The Morozov Collection

This landmark exhibition is the second in the Icons Of Modern Art series.

Organized by the Fondation Louis Vuitton in partnership with the State Hermitage Museum, the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts and the Tretyakov Gallery.

Opening September 22, 2021, the Fondation Louis Vuitton will present The Morozov Collection, one of the world’s foremost collections of Impressionist and Modern art.  On view through February 22, 2022, this major international exhibition will bring together in Paris 200 masterpieces from the French and Russian modern art collection of the brothers Mikhaïl and Ivan Morozov. This will be the first time the collection has traveled outside of Russia since its creation at the turn of the 20th century.
 
The landmark exhibition is the second in the Icons Of Modern Art series, organized by the Fondation Louis Vuitton in partnership with the State Hermitage Museum (Saint-Petersburg), the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts (Moscow) and the State Tretyakov Gallery (Moscow). It follows the Fondation Louis Vuitton’s influential Shchukin Collection exhibition (2016), which attracted 1.3 million visitors, and continues the Fondation’s series dedicated to prominent collectors and pioneering patrons of modern art, which has also included The Courtauld Collection, A Vision for Impressionism (2019).
 
Installed across all of the galleries in the Fondation Louis Vuitton’s iconic Frank Gehry building, The Morozov Collection will bring together a selection of works by renowned French artists including Manet, Rodin, Monet, Pissarro, Toulouse-Lautrec, Renoir, Sisley, Cézanne, Gaugin, Van Gogh, Bonnard, Denis, Maillol, Matisse, Marquet, Vlaminck, Derain and alongside Russian masters including Repin, Vrubel, Korovin, Golovin, Serov, Larionov, Goncharova, Malevich, Mashkov, Konchalovsky, Outkine, Saryan and Konenkov. Conceived by Anne Baldassari, the exhibition’s chief curator, The Morozov Collection will include astonishing discoveries and memorable moments, with a unique design that evokes historical references and highlights the timeless nature of works that exemplify the emerging artistic modernity of the late 19th- and early 20th centuries.
 
For the first and only time, the Music Room in Ivan Morozov’s Moscow mansion will be presented outside the State Hermitage Museum as part of a special exhibition design and installation that marks the ending of the presentation of the Morozov works. Consisting of a monumental decorative installation of seven panels commissioned by Ivan Morozov in 1907 from Maurice Denis on the subject of The Story of Psyche (1908–1909), and of four sculptures by Aristide Maillol, the Music Room will provide a rare window into the life of the prominent collector.
 
A 520-page scholarly catalogue, The Morozov Collection: Icons of Modern Art will be co-published by the Fondation Louis Vuitton and Les Éditions Gallimard. Based on Mikhaïl and Ivan Morozov’s extensive unpublished archives, which are preserved at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts and the Tretyakov Gallery, the publication will feature unpublished texts and documents that illustrate the Morozov family’s unique history.

The Morozov brothers
The brothers Mikhaïl Abramovich Morozov (1870–1903) and Ivan Abramovich Morozov (1871–1921) were arts patrons who dominated Moscow’s cultural life at the turn of the 20th century, in much the same way as the Tretyakovs, Mamontovs, Riabouchinskys and Shchukins did.  They stood out for their unconditional patronage of contemporary European and Russian art, which greatly contributed to enhancing the international reputation of modern French painters. 
 
On the advice of Paris’s leading art dealers—Paul Durand-Ruel, Ambroise Vollard, Georges Bernheim, Eugène Druet, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler—the Morozovs acquired more than 250 iconic paintings and sculptures by Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Renoir, Monet, Matisse, Marquet, Derain and Picasso, as well as monumental decorative works by Bonnard and Denis, and bronzes by Rodin, Claudel and Maillol.  They also committed to collecting contemporary Russian art by bringing together nearly 400 modern Russian paintings by artists of the Realist (Wanderers), Symbolist, Impressionist, and Post-Impressionist movements such as Vrubel, Korovin, Golovin, Serov, Outkine, as well as by Larionov, Mashkov, Konchalovsky, Saryan and Konenkov.    
 
Their collections, nationalized in 1918, allowed the creation of the world’s first museum of modern art: the State Museum of Modern Western Art / GMNZI, which opened in Ivan Morozov’s Moscow mansion in 1928.  From the 1930s to 1948, their collections were gradually spread out among Russian public institutions: the State Hermitage Museum, the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts and the Tretyakov Gallery.
 
Institutional partnership
The Fondation Louis Vuitton’s organization of the exceptional Icons of Modern Art exhibitions, dedicated to the Shchukin and Morozov collections, illustrates the lasting bonds of friendship and collaboration between French and Russian institutions.
 
The Morozov Collection exhibition marks a new milestone in the institutional partnership established by the Fondation Louis Vuitton with the State Hermitage Museum, the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts and the State Tretyakov Gallery.  It also features major loans from the State Russian Museum in Saint Petersburg, the National Art Museum of the Republic of Belarus (Minsk, Belarus), the Dnipropetrovsk Art Museum (Ukraine), the MAGMA Moscow, and the private collections in Moscow of Petr O. Aven and Vladimir and Ekaterina Semenikhine.
 
By extending its patronage to the State Hermitage Museum, LVMH was actively involved in the organisation of the Morozov exhibition that took place in June 2019 in Saint-Petersburg. LVMH has also given its full support to a legacy project led by the State Hermitage Museum, aimed at recreating within its permanent collections, the Music Room in Ivan Morozov’s mansion. These patronage projects demonstrate the dedication that the LVMH Group has shown for nearly 30 years to arts and culture in France and around the world (Europe, USA, China, Japan…).