How did Morozov collectors buy paintings? Revelers-collectors Morozovs

Interest in the Morozov dynasty arose again thanks to the Foundation Louis Vuitton exhibition in Paris and exhibitions of the collections of these patrons at the Pushkin Museum. A. S. Pushkin and in the Hermitage. The Morozovs made their fortune in the production of textiles. Magazine The Status Symbol provides the most interesting memoirs of a contemporary of famous collectors.

The Morozovs are collectors of new Russian and French art

The Morozovs became famous for their philanthropy and collecting: Alexei Vikulovich created the Porcelain Museum, Ivan Abramovich collected impressionists (now the collection of the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts), Mikhail Abramovich sponsored the Greek Hall in the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, was the director of the Russian Musical Society; Varvara Alekseevna created a library-reading room named after. Turgeneva, Sergei Timofeevich - Museum of Handicraft Art, Savva Timofeevich contributed to the creation of the Moscow Art Theater, the Diaghilev seasons.

The most famous art collectors were Ivan Abramovich and his brother Mikhail Abramovich Morozov. They began collecting works by Russian artists. From the beginning of the 1900s, the Morozovs acquired works of new Western European art, mainly French painting. The collection of Mikhail Morozov was brought by him as a gift to the Tretyakov Gallery in 1910. Mikhail Morozov's collection included works by Mikhail Vrubel, Valentin Serov, Vasily Surikov, Edouard Monet, Claude Monet, Pierre Auguste Renoir, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Edvard Munch.

The collection of Ivan Morozov, the most famous patron of the dynasty, contained works by Claude Monet, Renoir, Paul Cézanne, Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Andre Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck, Otho Friesz, Charles Manguin, Albert Marquet, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso.

After the revolution, the collection of Ivan Morozov, together with the collection of Sergei Shchukin, served as the basis for the organization of the Museum of New Western Art, the collections of which were subsequently transferred to the State Hermitage in St. Petersburg and the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow.

How Leo Tolstoy “knocked off” Morozov

However, contemporaries spoke unflatteringly about the new Moscow entrepreneurs. From the memoirs of the artist, member and manager of the Association of Traveling Art Exhibitions Yakov Minchenkov, the following case is known:

There was only one visitor left at the exhibition - a prominent representative of the bourgeoisie, one of the Morozov family of Moscow merchants, a reveler and a madman. It was said about him that when he came to a city and stayed at a hotel, he demanded the eviction of everyone living on his floor, declaring: “I pay for everything and don’t want anyone else to live next to me.” In a fashionable, expensive tuxedo, with a lush red flower in his buttonhole and himself red from wine - when he saw Tolstoy, he began to run around him, asking me:

  - Is this Tolstoy, Tolstoy?

Lev Nikolaevich, apparently, was tired of seeing the spinning figure in front of him, and he, frowning, asked:

   - What does this cockerel want?

I had to advise Morozov to leave us alone, and then Tolstoy returned to his good mood.

Yakov Minchenkov “Memories of the Itinerants”

In “Memoirs of the Itinerants,” Yakov Minchenkov described collectors from among the old Moscow merchants and members of the Morozov dynasty:

“Most of them were old people, poorly educated people, but loving and appreciating art. But their children, who even received higher education, were not all very sensitive to art. Often their acquisitions at exhibitions were in the nature of a whim, a waste of money from excess. These were the Morozov brothers. They came to the exhibition, sometimes two or three of them, purchased things, and some time later, when paying, they even forgot which of them bought what. At first they purchased paintings at a traveling exhibition, then they got tired of the art of the Itinerants, and they began to collect works of new movements, and threw the paintings of the Itinerants out of their collections. Then they switched to foreign artists, changing their views and tastes in art, like fashion in costumes.”

Yakov Minchenkov “Memories of the Itinerants”