Sergei Shchukin

Sergei Ivanovich Shchukin (; 10 January 1936) was a Russian businessman who became an art collector, mainly of French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art.

Early life and family Sergei Ivanovich Shchukin was born on in Moscow, one of ten children of Ivan Shchukin, a self-made Moscow merchant, and his wife Ekaterina Shchukina, née Botkin, the daughter of an established family of merchants. I.V. Shchukin and Sons Trading Company became one of the largest manufacturing and wholesale companies in Russia.

Art collection There were several art collectors in the Shchukin family. Sergei's brother Pyotr Shchukin built an important collection of Russian ancient art and artifacts and owned several impressionist masterpieces, while his brother Dimitri Shchukin assembled "Moscow's best collection of Old Masters," which eventually entered the Pushkin Museum. Another brother, Ivan, also collected art and books. Henri Matisse created La Danse for Shchukin as part of a two-painting commission, the other important painting being Music, 1910. Both paintings are now in the collection of the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg. An earlier version of La Danse (1909) is in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art in New York City. The collection also featured fifty choice works by Pablo Picasso, including most of his earliest Cubist works, such as Three Women and major landscapes, but some key pieces of the Blue and Rose periods as well. In 1909, Shchukin opened his home on Sundays for public viewings, introducing French avant-garde painting to the Muscovites. thumb Henri Matisse, The Dance (second version), 1910, 260 x 391 cm, The Hermitage, (Matisse's second version of the painting).

After the revolution After the 1917 Revolution, the government appropriated his collection (decree of the Council of the People's Commissioners, signed Lenin, 8 November 1918) while Shchukin escaped to Paris, where he died in 1936. His mansion in Moscow became the State Museum of New Western Art (Государственный Музей нового западного искусствa, section I), section II being the mansion and collection of the other famous Russian patron, Ivan Morozov. Eventually, in 1928, the two sections were merged and exhibited in the former Ivan Morozov mansion at Prechistenka, 21. In 1948 the State Museum of New Western Art was closed down by a decree signed by Stalin due to its allegedly bourgeois, cosmopolitan and wrongly oriented artworks. The two collections were randomly divided between the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts and the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg.

Compensation efforts Shchukin's art collection has been jointly displayed with the collection of Ivan Morozov. In 2008, the families of Shchukin and Morozov made efforts to compel Russia to provide them with “reasonable compensation,” which become an international legal and political issue. The families refused an offer from the British Royal Academy of £5,000 for each family in exchange for their promise not to make claims on the paintings while they were on loan to the Royal Academy, which was displaying the two collections in London.

Death and legacy

Shchukin died on 10 January 1936 in Paris and is buried in Montmartre Cemetery, Avenue des Polonais 1st Division.

Irina Antonova, director of the Pushkin Museum, remarked of Shchukin: He started to collect unpopular art, which was snubbed by the Louvre and other museums. It was his personal taste. Perhaps he heard foreshocks that would change the world. Such a collector could appear only in a country that awaited a revolution. He collected art that prefigured the global cataclysms.

In the autumn of 2016, the exhibition "Icônes de l'art moderne. La collection Chtchoukine", opened at the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris.