oxford. 

EPILOGUE

Meanwhile, the former Morozov mansion was living its own life. The collection was untouched as Morozov had left it. It had never been his idea to take anything with him: "Not a single Russian, not a single French picture suffered. The collection has not been touched and is to be found just as I arranged it, in the palace adorned by Bonnard's Spring and Fall and Denis' Story of Psyche."4

The Shchukin and Morozov galleries were now classified as separate "sections" of the Museum of New Western Painting. (In 1923, for some reason, the word "painting" was replaced by the word "art," introducing a significant change in the Soviet abbreviation: the GMNZhZ became the GMNZI.) The mansions on Znamenka and Ostozhenka, although already crammed with tenants and offices, remained in the sights of the Commission for the Unburdening of the City of Moscow. In 1925 the Morozov palace very nearly became a maternity hospital. Only the intervention of Foreign Minister (Commissar) Chicherin prevented it. Chicherin, the son of a diplomat and a baroness and the nephew of an outstanding jurist, loved music and would later, in retirement, write a book about Mozart. He persuaded his Kremlin comrades that the enemies of the republic would use the closing of the new Soviet museum against them.

About 1925 was also when all pictures by Russian artists were removed from the Morozov mansion: Russian art no longer accorded with the theme of the museum. Some of these paintings would later be distributed among provincial museums; some disappeared altogether. Most of them, however, were just right for the Tretiakov Gallery and were sent there. The Tretiakov was now the city's principal museum, and its treasures were treated as sacrosanct, unlike the contents of the private mansions of the formerly rich, even if they had been converted into museums. These museums now began to be shut, one after another. The Shchukin's turn to be "consolidated" came in 1928. There was no longer any sense in seeking intervention from on high. The New Economic Policy (NEP) was being wound down, and while Old Bolsheviks were not yet being arrested, they were already being shifted away from major jobs. And so the order was issued to make the palace on Znamenka available. The pictures were packed and shipped to the house on Prechistenka St. (now named Kropotkin St. in honor of the anarchist thinker Pavel Kropotkin). The famed Gaugin "iconostasis," the Matisse Rose Drawing Room and the Monet Music Salon existed now only in photographs.

And so the heretofore autonomous First and Second Sections of the Museum of New Western Art became one.5 Three hundred works  from the Morozov collection joined to 300 works from the former Shchukin collection along with tens of canvases appropriated from other "former" collectors. In all, the new museum had 19 Monets, 11 Renoirs, 29 Gaugins, 26 Cezannes, 10 van Goghs, 9 Degases, 14 Bonnards, 22 Derains, 53 Matisses and 54 Picassos.

There were a great many more pictures than could fit on the walls of the second-floor rooms of the Prechistenka mansion with their unique  illumination by skylight. Many canvases went into reserve -- temporarily, it was promised. The space problem was to be resolved after the First Five-Year Plan was realized. Yet the "annihilation" of the united GMNZI, which opened in December 1929, began immediately. A Workers' Brigade of the People's Commissariat of the Worker-Peasant Inspectorate of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic came to check on it6 and was not pleased with what it found. By no means! Where was anything proletarian? Its art could interest only "gourmands and aesthetes." The museum's only chance of surviving now lay in some sort of fundamental rearrangement. There was an attempt to hang the pictures by subject and then by a kind of rationing system: so many pictures "of abstract art and other pictures not understandable to the mass viewer," so many still-lifes, "understandable but not reflective of social problems" and landscapes without human figures and then pictures with people in them but "without clear indications of class."

A separate tally was made of "actively revolutionary, properly agitational" pictures. Out went pictures considered "actively reactionary and a dark threat to class consciousness" as well as, in the words of the inspectors, "passively documentary portraits." The result was catastrophic: only nine paintings had working-class themes, barely 2% of the collection.

The museum's future hung in the balance. One response to the official call for the leaders of culture to create a "Magnitogorsk of art" was a plan to create an all-Russia combine to "regulate the distribution and use of types of art" on the basis of the GMNZI and Tretiakov collections with control vested in an industrial enterprise.

Such was the ideological side of things. On the material side, the vast Morozov mansion remained a temptation. At one point, the RKKA Military Academy had its eye on it. On that occasion, Aleksei Bubnov, an Old Bolshevik and the new commissar of enlightenment, rose to the defense of the GMNZI, doing so in Soviet fashion by threatening to take the matter up with the party organs if attempts against "the minimum quota of our chain of museums that has been set for our period" did not stop. The museum was saved, but the collections were still methodically draining away.

For about two years, pictures from the GMNZI were regularly transferred to the Hermitage "by way of exchange." Leningrad might well have gotten more than the several dozen canvases that it did get, had the Commission for the Unburdening of Moscow been granted possession of the former Shchukin mansion on Znamensk in 1926; because of the absence of space in Moscow to accommodate it, the Shchukin Section would have gone straight to Leningrad.

In reaction to viewers' dissatisfaction with themed groupings ("The Class Struggle," "Woman in Bourgeois and in Proletarian Art"), the GMNZI displays were reduced, and the number of things in storage rose. Decadent bourgeois art was not to be shown. It was as simple as that. The Denis panels were covered over, leaving the former Music Salon entirely to Matisse; the oak panels in the Gothic office were draped in canvas, and Picasso paintings hung. Meanwhile, Antiquariat, the State Trading Co.'s chief unit for the purchase and sale of antiquities, began actively to "test" market GMNZI paintings. The unit took some 30 works. Buyers might simply state a preference and get  it. Albert Barnes, a Philadelphian, wanted Pierrot and Harlequin.  Half a million German marks were asked for this Shchukin Cezanne. The purchaser thought the price high but paid it. Incidentally, it was at Barnes' commission that Matisse, in the late 1930s,  would create a panel that was a kind of paraphrase of the legendary Shchukin panels, Dance and Music.

A US gallery, Nodler, which maintained a relationship with Antiquariat's office in Berlin, found yet another buyer. In April 1931 this telegram was received in Berlin: "I have a client who is very interested in Madame Cezanne, Cafe van Gogh Chambermaid Renoir Green Singer Degas. Can you name an attractive price for the four in dollars in that unable to purchase here sufficient marks." The Cezanne and van Gogh had been Morozov's, the Degas had belonged to Mikhail Ryabushinsky and the Renoir to Sergei Shcherbatov.

All four canvases went into the private collection of Steven Clark, an heir of the Singer sewing machine fortune. They cost the American a total of $260,000. The deal, made before diplomatic relations with the United States were established, did not have to meet the later requirement of dealing with the former owners. Clark understood the situation and always kept his purchase secret. When the pictures were exhibited, they were shown as belonging to "Anonymous."7 

By 1933 the sale of works of art from Soviet museums was winding down, and the pictures that had been earmarked for sale but not sold were returned to the GMNZI. The Museum of New Western Art was still alive but living meagerly. Funds were short. The house on Kropotkin St. now hardly resembled the opulent Morozov castle. Moreover, the names of the former owners were never spoken. All that Ternovets could dare, in the end, was to include the initials "Shch" and "M" in the museum catalogue. On Jan. 1, 1938, Boris Ternovets himself was removed as director of the GMNZI. He learned of his firing from the newspaper. Sooner or later the removal had to occur: the art he was safeguarding was, after all, formalist.

The onset of the Second World War delayed the inevitable liquidation of the museum. The pictures were evacuated to Sverdlovsk, and, when brought back in 1944, left as packed. Victory did not bring the expected liberalization of the regime. In 1946 the works of Mikhail Zoshchenko and Anna Akhmatova were labeled "ideologically harmful," and in January 1949 the campaign against "cosmopolitanism" and "bowing and scraping to the West" was launched. In early March 1948, by resolution of the Council of Ministers, the GMNZI was liquidated as "a seedbed of formalist views and for prostrating itself before the decadent bourgeois culture of the epoch of imperialism," which has done "great damage to the development of Russian and Soviet art."

Several weeks before the edict was promulgated, the museum staff were bluntly told "to unfurl the exhibits" and given slightly more than a day to comply. Even the giant Matisse panels had to be unrolled. Kliment Voroshilov, the vice chairman of the Council of Ministers and a collector and art-lover, and Alexander Gerasimov, the president of the USSR Academy of Arts and painter (creator of Stalin and Voroshilov in the Kremlin) appeared at the museum in the morning with an entourage. No matter how hard the museum staff sought to "divert" the delegation and call its attention to realistic things, the visitors knew why they were there. Gerasimov was a rabid foe of the museum. And he hated it even after it was gone and he had become master of the Morozov office. 

The displays remained in place until the end of February. The museum was officially closed but admitted "its own." The resolution on liquidation set extremely harsh terms. For turning over "the most valuable works" to the Museum of Fine Arts, the museum was given 15 days; to transfer the building and equipment to the Academy of Arts, it was given 10 days. Anything that the Moscow museum did not want might be given elsewhere. That the most "dangerous things" were not just to be scattered about the country but physically destroyed, nothing was said in the resolution. But the order, while unspoken, existed.8

Iosif Orbely, an Orientalist and director of the Hermitage, was the unintentional savior of the collection. More precisely, the savior was his wife, Antonina Izergina, who was the curator of French art for the Hermitage.  She prompted her husband to go immediately to Moscow and to take whatever he could. Legend has it that two Eastern graybeards, Orbely and Sergei Merkulov, the director of the State Museum of Fine Arts (the latter a sculptor and the creator of the granite Dostoevsky and Timiryazev as well as giant statues of "the leaders of the people"), took up positions in the White Hall of the museum on Volkhonka and began a division on the basis of "one for you, one for me." Orbely took everything that the frightened Muscovites refused: the huge Matisses, the rolled-up panels by Maurice Denis, the cubist canvases of Picasso, the primitive paintings of Derain.

When in January 1949 the Academy of Sciences called for struggle against "cosmopolitanism" and "bowing down before the West" and stood up for Russian priorities in science, the principal home of "formalism" no longer existed. In December 1953 the Museum of Fine Arts finally risked hanging its impressionist paintings. But it was still too dangerous to make known who had brought them to Russian and when. Within a few years, "M" and "Shch" would be utterly forgotten.

AFTERWORD

1936

Jan. 12. Sergei Shchukin died at the age of 82 in Paris.

Jan. 28. Pravda published an article headlined "A Mess Instead of Music." It was the start of the struggle against formalism. Attacks on the State Museum of New Western Art were stepped up. Impressionism was declared formalist.

1938

Jan. 1. Boris Ternovets is dismissed as director of the State Museum of New Western Art after 15 years in that post.

1944

The collection returned to the museum from evacuation. It was temporarily put into the custody of the Museum of Eastern Culture, where it remained unpacked.

1947

Aug. 5. The All-Russia Academy of Arts is reorganized as the USSR Academy of Arts. Its first president, the artist A. M. Gerasimov, suggested that it be given the State Museum of New Western Art building for its headquarters.

1948

Late January. The staff of the State Museum of New Western Art is given one day "to display" its holdings for the inspection of a commission headed by K. Ye. Voroshilov, the vice-chairman of the Council of Ministers.

March 6. Decree of the USSR Council of Ministers liquidating the State Museum of New Western Art is issued. A liquidation commission was formed. The collection was divided between the State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts and the State Hermitage.

1949

Jan. 5. The Academy of Sciences, meeting in Leningrad, called for struggle against "bowing down to the West" and for the affirmation of Russian priorities in science.

1953

December. The State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts opened a new exhibition. It included for the first time the display of impressionist works -- by Renoir, Monet and Degas.

1956

May. The State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts opened an exhibit of French art from David to Cezanne on loan from French museums. More than 200,000 visitors toured the exhibit. In the autumn, the Pushkin museum held a show of works by Pablo Picasso, and the Hermitage a show of Paul Cezanne.

EPILOGUE

Ivan Morozov's last interview ended on a surprisingly optimistic note. Felix Feneon had suggested that the collector take up painting again. He had so much free time!

"I know painting too well to dare to do it myself. But I will, in any case, consider your suggestion," Morozov answered. Smiling ironically, he asked . . . for the address of an art store.

"Morozov . . . long and analytically looked for that in a new artist that only he could see, then, finally, he made his choice and, in so doing, always added his golden 'improvement.' "

This man who needed a footnote "moved in silence, just as Shchukin went surrounded by noise. Serov's 'fashionable deputy,' so graceful and polished, invisibly surrounded by whisperers and advisers, would appear as his own large, rumpled self at exhibitions, distinctive, unexpected and never on the day of the gala opening. His would be a weekday stroll through empty rooms. He would be greeted by the house and left to himself. He would make his inspection, I would say, 'zigzag fashion,' without apparent order or system: not along the walls, not along the enfilade -- he would approach -- move off -- in various corners -- he would return -- then wander into a new corner. . . ."

Thus, Abram Efros ended his essay on Ivan Abramovich Morozov.