Old Russian Merchants and New French Modernism

By James West, Guest Contributor

Dr. James L. West is Professor of Humanities, Middlebury College, Middlebury, Vermont.

Leave it to the Russians to confuse ancient tradition and avant-garde modernity in ways that leave westerners scratching their heads. Such hallucinogenic juxtapositions of old and new can easily be seen in the streets of contemporary Moscow, as ancient cathedrals long destroyed are resurrected alongside soaring twisting glass towers of the latest Deconstructive architectural design. The current show of Russian and French art at the Royal Academy in London calls to mind another time exactly a century ago when Russia’s mixture of ancient and contemporary nurtured the nascent Modernist movement in art and music. In the last years of Imperial Russia, Russian elites and Russian artists were able to draw out of Old Russian culture elements of astonishing modernity. In little-known ways, the Russians fueled and shaped the Modernist canon as we know it today.

Explosion of Russian cultural activity

In the first years of the twentieth century, Russia virtually exploded with cultural creativity. It could literally be said that Russian artists and musicians led the Modernist revolution before the First World War. Much of that experimentation consisted of reinterpretations of Old Russian Culture in modernist idiom. The brilliant abstract art of Vasilii Kandinsky was heavily influenced by medieval Russian icons, the brilliant original hues of which had only recently been discovered by a hapless chemist who spilled acid on a darkened icon and was the first since the Middle Ages to see it true colors. Kandinsky’s modernist canvases of the pre-war years are literally “abstract icons,” whose bright yellows, reds and greens were inspired by the vibrant tones of the Moscow, Novgorod and Tver Schools of medieval icon painting. In a similar way, the young Igor Stravinsky looked to Russian folk culture and peasant tales to inspire his modernist musical compositions for Diagilhiev’s Ballet Russe in Paris from 1908 until 1913. The ancient tale of the Firebird became the ballet of the same name, the traditional Russian Shrovetide carnival inspired Petroushka, and the breakthrough piece of modernist music, The Rite of Spring, was Stravinsky’s exploration of the most ancient time of all, the pre-Christian world of Kievan Rus.’ Likewise, Natalia Goncharova’s modernist-primitivist paintings of the same period were drawn from the folk tradition of the lubok, colorful wood-block prints which served as the art of
the peasantry at least from the time of Peter the Great.

The history of Modernist art has amply recorded these retro explorations by Russian modernist artists and composers. What is less known, however, is the way in which certain individual Russians influenced the creation of the Modernist canon in Europe.

In the years before the First World War, the Russian merchants Ivan Morozov and Vassili Shchukin stalked the studios of Paris buying modernist art from obscure and poverty-stricken painters like Picasso and Matisse, virtually keeping these struggling artists afloat in a market that disdained their work. The paintings they bought and shipped off to Moscow later became some of the most important on the century. The story of how these men got to Paris, and the role they played in shaping our contemporary understanding of Modernism, is another fascinating example of Russia’s ability to jostle tradition and modernity in surprising ways.

"Quieter than grass, lower than water"

Traditionally, Russian merchants were the most deferential and most despised of Russia’s elite groups. Shunned by aristocrats and peasants alike, the kuptsy remained “quieter than grass, lower than water.” Calamity followed upon unpopularity, as the old merchantry of Moscow was virtually destroyed by the great fire of 1812. From the ashes of that conflagration emerged the lowest of the low, itinerant peasant rag-pickers hawking their wares around the streets and bazaars of the reviving city. These industrious peasants were the founders of the Moscow textile dynasties, whose descendents three generations later emerged as the wealthiest and freest men ever to live in Russia until the New Russians a century later. Flush with resources and self-confidence, this new private elite set forth to do battle both with the tsarist government, whose repressive instincts feared all initiative from below, and with the aristocratic elites, whose taste and influence dominated Russian culture and politics.

Many activist merchants and industrialists were Old Believer descendants

Ironically, many of the activist merchants and industrialists of this period were of Old Believer origin, descendants of the schismatics who, in the seventeenth century, rejected reforms of the Orthodox Church under Patriarch Nikon, as well as the later westernization of Peter the Great. Through more than two centuries of persecution as heretics, the Old Believer peasants remained faithful to their Muscovite rituals, and consistently rejected innovation in either religious or secular life. In order to distinguish themselves from the “Nikonians” (Orthodox) majority, they followed the path of religious minorities elsewhere by cultivating the virtues of literacy, sobriety and enterprise.

Perhaps because of their “Protestant Ethic” ethos and practices, many of their number were included in those merchant elites who transformed the Russian economy with their entrepreneurship in the early nineteenth century. By the end of the century, many, like Ivan Morozov, had adopted a modern lifestyle without forsaking the faith of their ancestors. Thus it was representatives of families like the Riabushinskys, the Konovalovs, and the Morozovs who patronized the modernist artistic experimentation, while others struggled for the rule of law in Russia in order to put an end to the arbitrary power that had persecuted their ancestors. It was another ironic twist of old and new in Russia that this most traditionalistic group contributed to the modernization of Russia’s culture at the end of the tsarist era.

Merchant Moscow the only place in Europe where modernism was accepted - that, by the way, includes France

Morozov the Old Believer, and Shchukin the loyal Orthodox, became protean figures whose resources and restless search for self-identity fueled much of the artistic experimentation of Moscow Silver Age. Shunning the classicist aesthetic of the aristocracy they despised, they patronized modernist experimentation the theater, in literature and in the arts. The strange thing was that merchant Moscow was virtually the only place in Europe where modernism was accepted- European bourgeoisies, including the French, mimicked the classicist pretensions of their social superiors, and nymphs and satyrs dominated the art production of Europe right up until the First World War.

Enter Morozov and Shchukin, whose maverick tastes and limitless resources combined to keep modernism alive in Paris. Forming close relationships with Picasso and Matisse, the Russians not only bought paintings
that have now become world-famous, but in the case of Shchukin, actually commissioned iconic works such as Matisse’s The Dance and Music. These canvases were specifically ordered in 1909 and 1910 respectively to adorn the stairways of Shchukin’s palatial Moscow mansion. The spirit of this commission lives on today in the placement of The Dance in the back stairway of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Shchukin has the opportunity to purchase the founding work of modernist, Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon, but even he passed this up as too daring. But the next year, his daughter bought a study for that masterpiece.

By taking their treasures to Moscow, Morozov and Shchukin removed them from the art market, and from public view. The paintings, dozens of them, hung in their private homes until the Russian Revolution, after which they were seized by the Bolsheviks and repressed under Stalin. It was only in the late 1950s that these works resurfaced in the fabulous modernist collections of the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad and the Pushkin Gallery in Moscow. With their reappearance, several of these works entered the modernist canon as iconic works. Is it possible that Shchukin and Morozov were just lucky, or did they have an uncanny eye for greatness? Or did their act of physically sequestering these paintings far from Europe bestow upon them a special aura when they reappeared in later decades?

Dr. West's book Merchant Moscow: Images of Russia’s Vanished Bourgeoisie was published by Princeton University Press in 1997. WV review here.

Photo identifications and credits (top to bottom): 1) Vassily Kandinsky's, "The Last Judgment" (1910) by PH Kushlis, Maeght Foundation exhibit "Russia and the Avant Garde" 2003; 2) Natalia Goncharova's "Paysage Rayonniste (La Forêt)" (1913) by PHKushlis, Maeght Foundation exhibit 2003; 3) Old Believers Church in Northeast Estonia (July 2004); 4) Shukin's "Boyarina Morozova" Darthmouth collection; 5) Ivan Abramovich Morozov (from Merchant Moscow); 6) Sergey Ivanovich Schukin (from Merchant Moscow); 7) Matisse's "The Dance" hanging in the back stairway of the Museum of Modern Art, New York by PHKushlis April 2007.

Comments

[Courtenay Barnett]

It seems a truism to state that at times of social and political upheaval artistic expression tends to flourish - and - the Russian experience ( be it at the time of Peter the Great, or post Soviet Union collapse) bears this out.

[patricia kushlis]

Yes, true. But strangely it also can flourish underground as a form of protest under repressive regimes in times of stasis. I saw that in Moscow in the late 1970s particularly in literature and drama.