The Morozov works got the same treatment. “Without this collaboration and huge program of restoration, it was impossible to organize the exhibition,” Claverie says, given the works were too fragile to be shipped out of the country. LVMH also paid to create museum-quality security glass, which was clear enough to see the paintings but light-safe enough to protect the art, that fit into the artworks’ frames.
When pressed further, Claverie declines to discuss how much all of these efforts cost. “I never mention figures,” he says. “We spend our life in this company talking about stocks and income. When we bought Tiffany, everyone knew how much we paid. So let us just dream, without any figures, in the artistic field.”
Still, he’s willing to acknowledge that “it’s obvious that it cost a lot because of insurance and shipping and restoration.” (The cost, certainly, ran into the millions of euros.)
But, he concludes, “for us, what is important is the attendance numbers. For Shchukin we had 1.3 million visitors, that’s enormous. And we hope, despite the pandemic, that we will reach the same level with the Morozov exhibition. We will see.”
What’s Inside
Given the scope, breadth, and quality of the 200 works on offer, Claverie shouldn’t be too worried.
The collection is spread across every floor of the foundation’s Frank Gehry-designed building, with rooms organized thematically. Starting on the museum’s bottom floor is a room dedicated to paintings the Morozovs owned of their family and friends. Included is Valentin Serov’s striking 1901 portrait of Mikhail’s son Mika, which normally hangs in the Tretyakov Gallery.
That same floor includes a room devoted to a massive triptych that Ivan commissioned from Pierre Bonnard in 1911, The Mediterranean, which he then installed as a kind of trompe l’oeil vista behind three columns, overlooking his Moscow mansion’s staircase. The bright, breezy paintings are more than 13 feet high, and depict a park in St-Tropez. In many respects they could be considered a template for the paintings Ivan collected: The colors are vivid— almost neon, really—and the subject matter is whimsical, easy, and fun.
The next room, devoted to landscapes, is a continuation of the theme. Among the more than 20 paintings are two very large oils by Monet (each more than 6 feet across). Painted in Montgeron, a suburb of Paris, in 1876, both images are of an almost absurdly high quality, atmospheric and shimmering with heavily layered brushstrokes.
The exhibition only gets better as the floors progress. There’s a room with superb Cézanne landscapes; another is devoted mostly to Gauguin. There’s an otherworldly Picasso from 1905, Acrobat With a Ball, which is stylistically similar and painted nearly contemporaneously with his Boy Leading a Horse (1905-1906), one of the jewels of the MoMA’s collection in New York.
The show’s curator, Anne Baldassari, has wisely given the collection’s best paintings space to breathe.