Henri Matisse. Paintings and Drawings from the Pushkin Museum in Moscow and the Hermitage in Leningrad

A representative display of Matisse's works made between the years 1901 and 1913 kept in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow and the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg. These paintings reveal the vividness of Matisse's Fauvist and Post-Fauvist style.

Russia was the first country to import works by Henri Matisse following his huge critical acclaim at the Autumn Salon held in Paris in 1905. Nevertheless, collector Sergei Ivanovich Shchukin – who also purchased works by Monet, Gauguin and other young avant-garde artists like Picasso, Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck and Kees van Dongen – had shown an interest in Matisse before his first exhibition at Vollard's Parisian gallery in 1904. Shchukin's passion for Matisse was shared by Ivan Morozov, a fellow countryman, who acquired eleven of the artist's works. The two private collections were nationalised and became independent museums following the Russian Revolution. Some years later they were brought together at the State Museum of New Western Art that existed until 1948, when the collections were divided up between the Pushkin Museum and the Hermitage Museum.

This exhibition is a representative selection of Matisse's paintings of the years 1901 to 1913, vibrant works that illustrate his Fauvist and post-Fauvist style. Coinciding with this exhibition, the two Russian museums display a number of Picasso works from Spanish collections.