The art world’s collective wisdom

One of the great sights in the Museum of Modern Art’s new building, which opened in New York last month, is the cheeky installation of Henri Matisse’s 1909 mural “The Dance (I).” MoMA can claim the richest and most varied Matisse collection of any art museum in the world, and the French painter is one of two artists with an entire gallery in the new building devoted solely to his work. (Jackson Pollock is the other.) But you won’t find “The Dance (I)” in that room.

Instead, the painting is installed in the stairwell adjacent to the Matisse gallery. This is no insult. The painting looks wonderful there. Partly that’s because the staircase is itself exquisite. MoMA’s architect, Yoshio Taniguchi, has built a floating apparition of thick wood risers that appear suspended between glass panels trimmed with gleaming stainless steel handrails. His “abstraction of a staircase” creates a remarkable setting for Matisse’s abstraction of a pagan dance -- five joyfully naked maidens clasping hands in a ring, who seem to drift by in a miraculous visual levitation over a grassy green mound beneath a bright blue sky.

The other reason the painting looks wonderful there is that Matisse had a staircase installation in mind when he made it. In “The Great Private Collections of Imperial Russia” (Vendome Press: 256 pp., $65), Oleg Neverov tells in fascinating detail the story of how Moscow businessman Sergei Shchukin came to be Matisse’s greatest patron, buying or commissioning many of his most celebrated works, including both versions of “The Dance.”

Shchukin was one of four brothers whose father, Ivan, was a wealthy textile manufacturer and merchant and whose mother, Ekaterina, came from a highly cultured family. All four sons became enraptured with art -- and with the polite addiction known as art collecting.

Piotr Shchukin, the eldest, concentrated on Russian antiquities. He amassed a mansion full of religious artifacts, carpets, furniture, decorative objects, historical documents and, most important, painted, gilded and enameled icons. Younger brother Dmitry, their father’s favorite, went for European Old Masters, assembling a collection of 146 paintings by Dutch, German, French and Italian artists of the 14th through 18th centuries. Baby brother Ivan, who left Moscow for Paris in 1893, bought works by El Greco, Goya and other Spanish masters, whose paintings had been essential to the development of modern French art.

Sergei, though, occupies a special place in the annals of art collecting. Chiefly because of his perspicacious eye for new painting, the Pushkin Museum in Moscow and the Hermitage in St. Petersburg today have major holdings in Impressionist, Postimpressionist and early Modern art. Eight Cezannes, 16 Gauguins, 13 Monets and some of the toughest early Cubist paintings by Picasso, Braque and others filled his residence.

Then there is Matisse. Shchukin developed a close working relationship with the painter (Henri was the same age as Sergei’s little brother, Ivan), finally acquiring 38 paintings, many of them monumental. In March 1909, the Frenchman made a large oil sketch for a painting on the theme of dance, which he showed to Shchukin when the Russian visited Paris that month. The final painting of “The Dance” was intended to decorate a stairwell in Shchukin’s palatial home together with a picture of pagan musicians and another showing bathers by a river. Matisse oversaw the installation of what is known as “Dance (II)” there when it was completed two years later. It now hangs in the Hermitage, while MoMA’s version, “Dance (I),” is the full-size oil sketch.

The book shows the main salon in Shchukin’s house, a grand Rococo space with an enormous gilded chandelier; the dining room, which is more like a baronial hall; a sitting room with an elaborate parquet floor; and “the Picasso room,” a nod to the dozens of examples hanging there. These palatial spaces are no different from those in any Victorian mansion of the era: The paintings are installed frame to frame, from the chair rail all the way up to the ceiling, as was customary with Old Masters. Given our familiarity with the pristine white rooms and austere displays in modern museums, the Victorian style for hanging some of the most radical examples of avant-garde French art seems startling.

There is no photograph of “The Dance (II),” “Music” and “Bathers by a River” hanging in Shchukin’s stairwell. Still, the difference between the sumptuous Victorian setting of the rich businessman’s mansion and the sleek spatial abstraction of Taniguchi’s hypermodern staircase at the Museum of Modern Art is striking. It might suggest an implicit purpose for Nemerov’s book -- a purpose to be found somewhere between the art-minded business moguls of pre-Revolutionary Russia, like the Shchukin brothers, and today’s publicity-minded art museums, which thrive on cultural tourism.

In short, the book is a kind of plea by example. Moscow now is home to more billionaires than any other city on Earth. Obscene wealth has been consolidated in the hands of a new business elite as a result of the privatization of public companies after the collapse of the Soviet Union. “Great Private Collections of Imperial Russia” surveys the remarkable history of private art acquisition, beginning with Peter the Great and his inner circle in the early 18th century and ending abruptly at the Revolution.

“OK, rich guys,” the book tacitly declares to today’s Russian oligarchs. “Now it’s your turn to buy art and sustain your nation’s art museums.” Three introductory essays -- written by the distinguished director of the Hermitage, Mikhail Piotrovsky, and Prince Nicholas Romanov, together with the general editor, Emmanuel Ducamp -- couldn’t be more direct, with such titles as “Private Collections: The Origin of Museums,” “Family Collecting” and “Private Galleries as a Public Service.” The book’s closing section, “Merchant Princes of the Moscow Renaissance: 1850-1914,” is an unsubtle hint to today’s merchant princes.

As art museums expand and the auction market boils, the fascination with art collecting is marked by new biographies of legendary art dealers. In “Discovering Impressionism: The Life of Paul Durand-Ruel” (Vendome Press: 304 pp., $27.50), the life of one of the most influential salesmen of Modern art (Shchukin was a client) is charted by historian Pierre Assouline, who wrote the much-admired biography of Picasso’s dealer, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler. Meryle Secrest’s “Duveen: A Life in Art” (Alfred A. Knopf: 544 pp., $35) presents a welcome update of S.N. Behrman’s biography of “immortality merchant” Joseph Duveen. Hers is a boisterous chronicle of the man who used the declining fortunes of Britain’s upper classes to satisfy the aristocratic aspirations of America’s post-Gilded Age plutocracy by shipping European Old Masters by the boatload across the Atlantic.

Important, overdue biographies of major artists also deserve attention. They include Hunter Drohojowska-Philp’s clear-eyed analysis of the myth-laden life of Georgia O’Keeffe, “Full Bloom: The Art and Life of Georgia O’Keeffe” (W.W. Norton: 630 pp., $35) and the epic story of quintessential painter’s painter Willem de Kooning by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan, “De Kooning: An American Master” (Alfred A. Knopf: 734 pp., $35). Jeff Kelley’s illuminating history of the anti-art Happenings of Allan Kaprow, “Childsplay: The Art of Allan Kaprow” (UC Press: 270 pp., $45), is not a biography, but it does clarify essential features of the tumultuous period between the late 1950s and the 1970s, when our idea of what constitutes a work of art underwent a thorough overhaul.

Patterns of collecting, though, can also make for insightful social history. One of the most distinguished and timely publications in this regard is Oliver Watson’s sumptuous “Ceramics From Islamic Lands” (Thames & Hudson: 512 pp., $65), which catalogs an extraordinary private collection assembled in Kuwait. Sheik Nasser Sabah al Ahmad al Sabah has acquired a staggering array of refined pottery that spans 1,200 years of diversified production in the Middle East, especially Iran.

Watson, however, persuasively undermines established assumptions that Islamic pottery of quality is only a Persian affair and that Arab societies have no comparable art. Fashions in collecting often follow cultural prejudices, and objects can be assigned histories they don’t actually possess. Moorish pottery in Spain, for example, is sometimes traced to Iranian sources via fanciful, even tortured pathways, while a fascinating chapter on faking Islamic ceramics includes case histories that demonstrate how collectors can be duped. The book’s ravishing Iranian ceramics are abundant, but the exceptional examples of Egyptian, Syrian, Bamiyan and other Arab vessels in the wide-ranging Al Sabah collection offer a welcome and necessary corrective. *