By PHK
As I indicated in an earlier post, the World Affairs Forum held “A Window on Russia,” a day long conference on March 20, 2006 for Forum members and guests in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The two session event featured a morning on Russian politics, economics and U.S.-Russian relations and an afternoon on Russian art and architecture. It was held in cooperation with the Santa Fe Institute. CKR, PLS, and I were among those who helped make the conference work – and it worked very well.
The presentations were so content rich, well delivered and relevant to helping Americans understand the complexities of today’s Russia that with the speakers’ permission and help, we are sharing their written remarks – or excerpts from them - with a wider audience on WhirledView.
Our special thanks to Dr. James L. West, Professor of Humanities, Middlebury College, Middlebury, Vermont and Randall R. LeCocq for their terrific presentations. Randall LeCocq’s speech “Russia under Putin” on Russian politics, economics and U.S.-Russian relations was posted in April; Jay West’s speech follows below.
We thank both Jay and Randy once again for their willingness to answer numerous questions and respond to a raft of comments. Much appreciation also to the Santa Fe Institute for making it possible for us to hold “A Window on Russia” on its premises – and for its staff's wonderful logistical and tech support.
Dr. West has focused his lengthy teaching career – first at Connecticut’s Trinity College then at Middlebury – on the interplay of history and culture particularly that of Russia, Eastern Europe and Germany. His most recent book Merchant Moscow: Images of Russia’s Vanished Bourgeoisie was published by Princeton University Press in 1997. A Russian edition is now in preparation as he describes below in his speech. 
Here follows the text of a major portion of James West’s speech in Santa Fe on March 20. It is entitled “Old Moscow Merchants and New York Modernism."
(begin text)
For most of my career, I have studied the history of the pre-revolutionary merchants and entrepreneurs of Moscow. For much of this time, the pursuit has been like researching a vanished civilization. Soviet historians did their best to erase these "enemies of the people" from the historical record, and archives were relatively closed. It has only been over the last decade or so, as Russia once again began to grope its way toward an entrepreneurial market economy that these obstacles to research have been lowered, and the relevance of this kind of study has become once again clear.
In the book Merchant Moscow: Images of Russia's Vanished Bourgeoisie, my Russian and American collaborators sought to reconstruct the world of the Moscow merchants through newly available archival photographs. The genesis of this project was a modest photo exposition mounted in a small church near the Kremlin in 1991. Crowds of Muscovites came to view the small display of images of a lost and long forbidden world. I went with a Russian colleague, and we asked the curator what would be done with the photos once the exhibit was over. He told us they had no funding, and that the photos would just be taken down. My colleague and I vowed that day to do something more with the small treasure we were seeing.
The images you will see today are the results of that decision. We assembled a group of Russian and American historians, and asked them to write their narratives using the photographic evidence we could supply them with. Together we explored the hidden world of early capitalism in Russia: merchant business practices, the architecture of the homes and businesses of the new elite, their commercial art and advertising, their clothing styles, their leisure-time activities, 
their religious faiths. All of this research was being done precisely at the time when the "New Russians" were emerging to change the face of Moscow and Russia, and our modest work in chronicling the history of the predecessors of the new Russian entrepreneurs began to draw attention in Russia. The American edition of our book was published six years ago, but a new, more lavish translation is presently being prepared for publication in Russia.
Among the leisure activities the Merchants indulged in during their brief period of prosperity from about 1905 to 1917 was art collecting. For my talk today, I want to explore an avenue of this subject which was not covered in our collective study: the way in which the merchants of Moscow influenced the canons of art history that we still observe today.
From the several dozen families who rose to prominence in Russia's first capitalist age several emerged as avid art collectors. Among them were the Tretiakovs, the Shchukins and the Morozovs. The pioneer collector among these families was textile merchant Pavel Tretiakov. As early as the 1880s he began to purchase the subversive works of the Russian Realists, such as Ilya Repin and Ivan Surikov, with their dark and gritty depictions of peasant life and the historic suffering of the common people under the oppressions of the tsars in centuries past. By shielding the young realists from state censorship and perhaps worse, Tretiakov almost single-handedly sponsored the creation of the first truly Russian national school of art. In 1894, he gave his collection to the people of Moscow, and the Treitakov Gallery in Moscow still houses the premier collection of Russian National art. 
The next generation of merchant collectors proved more audacious still. In the early years of the twentieth century, Ivan Shchukin and Pavel Morozov 
vied to amass the most impressive collections of the most advanced western art. 
Where European middle-class collectors tended to favor classicist styles of art, imitating the artistic precepts of the aristocratic elites, their Russian counterparts were determined to pursue new forms of artistic expression, perhaps to distinguish themselves from the classicist tastes of the aristocracy they despised and the tsarist regime they hoped to supplant. Thus in the years just prior to the First World War, when the Modernist style was being incubated in the ateliers of artistic Paris, these intrepid Russians made the rounds each year, purchasing the work of impoverished and as yet unrecognized artists like Matisse and Picasso. Their only competition at the time were a few American buyers, most prominent among them Gertrude Stein.
In her 1983 study of the Moscow merchant collectors, French Painters, Russian Collectors, art historian Beverly Whitney Kean explored the inventory of the Morozov and Shchukin collections. Morozov favored the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, purchasing two works by Degas, six by Renoir, five by Monet, eleven by Gauguin, eighteen by Cezanne and five by Van Gogh.
Shchukin vied to outdo his rival, amassing 362 Modernist works. He matched Morozov by purchasing five Degas, three Renoirs, thirteen Monets, thirteen Gauguins, and eight Cezannes, but he focused on the more contemporary, as yet unrecognized Matisse and Picasso. Shchukin broke the bank by buying forty-three works by Matisse, and fifty by Picasso. 
And he not only purchased paintings, he commissioned them. In 1909 he asked Matisse to paint a picture on the theme of "dance" for the stairway of his Moscow mansion. 
The next year, he ordered a companion piece on the theme of "music." Thus one of the greatest Modernist paintings, The Dance, was born as a decorative panel for a Moscow merchant's stairway wall.
In time, the two collections even began to "talk" to one another. If Shchukin had The Dance, Morozov purchased Still Life with the Dance, in which his competitor's painting was depicted in the artist's studio behind a bouquet of flowers. Other paintings echoed one another as well. These men were clearly immensely proud of their collections. The most famous painting of Ivan Morozov, by Valentin Serov, depicts him sitting in front of one of his favorite works, Matisse's Fruit and Bronze. It is probable that these Moscow collectors were the primary patrons of the struggling Modernists when European buyers were still wary of the new abstract style. At some point there may have been more Picassos in Moscow than in the artist's Paris studio. Shchukin passed up the opportunity to definitively make art history: he declined to purchase Picasso's recent artistic experiment, entitled Demoiselles d'Avignon.
In the end, history was not kind to the Moscow Maecenases[1] and their capitalist peers. With the Bolshevik Revolution, the world of the Moscow merchants was destroyed and systematically erased from history. The merchants were harassed and often arrested, and the lucky ones escaped abroad or were deported. The art collections of which they were so proud were nationalized in 1918, and became the foundation of the most famous Modernist holdings in the world, those of The Pushkin Gallery in Moscow and of The Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. 
After decades of silence as to the true provenance of these collections, Russian curators have recently added a seemingly ubiquitous attribution below many of their most prized holdings: "Kollektsia Ivana Morozova," "Kollektsia Sergeia Shchukina."
Reading over the inventories complied by Beverly Whitney Kean, it occurred to me that as a freshman student of art history at college a generation ago, I had been asked to write essays on a surprising number of the paintings found in these two collections. Why was it that Matisse's Harmony in Red,
Van Gogh's Night Café, and Cezanne's Self-Portrait, each of which I had been asked to analyze, were all once in the same private collections on the far frontiers of Europe?
Perhaps it was that the merchants I study were remarkably prescient in gauging what was "good" art. Or perhaps they were just lucky. Or maybe their collective act of removing these works from European art markets, and the subsequent seizure by the Bolsheviks and the later sequestering of these paintings during the Stalinist era, made them famous when they reemerged in the great Soviet collections in the 1950s and 1960s. I ask these questions as a layman, as a social, not an art historian. Whatever the answer specialists in art history can give, it seems clear to me that by their selections, their purchasing decisions, and their display of these works, the Moscow merchants of that distant time had something to do with shaping our contemporary perceptions of what modern art is.
There was a recent echo of the long-lost world of my merchant-collectors in The New York Times. When the Museum of Modern Art reopened in 2005 in its reconstructed building, some members of New York's artistic public were puzzled why the museum's version of Matisse's The Dance, one of the most famous paintings in the collection, was rehung in an out-of-the way corner of the museum. Indeed, I myself found the painting difficult to locate. But when I finally found it, I understood that the curators of the MOMA knew the painting's history well, and had made the decision to position it precisely where Ivan Shchukin originally commissioned his version of The Dance to hang: in the stairway! 
1. Maecenas – Roman patron of the arts.
Photo identification: 1. James West - photo by Patricia Lee Sharpe, March 20, 2006; 2. Book cover of Merchant Moscow: Images of Russia's Vanished Bourgeoisie; 3. Anna Organova Buryshkina in the aeroplane; 4. AArseny Abramovich Morozov and his wife Vera Sergeevna; 5. Children of Mikhail Vasilevich Sabashnikov, Textile Merchant, May 1902; 6. The Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow photo by James West; 7. Sergey Ivanovich Shchukin; 8. Ivan Abramovich Morozov; 9. Sergei Shchukin's "Picasso Room;" 10. Matisse's The Dance (1909), Shchukin collection; 11. The Hermitage, St. Petersburg - photo by James West; 12. Matisse's Harmony in Red (1908) Shchukin collection; 13. Matisse's The Dance (over the MOMA stairway.)