+ SAILING HOME: Le Port (Port-Vendres) 1905 by André Derain is on show in France, thanks largely to the efforts of Bernard Arnault, head of LVMH.
ADAGP, PARIS 2016
WHEN THE Fondation Louis Vuitton opened a couple of years ago, it was not without controversy. But since then, Paris has had rather more serious things to worry about than a luxury-goods conglomerate constructing a huge Frank Gehry building in the middle of the Bois de Boulogne. Now the FLV has become one of the city’s major cultural attractions. Like it or not, the fine arts have become a de facto branch of the luxury industry, and if that means shows such as “Icons of Modern Art,” which brings the Shchukin collection—for decades split between the Hermitage and Pushkin museums in Russia—to the heart of Western Europe, there is quite a lot to like.
Sergei Shchukin was a successful, late 19th-century Russian businessman; happily, he was also an aesthete. He began collecting on a trip to Paris in 1897, and by 1908 the walls of his house in Moscow were crammed, frame to frame, with more than 250 examples of the Russian avant-garde and the masters of impressionism. Every major dealer of the day was selling to him, from commercial genius and so-called inventor of impressionism Paul Durand-Ruel to Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, the Colonel Parker to Picasso’s Elvis. He was no hedge-funder cruising a Frieze art fair. But after the Bolshevik Revolution, his collection was broken up and handed to the state; it has not been reunited outside Russia since.