For the First Time in 100 Years, 130 Art Masterpieces Leave Russia
The Fondation Louis Vuitton is hosting an exhibition of masterworks from the Hermitage's breathtaking Shchukin collection.
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By the time Russian industrialist Sergei Shchukin’s palace and fortune were seized by the Bolsheviks, his collection of 278 artworks by the likes of Matisse, Degas, and Picasso was considered one of the finest in the world.
After the February Revolution, Shchukin emigrated to Paris, and in 1918, Lenin officially absorbed the paintings into the collection of the Russian State. (Until his death in 1936, Shchukin was reportedly sanguine about his paintings’ fate—he had planned to donate the collection to the public, anyway.) The paintings were then hidden away for several decades during Stalin’s reign, their very existence deemed “decadent." They gradually reappeared on the walls of the Hermitage and Pushkin museums in the mid-1970s.