Two paintings from the Morozov collection, including that of a Russian oligarch and another belonging to a Ukrainian museum, exhibited at the Vuitton Foundation in Paris since September, will “remain in France”, the Ministry of Health announced to AFP on Saturday. Culture.
The first painting “will remain in France as long as its owner, a Russian oligarch, remains subject to an asset freezing measure”, indicated the ministry, without giving the name of the owner, while the second, belonging to the Musée des Beaux – Arts of Dnipropetrovsk in Ukraine, will remain “until the situation in the country allows its safe return”.
A world first for an exhibition of such magnitude
About 200 works of art by Van Gogh, Gauguin, Renoir or Cézanne have been exhibited at the Louis Vuitton Foundation since September 22, alongside Russian painters such as Golovin, Gontcharova, Korovin, Mashkov, Melnikov, Malevich, Répine, Serov…
These masterpieces were collected by the two brothers Mikhaïl and Ivan Morozov, industrialists passionate about modern art at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.
This is the first time that this collection has come out of Russia on this scale to be exhibited abroad.
Great Russian museums and a private collection
The vast majority of works come from three major Russian museums: the Pushkin Museum and the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, as well as the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg. Some come from the National Museum of Fine Arts of the Republic of Belarus in Minsk, the Russian National Museum in Saint Petersburg and the Museum of Fine Arts in Dnipropetrovsk in Ukraine.
A table titled Piotr Konchalovsky – Self-portrait (1912) comes from the private collection of Petr Aven, a Russian oligarch close to Vladimir Putin who appears on the list of Russian personalities subject to Western sanctions.