From October 22nd 2016 to March 5th 2017, Louis Vuitton Foundation Open 11am to 8pm on week days and 9am to 9pm on Saturdays and Sundays. Closed on Tuesdays. Adress: 8, av. Mahatma Gandhi 75116 – phone 00 33 1 40 69 96 00   This exhibition is a rarety: it focuses on one of the most important patrons of art of the 20th century, the Russian Sergueï Chtchoukine. With a collection of 130 masterworks from Monet, Cezanne, Matisse and Picasso among others, all representative of modern art, it displays content but also context, and explains with what ability Chtchoukine gathered one of the biggest collections of masterworks of the early 20th century. The works have been gathered for the first time in many decades thanks to the participation of the Pouchkine museum of Moscow and the Ermitage museum of St Petersburg. The collection was originally made public under Lenin in 1918, then was banned by Stalin as part of Stalin’s fight against “bourgeois art”. The collection was then divided in 1948 between the Ermitage and the Pouchkine. Today we are invited to discover this very influential art collection through subtle themes such as its impact on young Russian artists from 1908 on, and the connexions between Europe and Russia in terms of art at the time. These works also influenced the avant garde of Russian movements, as is depicted in the last parts of the exhibition.

Paul Cezanne, Mardi gras, 1888-1890

Such a feature was only possible thanks to the participation of Pouchkine’s grand son, the commissioner Anne Baldassari, directors of the Pouchkine state museum of arts, the Ermitage and the director of the Tretiakov national gallery.   D.A.