The publishing house “Trilistnik” has issued a book titled “The Life and Collection of Sergei Ivanovich Shukin”. There’s a catalog of Shukin’s collection attached. It’s just amazing to look through it. I’ve known before that all the impressionists and postimpressionists in our museums could be looked at by courtesy of Shukin and Morozov. But knowing it is one thing, realizing is another. Realizing that those classic works by Renoir, Mane, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Sezanne, Matisse, and Picasso kept in the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts and the Hermitage had been originally part of Shukin’s collection, the one which seemed sheer lunacy to the contemporaries. A scandal related to a lawsuit filed by Shukin’s grandson, Andre-Marc Deloque-Furcau who wanted to receive compensation for a nationalized inheritance, has sparked up interest toward the collector this summer. Olga Kabanova, the columnist with Izvestia, began conversing with Natalia Semenova, the book’s author, by asking her about the latest developments:
Q: You’re on friendly terms with Deloque-Furcau, he wrote a foreword to your book. Does he realize that his attempts to return his granddad’s collection are in vain?
A: You know, we used to think of collectors as some dukes of the Renaissance, it looked so faraway. No that I’ve acquainted with them, it’s easier to understand Shukin’s life. It rings a bell to me when somebody recollects that Sergei Ivanovich never spent assets on paintings, only profit. Just like today, when you ask a sponsor for some money and he says that he’s got no money, every penny is in business. I can imagine Shukin visiting Matisse, who’s out of money, they sit at a restaurant bargaining. And then Matisse buys himself an estate for money he got from Shukin. These days people look at issues related to inheritance in a different way. You see a person gathering a collection. His children might never own it. Andre-Marc is a man of Western culture, he sticks to different principles. He believes that one should get compensation for confiscation.
Q: But that’s impossible.
A: When I tell him that the right of succession has been canceled in this country, he replies that the Western law implies compensation. He’s certainly not planning to get the collection back, where on earth he’s going to hang a painting with an insured value of $1 million, all the paintings of the collection are like that. Besides, he became aware of his granddad’s collection worth of estimated $3 billion only after turning 50. The world’s largest museums are waiting in line to show it off. You’d better bear in mind that all the Shukins are unusual people. It was not for nothing that Sergei Ivanovish provided funds for a mental clinic.
A: Why did he do that?
Q: Two of his sons took their own lives. By and large, there were always sick people in a third generation of all well-known merchants. A number of reasons: many a marriages were made amidst the relatives, secondly, almost everybody in a second generation survived syphilis. I stress that all the Shukins were extraordinary people. Andre-Marc is a talented man too. But when we first met in 1991, he knew nothing about the value of his grandfather’s collection. And his bourgeois family never viewed Picasso and Matisse as real painters. Plus his self-esteem has been hurt. Nobody has ever invited him to attend an exhibition. Had some curtsies been made to him, as a heir, we would probably have seen no claims whatsoever.
Q: Sergei Ivanovich Shukin is a mystery man. Tretyakov was collecting paintings by Russian painters, who were considered progressive back then. And Shukin was after the French, such as Matisse, totally unknown in his homeland at the time.
A: He had no interest in painting until he turned forty. Two of his brothers were the collectors. Fedor Ivanovich gathered a museum, now it makes almost a half of the exhibits of the State History Museum. And Dmitry Ivanovich quit business altogether, became a rentier and collected his Dutchmen. Sergei Ivanovich was a sickly child, he had a terrible stutter, could hardly say a word. He was raised at home with his sisters till he reached 18, his family believed he was a useless waste of space. Then he was treated in Germany, it helped, but he never got rid of his stutter. Many believe that collecting makes up for some inner flaw. It certainly looks a true story in the case of Shukin. He settled down in business first, then he started collecting. His younger brother Ivan lived in Paris. He was a rentier and a playboy, hanging out with Rodin. Ivan was an inspiration to Sergei in collecting. Ivan made his elder brother part of his circle and Sergei got infatuated with painting.
Q: But why did he take his chances on buying the unrecognized ones?
A: Now when I see today’s collectors I can understand how they feel if they happen to discover a new talent. Back then the prices were pretty small. And all the Shukins had a special ‘knack’. Sergei Ivanovich began by collecting the impressionists and did so for three years. It’s understandable. Serov and Korovin painted more or less in the same style in Russia. Then he learned about Gauguin, Cezanne, Van Gogh. Thrice a year, when money was in hand, he would set off to Paris for shopping. First he used the art dealers, later he cut the deals by himself. The breakthrough took place in 1905, when he met Matisse. He selected one of the painter’s works, a still life, and promised to buy it within two weeks if he came to like it. Since then he enjoyed a special kind of relationship with the painter. He paid up-front for unfinished paintings. By his request, Matisse painted ‘The Dance’ in 1909, the critics laid into the work unanimously, and Shukin nearly backed down. His wife passed away two years before, and he began buying more than usual: Gauguin, Cezanne, Braque, even Picasso. He never spoke about the impressionists, but he had to make lengthy comments on Matisse and Picasso.
Q: Why did he have to?
A: Because he had to explain to the public that the painters weren’t charlatans. Unlike Morozov, he didn’t mind visitors taking a look around his gallery. Most of them just went crazy at the things they saw there. Shukin was lecturing them, thrusting his opinions on them. Somebody talked him into buying a painting by Picasso, for peanuts. He hung ‘Girl with a Fan’ in his lobby. He was staring at it continually for a few months, and little by little the painting began to get a hold of him. Eventually he realized that he couldn’t live without it. He said that he can feel the glass splinters in his mouth when watching a Picasso. Other paintings looked dull and miserable to him after that. ‘Picasso put a spell on me, it was like hypnosis or mania,’ wrote he in his diary. Over the period of four years, he purchased 51 paintings by Picasso, 16 paintings by Derin and by Henry Russo, nobody was buying Russo at that time. It looked like love – he’d fall for an artist, he’d buy some works, and then he’d move on, never looking back at his past attachments. At some stage Shukin began running ahead of his time, he was buying things that would get the recognition in the distant future.
Q: Why did he bequeath his collection to the Tretyakov Picture Gallery?
A: Because neither his wife nor his children wanted to have it. He prepared his will right after the death of his first wife, bequeathing the entire collection to the Tretyakov Picture Gallery. People at the Tretyakov got petrified after learning about his acquisition of Matisse’s ‘The Dance’ and ‘Music’. He then okayed to keep them outside the Gallery.
Q: So the collectors were a second generation of those who made big money?
A: That’s correct. They were the children of those who began making money even before the reforms. The father of Sergei Ivanovich was a typical product of his time who fell asleep in an opera-house. Sergei Ivanovich was a very efficient businessman, some people even called him a minister of commerce. He bought a number of textile factories really cheap in 1905, and he made the prices skyrocket when the troubled time were over. He tried to pull the same trick during the WWI, but lost money as a result.
Q: Was he living in an opulent style?
A: A hundred years ago ‘New Russians’ wanted to try anything once. But Sergei Ivanovich never sent his shirts to London for washing, unlike one of the Morozovs. He never demanded to clear out everybody from his floor in a hotel, unlike the other one of the Morozovs. And he never set up the open-air cages with leopards, unlike Ryabushinsky.
Q: Shukin left Russia shortly after the revolution. Did he have any plans for taking the collection along?
A: He was a perspicacious man. He could feel that something wrong was going on. He wanted to move abroad and live near the Lake of Geneva. But his second wife said that she couldn’t do without Russia, so they stayed in. Soon after the coup d’etat he tried to save the collection and move it to the Museum of Fine Arts, but a central heating was shut off there. He even tried to relocate it to the Kremlin. They were fortunate to have left Russia a few days prior to the onset of Red Terror. They went to Germany using fake documents. His little daughter, dressed in a shabby dress, was holding to a doll called ‘Tamara’. Diamonds were hidden inside the doll. After moving around Europe for awhile, they finally settled down in France. The Russian industrialists were the patriots and kept their money with the Russian banks. But Shukin must have kept a hefty sum of money in Stockholm. His big family was living on that money for thirty years. They had a nice apartment. Free meals were served to the impoverished compatriots who gathered in the apartment on Sundays. But Shukin didn’t give money away to anybody. Legend has it that Nabokov asked for some money was given none.
Q: Did he feel nostalgic for Russia?
A: His daughter told me that she didn’t understand the meaning of that word. Sergei Ivanovich faded to black quickly in exile. He died in 1938, living the last twenty years of his life by inertia. He knew what was happening to his collection in Russia, changed his mind with respect to his debt to the motherland, wrote a new will in 1926, bequeathing everything to his children. Alexander Benua wrote in an obituary that Shukin’s life was an ordeal. His was collecting as of overcoming himself.
Q: And now his ordeal has been finally appreciated by the motherland.
A: Now it has. Shortly after the nationalization, the First Museum of Western Art (formerly known as Shukin’s) and the Second Museum of Western Art (ex-Morozov’s) were set up. They became one State Museum of New Western Art in 1928. It was disbanded by Stalin’s orders in 1948. Those days Gerasimov wrote that he’d kill anybody who’d show a Picasso. The collection was split between the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts and the Hermitage. The directors of those museums, Merkulov and Arbeli, were dividing the paintings between themselves, one by one. Arbeli’s wife was in the French painting, she put pressure on her hubby, so the Hermitage got the largest pictures – ‘Music’ and ‘The Dance’, all the Picassos of the cubist period. The Pushkin Museum got the most conservative paintings. When Alexandra Andreevna Demskaya was commissioned to write a history of the Pushkin Museum in the mid-50s, she couldn’t find a single document on Shukin. When I placed a request for writing a book about him for the first time in 1985 it was still forbidden territory, juts like the Stalinist purges. Officially, we had only one collector, Pavel Ivanovich Tretyakov, plus Bakhrushin, to some extent. Any other names didn’t fit in the picture.
