Masters of modern art from the Hermitage

‘Painting from nature is not copying the object’, Paul Cézanne wrote, it is ‘realizing one’s sensations’. Cézanne was in a kind of dialogue with the impressionists. Like them, he continued to paint traditional subject matter but he explored it in ways that many of his contemporaries found odd or even shocking. Cézanne’s analytical approach to nature and his way of building form with colour were at odds with his impressionist friends. They sought what was fleeting in nature; Cézanne searched for its eternal essence. Where the impressionists saw water as best able to refract light and reveal movement, in Cézanne’s painting ‘Banks of the River Marne’ there are no ripples and everything is still. Where the impressionists saw change as representing reality, Cézanne concentrated on the relationship of objects. He saw the world as a plane uniting all the essential underlying connections of the universe. Can Cézanne’s influence on the development of Western modernism be overstated? The collectors Shchukin and Morozov came to believe that he was the first true modern, and his influence can be detected in the works of so many artists, including Henri Matisse who once called Cézanne ‘a sort of god’.

Sergey Shchukin’s collection of works by Paul Gauguin was unrivalled. He filled his dining room with the artist’s paintings, hung closely together to form a wall of what looked like golden icons. To a Russian like Shchukin, a wall of icons symbolised the Heavenly Kingdom, a world of saints and angels, so it must have seemed a suitable form for a display of Gauguin’s ‘exotic’ peoples and their spiritual beliefs. Gauguin travelled to Tahiti twice in search of what he called a ‘primitive paradise’. ‘The month of Mary’ was painted during his second stay. Its direct reference was a sculptural relief from the temple of Borobudur in Java, a photograph of which Gauguin carried around with him. But it also refers to the Virgin Mary and reveals Gauguin’s desire to unite traditional Christian motifs with his own ‘primitivist’ mythology. Gauguin was constantly striving to develop a new style. He started out showing with the impressionists, working closely with Pissarro. Then he went through a phase of admiring Cézanne above all others. He continued his move away from impressionism and wanted to ‘synthesise’ his approach to nature with feeling, to create a symbolic register of flat patterns and pure colour. Later, he would be called a ‘post-impressionist’, one of that generation whose work derived from, and reacted to, impressionism.

Sergey Shchukin’s son Ivan once recalled his father saying of Pablo Picasso: ‘This is the future’. Shchukin went on to amass some 50 Picassos that he would later hang all together in their own room in his Trubetskoy Palace. He seemed bewitched by the artist and spent long hours – sometimes weeks – letting new works speak to him until he understood them. It can’t have been easy: cubism was a rupture, breaking all ties with the past and rejecting all accepted painterly values. Shchukin was introduced to Picasso in 1908 at the Bateau-Lavoir in Montmartre by his friend and art advisor, the artist Henri Matisse. That same year Shchukin first saw Picasso’s revolutionary ‘Demoiselles d’Avignon’. He was reportedly shocked, but he later bought a work that issued directly from it: ‘Woman with a fan’.