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Curating Russia:  

The Shchukin Collection, The Nation, and Border Crossing 

Across Regimes 
 

Leah Rasmussen1 

 University of Maryland, College Park 

 

 

 

 

Abstract 

Russia’s place in the world endured dramatic shocks over transitions between tsarist, Soviet, and 

post-Soviet regimes. Questions of identity and nation consumed cultural and political elites alike. 

Art plays a critical role within the state not only for its financial value, but also as a source of 

power. This article investigates how the Russian Federation employs this artistic cultural heritage 

through its use and displays of the collection of late tsarist Moscow merchant Sergei Shchukin. 

These holdings enable the Russian state and cultural leaders to participate in an increasingly 

globalized art world. Leading Western museums compete to exhibit Henri Matisse’s pivotal 

painting, Dance, commissioned by Shchukin and remaining in Russia throughout the tsarist and 

Soviet periods, ending up in the Hermitage Museum. Throughout Russian and Soviet history, 

Western European art has served as a cultural legitimizing force that ties both the country and its 

history to the artistic traditions of the West, which retains a dominant position in the global art 

world. 

 

  

 
1 Leah Rasmussen is a PhD student at the Department of History at the University of Maryland – College Park 

 



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Introduction 

Speaking to author Pavel Buryshkin from exile in Paris in the 1930s, Sergei Shchukin relayed “I 

have not been collecting only for myself and all for myself but also for my country and my nation. 

Whatever happens in our country, my collection should stay there…” (cited in Boguslavskij 1995, 

328). Nation has been invoked across Russian regimes as a critical concept in Russia’s self-identity 

and its global interactions with the West. In recent years, the cultural diplomatic efforts of the 

Russian Federation have increased, reflecting its desire to showcase its national patrimony and 

inclusion as a European state. This article traces Henri Matisse’s Dance, commissioned by 

Moscow merchant and art collector Sergei Shchukin in 1909. It highlights important themes in 

Russian art, culture, and transnational relations to understand how the art of one nation can become 

central to the national patrimony of another.  
 

The arrival of Matisse’s canvas in Moscow, with its bright, illuminated nude figures, served to 

liberate Russian avant-garde artists from the bounds of European convention and tradition, linking 

their peripheral city to the French artistic core. Following the 1917 Russian Revolution, the canvas 

that marked a turning point in the history of modern art was retained and nationalized by the Soviet 

state and would, over the course of the twentieth century, be subject to the restrictive legislations 

of a regime that sought strict control over cultural goods. Dance’s movement through the Soviet 

era nonetheless endowed it with accumulated meaning both in its place and power within a Soviet 

Russian cultural patrimony. Dance’s re-emergence in the West following the end of the Union of 

Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) became a significant global cultural event. Century-long 

contestations over its presence and place within the Russian national patrimony deepened in the 

post-Soviet era as challenges were launched against the 1917 nationalization decrees that had 

inducted Dance into both the national heritage and the state’s currency reserves.  
 

Art plays a critical role in discourses of national culture. Multiple nations and regimes have staked 

claims to Dance as part of their national patrimony including those of tsarist Russia, the USSR, 

the Russian Federation, France, and Europe more broadly. Matisse is considered to play a defining 

role in the course of the history of modern art. Dance gained prominence over time as it was subject 

to the will of the state and was celebrated by educated societies in Russia and abroad and coveted 

by those who sought to retrieve and view it. As a result of art’s ability to cross borders and take 

residency within national institutions, multiple claims could co-exist as to the place of Dance 

within national patrimonies. From 1991, close to a century after Sergei Shchukin commissioned 

Dance and hung it in the staircase of his Moscow home, the Russian Federation has taken 

extraordinary measures to protect its prized possession. Whereas Russia recognizes and defends 

the place of Dance within its borders and patrimony, seeking to challenge the power mechanisms 

of core-peripheral culture relations, Western exhibitions claim it singularly as a product of France, 

of the West, ignoring its duality and celebrating its return. The relationship between national and 

transnational emerges as a complicated yet critical pathway to understanding the importance of 

Dance and the complexity of Russian national culture and its place within global pantheons of art. 
 

This article uses Dance to support and extend to the present Homi Bhabha’s view that “in the fin 

de siècle, we find ourselves in the moment of transit, where space and time cross to produce 

complex figures of difference and identity, past and present, inside and outside, inclusion and 

exclusion” (1994, 2). The production and relations of power complicate this transit, with a clear 

European center that leaves Russia on its artistic margins and a peripheralized national patrimony. 

Edith Clowes argues that Russian ideas of self and other in the post-Soviet era remain a work in 

progress. Russians at once consider Russia as a global cultural center but recognize that it is not 



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seen that way in the West (Clowes 2011). Russian and Soviet views, the Western gaze, and ideas 

of national patrimony have evolved across time and regimes. Chike C. Aniakor writes that “[a]rt 

objects are historical documents. They reflect the social and historical conditions of their 

creation…” (1995, 436). This article argues that the moment of creation is complicated and cannot 

be seen as stagnant. Aniakor challenges us to consider the intertwined historical, societal, and 

political context of works of art. This article follows Hannah Barbosa Cesnik in “[r]ecognizing 

cultural patrimony as active rather than passive opens the possibility of ownership to something 

beyond constructed national borders but less than a global-free for all” (2021). Finally, I recognize 

important recent work that places collectors at the center of moving art across borders (Quodbach 

2020). This article argues that Sergei Shchukin—even as a collector on the periphery— played a 

singularly important role in building the patrimonies of Western Europe and Russia as well as 

propelling Russian art in new directions. These directions continue to gain international 

recognition nearly a century after Joseph Stalin stopped the innovations of the avant-garde in their 

tracks. 
 

This article culminates in the 2008 From Russia: French and Russian Master Paintings exhibit at 

the Royal Academy of Arts in London, moving through time and space to see how Dance and 

related works were understood and identified with over a century. An interview conducted with 

co-curator of From Russia, Ann Dumas, offers insight into the legal and cultural environment of 

the exhibit. This article also uses Hermitage Director Mikhail Piotrovsky’s memoir and a work co-

authored by Shchukin’s grandson, André-Marc Delocque. I seek to determine the value that 
modern French art has come to develop within the Russian patrimony—how the national and 

transnational blend and how pre-revolutionary modern art survived multiple controversies to 

emerge as a strong symbol of Russian heritage.  
 

Collecting the Nation 
 

Sergei Shchukin’s purchase of a landscape by Claude Monet from French art dealer Paul Durand-

Ruel in 1898 marked a “decisive breakthrough in the Russian art world’s relationship to modern 

Western art” (Dorontchenkov 2009, 1). Before this point, Russian artists and collectors had seen 

Russian art as separate from Europe; now, with Shchukin’s purchase and the “drive towards the 

West” of Sergei Diaghilev and the artists from the World of Art collective (1898-9), Russian art 

redefined itself within a wider European art pantheon.  
 

Shchukin and his contemporary, Ivan Morozov, both textile merchants from Moscow and outsiders 

to the Russian art world, turned to the West, to the art of France for their market. They rapidly 

earned international acclaim for their eye and approach in amassing two of the “best and largest 

collections of contemporary French art in all of Europe” (Dorontchenkov 2009, 77). Each 

encountered broad resistance as they collected contemporary and provocative works of art. 

Shchukin continued his focus on French art, setting as his goal to assemble one of the most 

significant, transnational collections anywhere in Europe. In doing so he would place Russia 

squarely at the forefront of collecting practices and a modern artistic world.  
 

Shchukin’s early collecting was defined by the canvases of Paul Gauguin, Claude Monet, and 

Vincent Van Gogh. He collected Impressionists until 1904 before turning to post-Impressionism. 

In 1903, Shchukin brought to Russia the work of Paul Cézanne, an artist who would become 

revered by the Russian avant-garde and whose influence on the Russian art scene endured through 

the Soviet era (Reid 2001, 153-184). Shchukin’s tastes were fluid, responding quickly to European 

tides and advancements in contemporary art, which he began purchasing in 1906 with his first 



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work by Henri Matisse. Shchukin’s singular focus on the future led Matisse’s Dance to cross 

Russia’s borders and become a central piece in its national patrimony and achieve a critical, 

enduring role in the global history of modern art.  
 

Figure 1: Henri Matisse, 1909, Dance II 

 
Henri Matisse, 1909, Dance II. Collection of the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.  

Wikimedia Commons. Accessed April 18, 2022.  

 

Public resistance to Shchukin’s collections mounted as artists found inspiration in the influx of 

French art fresh from the studio. The foreignness of his canvasses jolted visitors who toured the 

collections in his home, which he opened to the public on Sundays beginning in 1909. One of 

Shchukin’s guests “marked up the painting of C. Monet with a pencil in protest against the 

Impressionists” (Shchukin 1913, 38). Such intense reactions from visitors demonstrated that while 

the pieces earned the Russian collectors a privileged place on the world stage, sections of the 

Russian public did not accept the paintings. As in Europe, impressionist art faced hostility to its 

challenges of accepted styles and perhaps, in the case of Russia, patriotic feelings.  

 

Shchukin’s home emerged nonetheless as an ersatz academy of modern art, attracting students and 

members of the educated public and inspiring Russia’s own modernist turn through galleries that 

captured in their entirety the development of select artists. In 1909, Shchukin commissioned the 

first of two works from Henri Matisse, at the time a relatively unknown artist amongst the 

European avant-garde. Shchukin reveled in how his role as a collector enabled him to enter the 

Paris studios and galleries to discover artists and elevate their careers (Armand Hammer 

Foundation, 1986). Dance, a large-scale mural, was slated for the staircase of Shchukin’s home. 

Matisse’s Dance represented his mastery of colour as he balanced a near imperceptible 

sophistication overridden by the primitive, almost barbaric, scene captured in his pivotal work. 

The naked figures in Dance caused a scandal when first publicly displayed at the Salon d’Automne 

in 1910 as they confronted and drastically altered not only the proportions of the human form but 

also represented complete physical abandonment in their hypnotic dance. The Russian critic of the 

newspaper Odessky Listok (Odessa News) described the scene in Paris:  
 



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Explosions of indignation, anger and raillery are incessant around these pictures. In effect, 

their toxic colours give the impression of a demonic cacophony, whilst the lines, which are 

simplified to such a point that they almost disappear, and the astonishingly ugly shapes, 

express the painter’s idea in a way that is both rash and insistent. The world created by 

Matisse in his naively cannibalistic panels is, I have to say, frankly distasteful. (cited in 

Semenova and Delocque 2018, 174) 
 

Shchukin himself initially recoiled at the painting’s apparent barbaric nature, nearly cancelling the 

commission out of fear of public opinion and the attention it would draw upon its transport to 

Moscow. He shook off fears of offending the Russian Orthodox Church and other conservative 

elements in Moscow, writing to Matisse: “I find your panel Dance of such nobility that I am 

resolved to brave our bourgeois opinion and to hang on my staircase a subject with nudes” 

(Kostenevich 1990, 39). For artists in Russia, Dance both symbolized and enabled their 

emancipation. The artists who had emerged out of Moscow’s studios during these years—Natalia 

Goncharova, Mikhail Larionov, Vasily Kandinsky, and Marc Chagall— still worked to evoke a 

sense of Russianness through established tradition in works they exported to the West and had yet 

to challenge French artists’ technical mastery. In the free forms of Matisse’s dancing figures, the 

conventions that had governed modern art were dismantled. Russian artists, no longer bound by 

European criteria to create within the realms or “isms” characterizing the European avant-garde, 

moved to infiltrate the European-dominated scene (Dorontchenkov 2009).  
 

Alexandre Benois captured this dynamic in an article written for Rech’ (Speech) in 1911 where he 

wrote that while it is possible for artists to learn or achieve “perfection” through imitation, they 

“cannot learn something in order to unlearn it” (Benois 2009, 104-105). In other words, the 

creativity and ingenuity required to achieve the success of the French could not be attained by the 

Russians if they continued to merely mimic and avoid necessary experimentation on the canvas. 

However, the import of Dance, its crudeness and simplicity, offered a path other than mimicry and 

the efforts to raise themselves and Russian art to the caliber of the French. Benois elaborates on 

the freedoms attained in Matisse’s work: 
 

When you recall all the crudeness, provincialism, and absurdity there is in [Russian] art you 

can become frightened and begin to share in the general alarm that the Parisian example will 

muddle our very uncultured artistic youth. But now there is also hope. What if it is this 

crudeness and simplicity that Matisse wants to acquire by force and that we already have 

that will save us by creating in us that desirable “childlike disposition” out of which new art 

is to emerge? (Benois 2009, 104-105) 
 

Through these primitive forms, Matisse made the modern art world accessible to Russian artists. 

It allowed them to bypass the technical mastery that earlier modern art forms had seemingly 

required, even with their looser strokes. In the same way that Matisse wanted to be seen as “worthy 

of creating his own new traditions, of starting anew,” (Benois 2009, 104-105) so did the Russian 

avant-garde who took from him, from Shchukin’s panels, permission to break free and carve their 

place on the global stage.   
  
Shchukin had captured and imported works from the west before the paint was even dry with the 

express purpose of exposing Russian artists to the bold strokes of the French avant-garde and their 

new definitions of art. Shchukin sought to inspire and expose, and leave the artists to form their 

own mind, their own response, more directly and concurrently than had previously been possible 



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because of Russia’s distance from the ateliers of Paris. However, Shchukin’s singular focus on the 

French scene evoked disdain, even from those who benefitted from his collections.    

   

Vasily Kandinsky, who in 1908 was the first artist to write about the descent into pure abstraction, 

grew increasingly annoyed with Shchukin’s disinterest in what he considered the equally 

innovative and inspired works of the Russian avant-garde. Convinced his abstracts were “just as 

good” as Matisse’s, Kandinsky wrote to his friend Gabriele Munter:  
 

Shchukin never buys anything from me. He is a long way from sharing our ideas. I think that 

only artists who have been hugely successful in Paris can awaken his interest. But where is 

such success to be found today? He believes that the two greatest contemporary artists are 

Matisse and Picasso. Apparently, he doesn’t think about me, truly. Nevertheless, my 

composition 2 and 5 would fit in very nicely at this place: I can see them there already. (cited 

in Semenova and Delocque 2018, 221) 
 

This ambivalence proliferated among Russian artists, whose works were left unpurchased by 

Shchukin and therefore remained unrepresented on the walls of his home, which had gained 

recognition as a temple of modernity. Questions of patriotism, nationality, and a national 

patrimony remained open and controversial. Did Shchukin’s commissions, as a Russian citizen, 

entrench these works as Russian? This question of what makes a piece of art national remains 

unclear in art history even today. 
 

Shchukin’s collection resonated within and beyond Russia’s borders for its ability to break down 

the barriers to the contemporary art scene that resulted from the country’s distance from Europe. 

The art of the commission itself speaks to a creativity, a boldness, and an active participation in 

the creation of a work that, this article argues, makes the commissioner an actor in its production. 

If we take this to be the case, then Shchukin’s commissions, most particularly that of Dance and 

Music, can be labelled or considered as Russian artistic productions, in line with those produced 

by Russian artists even as the artist is himself French. The placement of the works in Shchukin’s 

house and their visibility to both artists and the public alike sparked a wave of creative innovation 

that remains recognized as critical to Russian national culture over a century later.   
  

The First World War stopped Shchukin’s activity as a collector; however, he assumed the role of 

mentor, commentator, and guide for Russian artists and sought to act as an enlightener of 

Moscow’s public. Leaders of the artistic scene in Russia considered Shchukin as “one of their 

number” even as his colleague Ivan Morozov, who collected the works of Russians, was not 

(Semenova and Delocque 2018, 221). In the first seventeen years of the twentieth century, 

Shchukin’s collecting had easily outpaced collectors in Europe as well as Russia. He had collected 

works snubbed by the then major art institutions and galleries of the West. The war and the 

subsequent 1917 Bolshevik Revolution scarred Shchukin, whose tastes and position in society 

were under threat by new State ideologies. Uncertain of a Bolshevik future, Shchukin left the 

country shortly after the Revolution. In his wake he was forced to abandon his business and 

holdings, including his art collection, which had grown to 225 works by the First World War, 

consisting mainly of prominent French artists. By this time, Shchukin’s efforts had already 

succeeded in closing the gap between a European artistic core and a Russian periphery. Though 

he would never again collect art with the same frenzied passion exhibited in his Moscow 

assemblage, Shchukin, prior to his death in Paris in 1936, fervently believed that the works he left 

behind should ultimately remain within Russian borders (cited in Boguslavskij 1995, 328). 
 



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Patrimony and Isolation in Soviet Russia  
 

The value and power that Dance had gained from its place within Shchukin’s home and the wider 

Russian art community earned it a critical role within a Russian national patrimony, which endured 

throughout the Soviet period. The Bolsheviks acknowledged the place of the painting and works 

collected by Shchukin and Morozov, nationalizing them and realizing their monetary value. In the 

post-Stalin era, the state turned to art for its power to legitimize both the USSR’s superpower status 

and ostensibly global culture. Despite the Soviet state’s systematic removal of Shchukin’s name 

and that of his legendary collection from public memory in Russia and abroad, its prominence 

remained in the eyes of the educated elite both inside and beyond state borders, where these 

featured works retained their place within the Western art pantheon.  
 

Vladimir Lenin signed a decree on October 29, 1918 to nationalize the Shchukin collection, 

reframing it as one of state-led national and world importance. The decree read:  
 

Considering the national importance of the Shchukin’s Art Gallery, being the exceptional 

collection of the great European – predominantly French – masters of the end of the 19th and 

the beginning of the 20th century and recognizing its significance in the field of national 

education, the Soviet of People’s Commissioners decrees…the Nationalization of the 

Shchukin’s Art Gallery. (cited in Boguslavskij 1995, 326) 
 

The decree, which also nationalized Morozov’s collections, brought them and their properties 

under the All-Russian Collegium for the Affairs of Museums and the Protection of Monuments of 

Art and Antiquity (Vserossiĭskaia kollegiia po delam muzeev i okhrane pamiatnikov iskusstva i 

stariny), a branch of the People’s Commissariat for Education (Narodnyĭ komissariat 

prosveshcheniia), on December 19, 1918. Nationalizing the collection confirmed the place that 

Shchukin’s art had earned in the national— and now Soviet— patrimony in its education of the 

public and ability to propel avant-garde artists who largely supported Bolshevik rule and provided 

creative support. 
 

Inventoried, the Morozov and Shchukin collections remained intact at their respective residences, 

the palaces being renamed The State Museum of New Western Art No. 1 and 2 respectively (Muzeĭ 

novoĭ zapadnoĭ zhivopisi, MNZZh 1 and 2). The museums were amalgamated into the former 

Morozov residence and renamed the State Museum of New Western Art (Gosudarstvennyĭ muzeĭ 

novogo zapadnogo iskusstva, GMNZI) in 1923.2 The creation of a museum dedicated solely to the 

exhibition of modernist works was revolutionary. It stood as the first museum of modern art in the 

world, preceding by six years New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).3 GMNZI reflected 

the Bolshevik belief of the power of this art to attack Western bourgeois conventions and 

simultaneously showcase Soviet Russia’s ability to capture and display works of global importance 

at a time when Soviet innovation was the subject of Western fascination. Nevertheless, the 

museum also appeared to the public as one that highlighted Western decadence, producing art of 

 
2 There is some confusion with the dates of this preliminary stage of the amalgamation. Some sources quote 1922 and 

some as 1923 for the year that the collections were administratively merged. At which time the museum’s abbreviation 

changed from MNZZh 1 and 2, to GMNZI. The amalgamation in different sources cites 1923 and 1928 as the possible 

dates of the physical amalgamation of the collections. This paper uses 1923 as the date.  
3 The revolutionary nature of the State Museum of New Western Art stood in its collections of European modernist 

works. Though other establishments, including the Vienna Secession, had been exhibiting and introducing new 

movements including the modernists since the turn of the century, the establishment of a museum dedicated solely to 

modern art is what contributed to the distinction of the GMNZI.  



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such abstraction that it was seemingly divorced from social reality as it had been purchased by 

wealthy Russian collectors. The Communist leadership nonetheless refused calls to divide these 

works among state museums or to remove them from the public eye, seeing the potential of 

GMNZI to rival the Hermitage in global importance (Mileeva 2013). 
 

The Soviet regime under Stalin was desperate for revenue to finance economic modernization and 

turned to these impressive works of art as sources of income. Works recognized as some of the 

most significant in the lives of select artists, including Cézanne and van Gogh, were sold off and 

would go on to reside in some of the world’s most prestigious institutions.4 An intense campaign 

to save Dance from suffering the fate of many of its contemporaries succeeded through 

emphasizing the work’s intrinsic and symbolic value to the State (NeWestMuseum). Despite the 

occasional sales of valued art, GMNZI, and the collections housed there, survived the 1930s and 

gained a certain notoriety as they were sent, along with most of the prominent museum collections 

of the state, to the Urals prior to the Nazi invasion during the Second World War. This shift in 

Dance from being recognized under Lenin as a work of national importance within a new Socialist 

patrimony to being seen under Stalin for its monetary potential shifted its power from national 

education and pride to the national currency reserves.  
 

In 1946, the USSR launched campaigns against cosmopolitanism and formalism to blunt perceived 

dangers of Western influence after the wartime alliance to defeat Germany crumbled and the Cold 

War began. GMNZI was closed, its collections divided between the Pushkin Museum in Moscow 

and the State Hermitage Museum in Leningrad (present-day Saint Petersburg). Artworks once 

praised for their high quality and educational importance were now proclaimed as socially and 

dangerously destructive in the Soviet Council of Ministers decree 672 on March 6, 1948:  
 

The formalist collections belonging to the Museum of Modern Western Art, bought in the 

countries of Western Europe by Muscovite capitalists in the late nineteenth century and the 

early twentieth century, have spread formalist views and the veneration of decadent 

bourgeois imperialist culture, causing severe damage to the development of Russian Soviet 

Art... the Council of Ministers hereby decrees the full liquidation of the Moscow State 

Museum of Modern Western Art. (cited in Semenova and Delocque 2018, 246) 
 

Matisse’s Dance, considered a subversion of bourgeois values four decades earlier, was now itself 

labeled as bourgeois. In challenging convention, the painting’s bright, joyous, and ambiguous 

figures appeared to threaten the cultural stability of Stalin’s regime. Labelled as alien, unknown, 

or even hostile, this art loomed over new Soviet ideas even though their very existence had served 

to challenge former conventions of Western art.   
  

Dance and other works in Shchukin’s collection left Moscow for the “cultural capital” of 

Leningrad. It was placed in storage in the State Hermitage Museum, out of view from the public 

in compliance with state orders. Hidden away, this work became cemented in the Soviet currency 

reserves. Curators and liberal segments of the educated public considered this a dark turn in what 

they saw as a declining appreciation for culture and the simple tragedy of removing these works 

from the public eye (Iavorskaia 2009, 307-309). 

 
4 Four of the most significant works sold during this period included Cézanne’s Portrait of Madame Cézanne in the 

Greenhouse; van Gogh’s Night Café from the Morozov collection; Degas’ The Singer from the Café Concert; Renoir’s 

The Maid. The decree of the sale, dated May 9, 1933, was signed by the deputy chairman of the Council of People’s 

Commissars V.V. Kuibuster (NeWest Museum, n.d.). 



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The forced assimilation in the 1930s of Soviet Russian artists into Socialist Realism, a 

propagandistic style of art that stripped away individual advancements to the global field, had 

monumental repercussions for Soviet culture. The assimilation effectively removed Soviet Russia 

from transnational conversations required to continue placing Soviet art into the prominent place 

it held in the early Bolshevik years and Soviet art became othered in the global art world.  
 

Stalin’s death and the subsequent de-Stalinization echoed throughout the museums and galleries 

of the Soviet Union. The Soviet government became dependent on pre-revolutionary Western 

(predominantly French) art collected by Morozov and Shchukin to highlight their importance 

within the global realms of culture and art as befitting a postwar, post-Stalinist superpower. Works 

of modern art which had remained hidden following the decrees of the 1940s gradually emerged 

from museum storerooms. Conventional, realist art arrived first, followed in the mid-1950s by the 

works of Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. Dance once more assumed pride of place alongside its 

companion Music in Leningrad’s Hermitage Museum. The re-emergence of what many recognized 

to be a prized collection generated significant excitement, as the current Director of the Hermitage, 

Mikhail Piotrovsky, recalled: “As [Khrushchev-era] political freedom grew, so did the radical 

nature of the paintings on show from Sisley to Picasso. For many it was a turning point in their 

understanding of art in general” (Piotrovsky 2015, 238). 
 

Just as they did prior to 1917, the cubist forms of Picasso, the nude figures of Gauguin, and the 

exaggerated forms of Matisse sparked controversy amongst patrons who gathered in the exhibition 

halls on the Hermitage’s third floor, which had become synonymous with modern art in the 1950s 

(Piotrovsky 2015, 238). In the Hermitage, the resistance to the restoration of modern art was led 

by artists and art historians clinging to Stalinist ideology. They condemned both the prominent 

placement of works of Matisse and others at the Hermitage and the sending of select pieces abroad 

as part of pan-European art retrospectives. Operating within the still-strict confines of the state’s 

cultural directives, museum staff, seeking political cover, claimed that these works displayed how 

Western culture had degraded and fallen from the ideals of classicism praised in the Soviet Union. 

For some time, this logic, along with the powerful support the pieces received among members of 

the educated elite who recognized their global value, subdued opposition.  
 

In his memoir, Piotrovsky (2015) highlighted an incident in 1963 when an angry commission from 

the Academy of Arts descended upon the Hermitage, outraged by their presentation and hanging 

of the “barbaric” modern pieces (238). Antonina Izergina, the curator of French painting at the 

Hermitage and the widow of late museum director Iosif Orbeli, stood before the commission and 

praised the significance of the Shchukin collection in educating the masses. Piotrovsky (2015) 

recalled the crowd being outraged by Izergina’s words that culminated with her reading the decree 

signed in 1918 that had nationalized the Shchukin collection and ended with the words “V.I. 

Lenin” (242). The commission’s efforts to remove the paintings from public view and subsequent 

opposition failed, allowing these works to remain as critical touchstones for debate on not only the 

value and role of modernist art but also their place within a national museum. Piotrovsky cites this 

as a point where these paintings assumed a solid place within Russian national identity both in 

spite and because of their controversial nature (2015, 242).  
 

Alongside these Soviet internal debates, the artistic works that composed the Shchukin and 

Morozov collections remained vital measures of modernism in Europe. After the re-emergence of 

these paintings to the Hermitage, Western institutions placed them high on their wish lists to be 

displayed in international exhibitions (WNET and Alvin H. Perlmutter Inc 1973). In 1954, 54 

Picasso works from the Shchukin and Morozov collections were loaned to France for an exhibition 



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in Paris entitled "Picasso from the Museums of Leningrad and Moscow and Parisian collections," 

even as the works remained prohibited from view in the Soviet Union. The Soviet government 

used Dance and related works to present themselves as a European civilization. Through invoking 

them once more into the global canon, the Soviet Union could advance an image that would portray 

it in an enlightened light.  
 

The Paris exhibition faced an immediate and unexpected intervention from the heirs of Sergei 

Shchukin who resided in France and who challenged the legality of the Soviet state’s ownership 

of works that had once belonged to their family. They claimed that the works were taken illegally 

under Lenin’s nationalization decrees and without compensation (Boguslavskij 1995, 325-341). 

The Paris exhibition organizers took immediate action, removing works that pertained to the suit. 

They were rushed to the Soviet Embassy to protect them from any legal proceedings and the risk 

of confiscation. This legal threat circumscribed Soviet desires to exhibit works of European 

importance—Dance was never sent abroad despite multiple requests—and promote the state’s 

place as an advanced culture. Several potential exchanges were negotiated throughout the 1950s 

and thereafter including between American and Soviet institutions headed by the MoMA. Alfred 

H. Barr Jr, the MoMA director who had published on Matisse, undertook years of close talks to 

uncover the “hidden masterpieces” of the Soviet state through displays in several US museums 

(Mikkonen 2013, 57-76). Soviet officials refused Barr’s request when he could not provide 

guarantees that any works loaned would be returned to the USSR at the exhibit’s end.  
 

Dance dually functioned as part of a Soviet and Russian patrimony in the eyes of vanguard 

intellectuals and cultural bureaucrats as well as an object of currency and a tool of cultural 

diplomacy. The Soviet-era erasure of Shchukin’s name from the works he commissioned and 

collected enabled Dance and others to be seen, however, primarily as Western creations, 

representative of those systems. It would only be after the end of the Soviet Union—in part due to 

the lawsuits that had come to highlight this very erasure—that Shchukin’s name was reinstated 

and became embedded in a now post-Soviet Russian national patrimony. The effort taken by Soviet 

officials to protect these paintings from civil actions was a direct result of their desire to secure for 

the state a power and legitimate position as a global cultural actor. In the post-Soviet period, the 

motivation for this protection transformed to one sparked by the painting’s place within the 

national cultural identity of the Russian state.  
 

Matisse and the other European modernists form the foundation for contemporary art and artists 

who still respond to the movements set in motion a century earlier. Matisse’s work inspired 

American artists throughout the twentieth century; his influence was notably revived and 

recognized in the experiments of colour and abstraction in the works of Mark Rothko and Roy 

Lichtenstein as explored in the After Matisse exhibition that began at the Queens Museum of Art 

and travelled throughout the United States from 1986-1988. Dance remained a critical work in the 

global trajectory of modern art even as it remained behind the borders of the Soviet Union until its 

collapse. Though ‘dance’ was a theme that carried into several of Matisse’s canvases from 1905-

1913, Dance or Dance II, as the Hermitage panel is known, stands apart from the other iterations 

of the painting for its boldness in both colour and scale.5 Shchukin’s commission holds a trance-

 
5 Henri Matisse’s panel Dance (La Danse) commissioned for Shchukin is also known in some contexts as Dance II. 
Dance I, a large-scale work that served as a preliminary sketch for Shchukin’s panel, used paler colours for the dancing 

figures and has significantly less detail than the final work. Dance I resides in the collection of the Museum of Modern 

Art (MoMA) in New York City.  



53                    Canadian Journal of European and Russian Studies, 15(1) 2022: 43-60 
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like energy enabling the audience to see and feel the painting’s movement, unique for its freedom 

of form and use of red instead of a light pink nude that lacks the same artistic depth.  
 

Exhibiting Dance  
 

As the Soviet Union collapsed and the Russian Federation emerged, Dance topped the wish lists 

of Western institutions that were hopeful it would be allowed to leave the country. Institutions 

were eager to be the first to bring it outside of Russia/Soviet Union since it left France in 1910. 

From September 24, 1992 to January 19, 1993, selected Matisse works including Dance travelled 

to the MoMA in New York City to take part in Henri Matisse: A Retrospective. The most 

comprehensive exhibition assembled on the French master comprised 400 works, carefully curated 

to explore the range and depth of the artist, offering an opportunity to reassess the role his pieces 

play in the history of twentieth-century art. It marked the first time the works from the Hermitage 

and Pushkin Museum had been exhibited in the United States – a point of pride detailed within the 

MoMA’s exhibition materials. The retrospective’s curator, John Elderfield, defines Matisse’s 

impact in the exhibition catalog writing that “[Matisse] altered painting so decisively…that our 

experience of any painting must be affected by what he achieved” (Elderfield 1992, 14). 
 

As Dance gained international popularity, issues of nationalization and ownership jeopardized its 

place within a renewed Russian national patrimony. The indoctrination of the 1918 nationalization 

decrees into Russian law and Soviet caution in transnational lending had diminished legal threats 

from Shchukin’s heirs, but the heirs saw a weakened state under Boris Yeltsin and a prime 

opportunity to challenge nationalization. In 1993, legal action was launched in French courts 

against the Pushkin Museum, the State Hermitage Museum, the Pompidou Centre in Paris, and by 

extension, the Russian Federation, concerning the loan of certain paintings to the Paris gallery 

(Boguslavskij 1995, 325). The suit claimed that Lenin’s decree, which ostensibly brought the 

paintings into the legal possession of the Soviet Union and, later, the contemporary Russian state, 

could not be considered valid in France as French law dictated the necessity of compensation for 

confiscated property. Shchukin’s heirs demanded the return of the collection to its “rightful” owner 

– Irina Shchukina, Shchukin’s youngest daughter.  
 

The Russian government responded on multiple fronts to protect artistic treasures considered as 

valuable national property. Expecting support from European governments in the post-Cold War 

era, Yeltsin’s officials wrote to the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs referring to the principle of 

state immunity, which they claimed was inherent in international law. The Russian Embassy in 

France took an active role “in the legal preparations of Russian museums and assisted in ensuring 

that the directors of the museums involved could take part in the trial” (Boguslavskij 1995, 329). 

An effective challenge to the Shchukin family’s claims in court would allow the portrayal of the 

new Russia as a deserved home for these paintings of national and global significance.  
 

For their part, the claimants highlighted moral and ethical issues that dated from the tsarist empire 

and the USSR, citing the UN Declaration of Human Rights in their opening arguments. The suit 

emphasized the difficult fate of Russian emigrants such as Shchukin and the oblivion surrounding 

his name in Russia. Where the claimants appealed to emotion, the defendants clung to international 

law. On June 16, 1993, the verdict absolved the Russian Federation of the responsibility for 

repatriation of Shchukin’s collected works to his heirs. The verdict further absolved the Russian 

government of any monetary compensation to Shchukina as generally dictated under French law 

for confiscation of personal property by a state, recognizing Lenin’s nationalization of the 



54                    Canadian Journal of European and Russian Studies, 15(1) 2022: 43-60 
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collection and later indoctrination into the constitution of the Russian Federation as legitimate. 

Shchukina’s claims were dismissed. 
 

The victory launched new initiatives to advance transnational exhibitions between European and 

Russian museums even as underlying legal issues remained unsettled. The Shchukin and Morozov 

collections were treated with particular care. Russian museums also continued to face severe 

financial constraints as state funding had dropped precipitously in the 1990s and the threat of 

needing to sell important artworks to survive loomed (Cameron and Lapierre 2007, 65-77). 
 

To the curators at the Royal Academy of Art in London (RA), bringing Dance to the United 

Kingdom and Germany was the foundation of what would become "From Russia: French and 

Russian Master Painting from Moscow and Leningrad 1870-1925" (Ann Dumas, unpublished 

interview by author, May 7, 2021). A joint venture with the Museum Kunstpalast in Dusseldorf, 

the exhibition – which had been in planning for over five years – would unite the modernist 

collections of Russia’s four primary art institutions. For the first time, it would introduce this 

critical period in the development of the modern art in both Russia and abroad through 120 

paintings by Russian and French artists (Dumas and Rosenthal 2008). Ann Dumas and Sir Norman 

Rosenthal, curators at the Royal Academy, worked closely with the Russian institutions who 

presented them with a selection of works available for their venture. They agreed that the 

exhibition would be staged around Dance.  
 

The official catalogue called the exhibition “a testimony to the glorious history of Russian 

collecting and Russia’s influence in the development of modern art” (Dumas and Rosenthal 2007, 

5). However, it was nearly cancelled just months before its anticipated opening. Russia faced 

renewed threats of seizure of their assets abroad in the early years of the 2000s by other individuals 

and entities seeking to recover imperial and Soviet-era debts. In 2005, the State Hermitage 

Museum threatened a moratorium on overseas loans following the temporary capture of 54 

paintings of Picasso, Matisse, and Cézanne at the Swiss border. Piotrovksy claimed that “works of 

art are now being used as hostages in trade disputes” (O’Connell 2008, 2). The dispute was 

resolved quickly in Russia’s favour by the Swiss Federal Council but produced new Russian 

demands for legal guarantees of immunity from seizure for future exhibitions. Such laws were 

already on their way to becoming commonplace, with several states already adopting protections. 

However, the United Kingdom State Immunity Act of 1978 proved insufficient for Russia. Russia 

argued that the 1978 Act needed updating to explicitly include items owned by national museums, 

not just property owned by a foreign state (O’Connell 2008, 2). This grey area would have been 

sufficient for Russia to pull the plug on the exhibit. 
 

The threat to withhold loans from Russian museums launched the Royal Academy and UK 

legislators alike to push updated laws through parliament prior to the slated arrival of the Russian 

collections. Anticipation over "From Russia" had built for years, culminating in an extensive media 

campaign that left the promise of substantial crowds for the blockbuster exhibition. The Russian 

state’s decision to prevent the export of the promised paintings in the fall of 2007 shifted media 

coverage to negotiations between states and the respective museums. The exhibition’s prestige led 

former British Prime Minister Tony Blair to “len[d] his support at a decisive moment in the 

negotiations” (Dumas and Rosenthal 2007, 5) as the British government passed the Tribunals, 



55                    Canadian Journal of European and Russian Studies, 15(1) 2022: 43-60 
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Courts, and Enforcements Act of 2007 (Arts Council England, 2007).6 "From Russia" opened at 

the Royal Academy on January 26, 2008.  
 

"From Russia," curated by Ann Dumas and Sir Norman Rosenthal, presented a specific narrative 

or perception of Russia’s place within the European art world and of Russian national identity 

within the nine galleries devoted to the exhibition. Chosen from lists presented by the Russian 

museums partaking in the transnational exchange, the RA curators opted to segregate works 

painted in France that comprised the Shchukin and Morozov collections from those created by 

Russian artists in the same period. Divisions were maintained, even as the rooms were meant to 

explore the “interaction between Russian and French art from the last third of the nineteenth 

century” (Dumas and Rosenthal 2008). Dumas later stated that she felt placing the 

accomplishments of the Russian artists from the turn of the twentieth century next to those of the 

French masters would do the Russians a disservice as they are incomparable in terms of technical 

capabilities and subject matter (Ann Dumas, unpublished interview by author, May 7, 2021). 
 

Walking from one gallery of the "From Russia" exhibit to the next, a viewer sees the undeniable 

influence of renowned modernist paintings but misses the transnational influences and the impact 

of Shchukin’s French pieces that allowed Russian artists to come into their own.  Dance sits in a 

gallery that overwhelms its audience with the abundant wealth of the French collections. 

Masterpiece after masterpiece, visitors are compelled to stop in their tracks. Only in subsequent 

galleries do curators draw attention to European artistic influences on Russia. An educated viewer 

would see the effects of Parisian studios that would have been experienced vicariously by many 

of the artists represented in Sunday tours of Shchukin’s home. Moments of ingenuity and a Russian 

style might mix with French influences in the visitor’s mind from previous galleries. Europe’s 

recognition of Dance and the curatorial decisions to separate it from Russian art symbolizes both 

the extent and the limits of Russia’s successful contributions to the global artistic pantheon.  
 

"From Russia" demonstrated the lengths that the Russian state would go to protect these 

masterpieces that played a significant role in defining Russian modernism and that have, over time, 

regimes, and space earned pride of place within the national patrimony and the national culture of 

the contemporary Russian state. The exhibition, however, curated through a Western lens, 

challenges this central place for Russia in modernist art and the dual nationality of its central work. 

In separating the French works from those of Russia, the curators perpetuated a core-peripheral 

model of art history. The segregated approach of "From Russia” enforced a perspective of French 

works as dominant and fully European, ignoring the role of collectors such as Shchukin and giving 

the impression that they are isolated from Russia and from the margins of the art world. It is true 

that the Impressionists, Post-Impressionists, Modernists, and others retain a privileged, almost 

unassailable place among viewing audiences as representing the power of France and Western 

Europe in the artistic world. In considering pieces only at the point of the artist’s conception, the 

exhibit negated at once the role of the collector and the accumulated meaning of a work, which, in 

the case of French art, was their direct impact on Russian modernism. While the curation 

potentially sought to reflect the collection as it hung in Russia’s ersatz academies and former 

museums of modern art, themselves segregated prior to and just following the Bolshevik 

Revolution, it ignored the impact and meaning that has accumulated through these canvases, which 

placed them securely within a Russian national heritage.  

 
6 The Tribunals, Courts, and Enforcements Act 2007 provided immunity from seizure for cultural objects being loaned 
from overseas to temporary public exhibitions in approved museums or galleries in the United Kingdom. 



56                    Canadian Journal of European and Russian Studies, 15(1) 2022: 43-60 
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"From Russia" functioned as an act of cultural diplomacy between British and Russian 

governments. At the same time, it enforced a historical perspective that dissimulates the 

transnational provenance of Dance. I argue that the commissioning of Dance endowed it with dual 

citizenship in both France and Russia as it traveled from Matisse’s studio in 1910 to its place in 

Moscow and then as it evolved to gain its contemporary identity and place within the Hermitage 

Museum in St. Petersburg. The exhibition demonstrates the difficulties for Russia, as a 

peripheralized nation, to overcome barriers to have paintings in its national patrimony recognized 

as such in the global art world in a manner that stretches beyond the artists but also includes 

collectors, curators, and other critical figures central to these dialogues. Outside of the realm of 

cultural diplomacy, the case of Dance connects Russia and the broader Soviet sphere to calls to 

decolonize Western-centric models of history.  The region’s removal from the global art world 

throughout most of the twentieth century, followed by the tumultuous experience of 

transformations to market-type economies, rendered it vulnerable to powerful cultural actors and 

institutions in North America and Western Europe.  

  

The lack of transnational recognition of Dance and other European art commissioned and 

purchased by Shchukin and Morozov began with the abrupt Stalin-era turn to Socialist Realism 

and their subsequent absence from the international stage. This very absence has contributed to the 

significance that comes from displaying them internationally in this post-Soviet age as the 

popularity of "From Russia" demonstrates. We see this also in the Louis Vuitton Foundation 

exhibitions that, in 2016-2017 and 2021-2022 respectively, displayed the Shchukin and Morozov 

collections separately. The Art Newspaper reported that the blockbuster show in 2016-17 attracted 

a record number of visitors to the exhibition which signified the “symbolic unification of the 

Shchukin collection” (Kishkovsky 2019a). The collectors’ names and accomplishments, 

suppressed in the Soviet period, now form part of the excitement in international exhibitions. 

Exhibits now include pieces of the Russian avant-garde also loaned by Russian museums that seek 

to show their own vision of a national cultural identity. 
 

 

Conclusion 
 

On June 13, 2019, Russian President Vladimir Putin granted Russian citizenship to Sergei 

Shchukin’s grandson, André-Marc Delocque, more than a century after his family went into exile 

(Kishkovsky 2019b). The citizenship ceremony coincided with the opening of "Shchukin: 

Biography of a Collection," an exhibition that reunited Shchukin’s collection inside Russia’s 

borders for the first time since they were divided between the Pushkin and Hermitage museums in 

1948. Delocque’s legal suits launched against the Russian Federation had forced the state to face 

the question of the legality of Lenin’s decrees that were indoctrinated into the constitution in 1991. 

Yet, in the same moment that they evoked questions of monetary repatriations and debates which 

commonly plague contemporary museums, the lawsuits demonstrated the valued place and 

protections that these paintings evoke by virtue of their history. Their meaning in Russia developed 

over the course of the modern age as a result of their direct influence on the Russian avant-garde. 

This meaning was expanded through the Soviet era for the ability of Shchukin’s collection to 

communicate across borders, both in its art and collecting practices, within these global pantheons 

that have historically been dominated by the legitimizing force of Western Europe as the cultural 

core.  
 

Shchukin’s collecting practices were inspired by the nationalism embedded in the collection of the 

renowned Pavel Tretyakov, who accumulated Russian art beginning in 1856. Shchukin’s eye 



57                    Canadian Journal of European and Russian Studies, 15(1) 2022: 43-60 
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enabled the Russian vanguard to reach new heights as it bridged artists to the burgeoning Western 

scene at the turn of the twentieth century. The importance of these paintings by European masters 

captured in the collection, their survival through the Soviet period, reinstatement as critical cultural 

and national touchstones, thereafter sealed their place as central pieces of Russian art. In his 

commission of Dance and the history that has come to define it in the post-modern era—as it 

moved between institutions that stood for Soviet openness to the rolled-up confines of the Urals 

during the Second World War and as its “formalist” fate was contested in the years that followed—

Shchukin assisted in creating a piece that, in spite of its Western origins in the studios of France, 

would come to symbolize the fragmented and divided foundations of Russian national identity. 

Considered one of the key paintings of the twentieth century, Dance has been inculcated into 

Russia’s national cultural heritage and now hangs in the State Hermitage Museum.  

 

 

 

 

  



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