Treasures of modern art to be seen outside Russia for first time

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One of the world’s greatest private collections of modern art is to go on show for the first time outside Russia, museum curators have said.

The collection of more than 250 paintings put together by Sergei Shchukin before the Russian revolution will be displayed in its entirety in October at theFondation Louis Vuitton in Paris – a major coup for the newly opened gallery.

The super-rich collector filled his Moscow mansion with some of the finest French impressionist and post-impressionist art, making a kind of orthodox altar in one room with 16 of Gauguin’s Tahiti paintings.

But his hoard of 50 top-notch Picassos, 38 works by Matisse, 13 Monets, eight Cézannes and four Van Goghs that the textile merchant picked up on business trips to Paris, was seized after Russia’s October revolution in 1917.

Lenin himself signed the decree to expropriate the works, before Stalin scattered the collection to museums in Moscow and St Petersburg, condemning some of the greatest masterpieces of 20th-century art as “bourgeois and cosmopolitan”.

“This is a historic event which will have people coming from all over the world, something we are not likely to see again for a while,” Jean-Paul Claverie, an adviser to the luxury goods tycoon Bernard Arnault, told Agence France-Presse. Arnault opened the private Fondation Louis Vuitton at the end of 2014.

The paintings will go on display in the spectacular building designed by the architect Frank Gehry on 20 October, with the Icons of Modern Art show running until 20 January.

The show will also include 30 major pieces from the Russian avant-garde suprematist and constructivist movements, loaned by the Tretyakov State Gallery in Moscow and the Russian Museum in St Petersburg.

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