Savva morozov biography of william

The elder Morozov brother, who moved with his new wife into a 19th-century palace in Moscow, clearly enjoyed his fortune. “Mikhaïl lived in a very grand bourgeois style,” the curator points out. “He was a real bon vivant—he drank too much and ate too much. He had his house done by a trendy architect, which he filled with his paintings and objects. It was particularly in his private office, where he received artists, that he had his French paintings.”

By the time he died, in 1903, of the kidney condition nephritis, at the age of 33, Mikhaïl had amassed 44 works by Russian artists and many important French Impressionist paintings—Manet, Renoir, Degas, Monet—along with Postimpressionist works by Gauguin and van Gogh, and sculptures by Rodin. “Collections and collectors are still so rare in Russia,” wrote Sergueï Diaghilev, the founder of the Ballets Russes, in a tribute. “We can only imagine how serious the collection of Mikhaïl Morozov would have become if his early death had not interrupted such a promising start.”

In 1895, Ivan, like his older brother, began his collection with Russian painters. By 1901, he was joining Mikhaïl on his trips to Paris, staying at the Grand Hotel next to the Opéra. A year after the death of his brother, he made the first of his annual visits to the Salon d’Automne in Paris, which was filled that year with more than 1,300 paintings and sculptures by almost 400 artists. Ivan was particularly interested in the salon’s retrospectives of Renoir and Cézanne. On that first trip, he bought major paintings by Renoir, Vuillard, Pissarro, and Sisley.

In Moscow, Ivan bought a palace that had belonged to a member of the aristocracy. “And he decided to make a museum,” explains Baldassari. “He demolished a mezzanine to raise the central spaces, creating ceilings that were 39 feet high. He had a glass skylight installed for even more light from above. He invented a form of central heating hi

In the summer of 1893 I again went to sea, but this time on board the Training Ship Prince Pojarsky[9]. She was an ancient three-master ironclad, steam and sail, of ante-diluvian design. Owing to her size and tonnage, she carried a veritable forest of yards and rigging, into which, except up the mainmast, we were forbidden to go because it was considered definitely dangerous.

However, in spite of this cumbersome world aloft, we cruised a good deal in her under sail, but only in the Gulf of Finland.

There was the same seemingly entirely indispensable and continuous flow of abuse, and the commander of the Moriakhad thoroughly worthy rivals in our captain and commander when it came to venting their tempers on the crew. They, too, were addicted to crew beating.

There was something new on the Pojarsky, which we had not experienced on the Moriak, and it was a truly interesting experience, something that had to be seen to be believed; this was her horizontal engine and the boilers—veritable museum pieces.

When I went to sea, engines, and those that dealt with them, were still considered by the older men as an unwelcome invasion, a wanton incursion into the hallowed and pure realm of sail. They were looked upon in the light of uninvited strangers, men who had filtered in unasked, bringing with them vapours, smoke, and pestilential odours. 

To some degree they were justified in their attitude, as I was soon to experience, and sail and steam did not in fact enter into any kind of harmonious partnership at any time; they interfered with each other, they did not ‘hit it off,’ as they belonged to different worlds.

Steam has taken much romance from the sea, it has broken her mystery and captivating glamour for ever. The art of the ancient craft of seamanship has retreated before the onslaught of progress. The sea, once a proud and domineering mistress, cruel and condescending, vicious and caressing to those who fared upon her, and liv

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Morozov

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MOROZOV The Story of a Family and a Lost Collection

NATALYA SEMENOVA Translated by Arch Tait

YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW HAVEN AND LONDON iii

Copyright © 2020 Yale University and Natalya Semenova All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press) without written permission from the publishers. For information about this and other Yale University Press publications, please contact: U.S. Office: [email protected] yalebooks.com Europe Office: [email protected] yalebooks.co.uk Set in Adobe Garamond Pro by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd Printed in Great Britain by Gomer Press Ltd, Llandysul, Ceredigion, Wales Library of Congress Control Number: 2020941220 ISBN 978-0-300-24982-8 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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Dedicated, at last, to Vladimir Vladimirovich Domogatsky

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Every sound man has, aside from his work, something else to which he devotes himself with a will. Let us call that something his avocation. Sometimes it takes over his life. Vladimir Ryabushinsky

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CONTENTS

I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX X XI XII XIII

List of Illustrations A Note on the Text Foreword

ix xiv xv

Sketches for a Portrait Varvara Khludova Mikhail Morozov ‘A Russian Rough Diamond, Polished by Civilization’ To Moscow! To Prechistenka! Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur ‘Cézanne Season’ ‘A Russian Who Doesn’t Haggle?’ Cupid and Psyche Maurice Denis, or the French Occupy Moscow The Mediterranean–Moroccan Suite A Place in History Elusive Manet

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69 87 97 104 113 124 133 146 162

CONTENTS

XIV XV XVI XVII XVIII

Last Acquisitions Citizen Morozov Emigration The Palace on Kropotkin Street The End of the Museum