THE CZARS OF RUSSIAN ART : <i> Soviet Tycoons’ Collections on Display at County Museum </i>

One of the supreme ironies of the art world is that the nation most hostile to modern art owns so much of the best of it, as the County Museum of Art’s current blockbuster, “Impressionist to Early Modern Paintings From the U.S.S.R.,” reminds us.

Why does a country whose official taste runs to bronze busts of Lenin and paintings of heroic workers have such a fabulous collection of Western modern art? A great cache of Russian Avant-Garde work languishes in Soviet cellars because it was made in Russia and bottled up by a repressive government. But what about all those shimmering Impressionist landscapes, Fauvist scenes and Cubist still lifes painted in France by the likes of Monet, Matisse, Cezanne and Picasso?

The answer lies in a highly improbable story about a pair of Russian merchants. Not czars, mind you, nor even minor aristocrats, but plain old, filthy rich businessmen who bought the best examples of the most radical art of their time and took it home to a country whose citizenry hated the stuff.

Sergei Ivanovich Shchukin (1854-1936) and Ivan Abramovich Morosov (1871-1921), both Moscow textile merchants, are double-handedly responsible for the Soviet Union’s unequalled riches in French Impressionist and early Modern French painting done before 1914. Before World War I and the October Revolution put a terminal squeeze on their acquisitive mania, the two industrial tycoons made regular train trips to Paris, returning with paintings that scandalized their friends and business associates but fascinated Russia’s most adventurous artists and left a permanent stamp on their work.

By any account, Shchukin and Morosov were an unlikely pair with impeccable timing. Though they were buying provocative French art at about the same time as Gertrude and Leo Stein, the Russians had far greater resources and little competition--least of all from the French. Writing about Matisse in La Chronique des Arts in 1910, J.F. Schnerb said, “We are happy to note that his disciples and active admirers include no one but Russians, Poles and Americans.”

Like other Russians of considerable means who became voracious collectors at the turn of the century, Shchukin and Morosov followed an aristocratic lead. Peter the Great had dragged his backward country into contact with Western culture in the 17th Century and Catherine the Great had made collecting art fashionable in the 18th Century while founding the Hermitage. In subsequent years, as the aristocracy became more ineffectual and serfs begat merchant sons who built private empires, the middle class adopted royal habits. Most of the bourgeois accumulations were of little lasting interest, but a few left a legacy that now draws legions of art lovers to Soviet museums.

Morosov and Shchukin--along with Pavel Tretyakov (whose collection of Russian art remains in a separate museum in Moscow)--were among “the Russian Fricks, Carnegies, Harrimans and Rockefellers of their time,” according to Beverly Whitney Kean’s engrossing study, “All the Empty Palaces: The Merchant Patrons of Modern Art in Pre-Revolutionary Russia” (Universe Books, 1983). Like American counterparts, the Russian industrialists had distinctive personalities that shine through their collections.

Shchukin was by far the more adventurous and flamboyant. Among the first to recognize Picasso and Matisse, he bought 50 Picassos and 37 Matisses, including large commissioned panels of “Dance” and “Music”--two landmark pieces of modern art that now hang in the Hermitage. A frequent visitor to Parisian galleries and artists’ studios, he also scooped up 8 Cezannes, 13 Monets, 16 Gauguins, 5 Degases, 6 Renoirs, 7 Rousseaus and 16 Derains.

Fernande Olivier, Picasso’s mistress, uncharitably described Shchukin as “a little man with a big head and a rather porcine face. Afflicted with a horrible stuttering, he had the greatest difficulty expressing himself and this embarrassed him and shrank his physical appearance still further.” Flattering photographs of Shchukin bear out none of this, though other chroniclers confirm that he had a large head and say that his socks didn’t always match.

Small, sickly as a child and afflicted with a speech impediment, Sergei was the least likely of his father’s six sons to take over the family textile business, but that’s exactly what he did. First kept at home with his five sisters, he bullied himself into being sent away to a boarding school and eventually earned a reputation as a “porcupine” among his business peers. His shrewdest move was to corner the textiles market during an uprising in Moscow in 1905. When the dust settled, he reaped the harvest of sky-high prices.

Shchukin’s fortune in business was tainted by personal tragedy. Within three years (1905-1908), his wife died of “a woman’s disease” and, in separate incidents, two of his sons and one brother committed suicide. Shchukin had already begun collecting art--buying his first Monet in 1897--but his stepped-up activity in 1908 certainly filled part of the gap left by his loss of family.

He would wrestle with himself and worry over each new work, but he bought feverishly and took his treasures back to his house in Moscow--the former Trubetskoy Palace--which became the site of grand soirees, elegant concerts and controversial open houses on Sunday mornings. During her recent visit here, Pushkin curator Xenia Egorova insisted that the “palace” is actually a rather modest two-story house, but photographs and written accounts portray it as splendid, if a rather peculiar mix of modern art and ornate architecture.

The walls were laden with paintings, hung salon style. Tiers of Gauguins lined the dining room. Matisse’s bold “Dance” and Music” panels were commissioned for the stairwell. Other Matisses hung in a grand salon and Picasso’s works filled a room of their own, where they excited no end of resistance from most of Shchukin’s visitors.

Alfred Barr, an expert on the period, wrote that Shchukin had good taste from the start and “bought very few bad pictures,” but the collector was known to vacillate. He got cold feet about hanging Matisse’s “Dance” and “Music” in his home (claiming the huge nudes were unsuitable for two adopted daughters). He eventually accepted them but not before dithering over a substitute,

returning the paintings to Paris and finally having a Russian artist touch up the flute player’s private parts in “Music.” Reportedly shocked at Picasso’s 1907 watershed painting, “Desmoiselles d’Avignon”--as were most of the artists’ colleagues--Shchukin lost no time snapping up equally bold paintings and became Picasso’s primary supporter while he made an unpopular move into Cubism.

No wonder the strange little man was revered by artists. When Matisse repainted “Harmony in Blue” after Shchukin bought it and presented the collector with “Harmony in Red,” Shchukin accepted the change without blinking. Now known as “The Red Room,” the vivid painting is the centerpiece of the current exhibition and a roundly welcomed last-minute addition. (Originally listed as part of the show, the painting was withdrawn because of a commitment to France, but negotiations finally delivered it to Los Angeles.)

Shchukin trusted his own instincts, buying impulsively and often directly from artists. The comparatively reserved and methodical Morosov tended to rely on the choices of dealers and artists. “When Morosov went to (Parisian dealer) Ambroise Vollard, he said: ‘I want to see a very beautiful Cezanne.’ Shchukin would ask to see all the Cezannes for sale so that he could make the proper choice,” Matisse wrote in “Ecrits et Propos sur l’Art.”

Morosov, who had a good eye but moved cautiously, continued a fine collection started by his brother, Mikhail, when he died in 1904. The middle son of a widowed mother who was left with three boys and a vast textile fortune, Ivan Morosov grew into a dark, corpulent, rather haughty man whom Matisse described as “a Russian colossus.”

Before the revolution stopped him, Morosov bought 6 Renoirs, 5 Sisleys, 11 Gauguins, 5 Van Goghs, 13 Bonnards, 10 Matisses, 3 Picassos, 5 Monets and--the pride of his collection--18 excellent Cezannes. He ultimately owned 350 paintings--250 French and 100 Russian--which he installed in exhibition rooms separate from living quarters in his 18th-Century mansion. Unlike Shchukin, who seemed to relish the commotion that accompanied public contact with his collection, Morosov never opened his house to the public until forced to do so by the government.

Morosov was 17 years younger than Shchukin and of a distinctly different temperament, but the two became friends through art and Shchukin introduced Morosov to Matisse and Picasso. Their forays into France came to a screeching halt in 1914 with Russia’s entry into World War I. Russia’s revolution in 1917 brought conspicuous merchants under searing scrutiny. Sensing the end of an era, Shchukin, who had remarried in 1915, spirited his wife and 2-year-old daughter to Germany in 1917. The belly of the little girl’s doll bulged with rubles; money stashed in European banks for buying paintings would allow them to live out their lives in comfort if not luxury.

Morosov’s hopes that the turbulence would end soon were dashed when anarchist hooligans briefly set up camp in his elegant dwelling and threatened his collection. In 1918 both his and Shchukin’s homes were turned into national museums and their owners were reduced to custodians living in servants’ quarters. Within a few months, the two men left the country--Shchukin surreptitiously, Morosov with permission. Neither would ever see his collection again.

Shchukin collected his wife and daughter in Germany and settled in Paris, where he died at 83. Though he had some contact with the artists he had supported, he felt awkward about not being able to buy their work and did not pursue their friendship. Still possessed by a collecting instinct, he admired Miro’s work and managed to buy four small paintings by Dufy.

Shchukin’s children have reported that he remained spirited--if proud and difficult--during his late years in Paris. Morosov was broken by his loss and died in 1921 in Germany, at 50.

Meanwhile, the two collections endured years of Marxist re-evaluation and bureaucratic reshuffling. Originally left intact as individual museums, the two holdings were combined in 1927-28 in a Morosov town house dubbed the Museum of Modern Western Art. By then Marxist philosophy had branded the art “decadent” and the artists hedonists or pathetic victims of capitalistic exploits.

When Stalin rose to power, modern art disappeared from view. Shchukin’s and Morosov’s collections were removed to safe storage at the beginning of World War II, but the museum was never reopened and it was abolished in 1948. The paintings, later divided between the Pushkin Museum in Moscow and the Hermitage in Leningrad, didn’t reappear until after Stalin’s death, in 1953. Then they began to be pulled out of storage and displayed a few at a time in obscure corners of the museums.

The collections’ first reintroduction to the West came when the Soviets agreed to loan 36 of Shchukin’s Picassos to an exhibition in Italy in 1953 and the following year in Paris. When they got to Paris, Shchukin’s daughter, Irina (the Countess de Keller), sued the Soviet Union for possession of the paintings. She lost the suit, but the show was abruptly closed and the art spirited back to the Soviet Union.

By that time, the Soviets understood that Westerners valued their state collections of modern art, but the fact that the art survived still seems some combination of a miracle and a fluke. That the despised paintings were preserved is probably due in part to the Soviet’s understanding that art could be a valuable commodity. Desperate for money in the 1920s and early ‘30s, the government cashed in some of its Old Masters. Among Soviet sales of art was $6.5 million worth of paintings bought in 1931 by Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon, who later founded the United States National Gallery in Washington. The Raphael, Botticelli, Titian, Veronese, Van Eyck, Velasquez, Rembrandt and Hals that you now see in the National Gallery with the rest of the Mellon collection once hung in the Hermitage.

Shchukin’s and Morosov’s paintings might have gone the same way, but the time wasn’t right. When some of the paintings were offered for sale, in 1932 and 1933, Western buyers weren’t astute enough to assess their full worth and the Soviets failed to arrange a sale of the modern works. The prices ($115,000 for a Cezanne) were considered too high and potential buyers were leery of the legalities of purchasing confiscated art. The Soviet Union was stuck with the world’s greatest collection of pre-1914 French Impressionist and early modern painting.