In 2016, Bernard Arnault, the billionaire chairman of LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton SE, traveled with his adviser Jean-Paul Claverie to Moscow to personally thank Russian President Vladimir Putin for loaning art to Arnault’s Paris museum, the Fondation Louis Vuitton.

“Because it’s a gift to France,” says Claverie, speaking in his book-strewn office at LVMH’s Paris offices. “Not just to France, to Europe and our world.”

It wasn’t just any art that Putin had allowed to leave the country. It was a profusion of masterpieces by Monet, Matisse, Picasso, Gauguin, Cézanne, and others, totaling 130 artworks, all of which had been assembled by the industrialist Sergei Shchukin at the turn of the 20th century.

But Claverie and Arnault weren’t just there to thank Putin. They also came with a request.

“We said, ‘Mr. President, thank you for the Shchukin collection, we have it in Paris now. You have another collection. If you make up your mind right now, if you say yes, we will make another exhibition,’” Claverie recalls.

The collection in question was assembled by Ivan Morozov and his brother Mikhail, two wealthy Russian textile merchants who, like Shchukin, collected hundreds of impressionist and modern works of art at the turn of the 20th century. Like the Shchukin collection, most of the Morozov brothers’ artworks were nationalized after the 1917 revolution, then absorbed primarily into the collections of the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow, and the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow.

Putin, in Claverie’s telling, briefly considered the request, “and then said, ‘Jean-Paul? Yes.’”

Overjoyed, Claverie got on the phone with his counterparts at the Russian museums. “I said, ‘Your president has decided to let us bring the Morozov collection to Paris, so now we have to start working on it.’”

Now, after four years and one pandemic, the collection will finally open to visitors starting on Sept. 22 through Feb. 22, 2022.

What It Took
A lot had to be accomplished in the interim. Because many of the artworks were in bad condition—they’d undergone decades of neglect under Stalin—the only way Shchukin’s collection could leave Russia was by first establishing a conservation/restoration lab at the Pushkin Museum, for which LVMH paid an undisclosed sum.

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