An exhibition reuniting Modern masterpieces from the historic collection of Sergei Shchukin is due to open next week at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris without the presence of Vladimir Putin. The Russian president has cancelled his long-planned trip to France after his French counterpart, François Hollande, suggested Russia committed war crimes in Syria by supporting the bombing of Aleppo. The meeting was called off when the French government indicated that talks would be confined to Syria, the BBC reports.
The two leaders were expected to inaugurate a Kremlin-funded Russian Orthodox cathedral and cultural centre in Paris on 19 October and to visit the exhibition Icons of Modern Art: the Shchukin Collection (22 October-20 February 2017) at the Fondation Louis Vuitton. Those events “fell out of the programme”, a Kremlin spokesman told the official Russian news agency Ria Novosti today. The Fondation Louis Vuitton declined to comment.
The row overshadows an exhibition that was brokered at the highest diplomatic levels. Shchukin’s French grandson, André-Marc Delocque-Fourcaud, told The Art Newspaper earlier this year that the show was on the agenda when Hollande and Putin met at the United Nations General Assembly in New York in September 2014. It has been billed as one of the most prominent events of the France-Russia year of culture in 2016-17.
With 130 works on loan from the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg and the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, Icons of Modern Art brings together around half of the pioneering collection that lined the walls of Shchukin’s Moscow mansion before the Russian Revolution. The textile industrialist was among the earliest patrons of Henri Matisse and also collected paintings by Pablo Picasso, Paul Gauguin and Claude Monet in depth. His house-museum was seized by the Bolsheviks in 1918 and the works were later divided by Stalin’s decree between the Hermitage and Pushkin museums.
• With additional reporting by Sophia Kishkovsky
