As Paris lines up to see what has been hailed as the cultural event of the season-an exhibit of 130 works by Henri Matisse-a lawsuit seeking to reclaim the paintings of a turn-of-the-century Russian collector threatens to mar the exhibit and lock up its catalogue.
A French court heard arguments last Friday for the suit by Irina Chtoukine, the 77-year-old daughter of the pre-revolutionary textile magnate Serguei Chtoukine, who claims the Soviet Union illegally appropriated her father’s magnificent collection of impressionist, cubist and modernist art and divided the works between Moscow’s Pushkin Museum and the Hermitage in St. Petersburg.
The museums lent 30 Matisse paintings from the former Chtoukine collection for the show at the Georges Pompidou Center that opened this week, including some of the most important Fauvist canvases such as “The Dance,” “The Conversation,” “The Painter’s Family” and “Portrait of Madame Matisse,” painted between 1909 and 1913. Chtoukine is demanding that the works be removed from the exhibit and the catalogue sequestered.
While art and legal specialists seem to agree that her lawsuit is unlikely to be successful, they also agree that if it is, the implications are vast for the future lending of the treasures in Russian museums.
Chtoukine’s lawyer said that she wants to reunite her father’s collection and donate it to the Moscow museum, with the condition that her father be cited beside the paintings as the donor.
“She is not indifferent to seeing the collection united in Moscow, nor to the fact that she be the one to give it, and not the Soviet state that takes it,” said lawyer Bernard Jouanneau. “In France we have the idea that there is no confiscation without indemnity; it is against French law to nationalize something without paying damages.”
“We think that she (Chtoukine) doesn’t really have the elements that she needs to win,” said Marion Julien, the administrative director for cultural affairs at the Pompidou Center. “But the judge is free to choose. It’s clear that if the decision were unfavorable, the implications would be . . . extremely dramatic for lending between Russian museums and the rest of the world. From the moment a judge decides that Russian works might not be considered as belonging to the state, Russia will of course hesitate to lend its works outside the country.”
A French resident, Chtoukine brought a similar lawsuit here in 1954 against 34 Picassos on loan from the Soviet Union. In that case a judge declared the suit beyond his competence.
But Jouanneau said the current suit was different, since the claim is based on copyright laws that, until they were later modified, gave the owner of a painting rights to reproduction and display.
But justified or not, officials at the Pompidou Center protest that Chtoukine’s complaint is with Russia, not France. “Culturally we can imagine that the reconstitution of a prestigious collection could be valuable. This doesn’t seem to me to be impossible, or even difficult,” said Julien. “. . . But it’s clear that much of this is a Russian-Russian problem. We’re a bit hostages in this.”
Newspapers and magazines have hailed the show of Matisse’s color-drenched, expressive abstract paintings between 1904 and 1917-his most creative period-as “astonishing” and “exceptional,” and crowds have mobbed the exhibition halls since the show opened.
The offspring of a Russian textile dynasty, Serguei Chtoukine fell in love with Monet’s impressionism during an 1897 visit to Paris, and started a personal collection that eventually comprised 450 works, including not just Picasso and Matisse, but Gaugin, Renoir, Degas, Cezanne and Van Gogh.
In the upheaval preceding the Bolshevik revolution and the rise of Lenin, Chtoukine emigrated to France in 1918; his art collection was nationalized in October of that year.
The lawsuit is the second blow to the prestigious exposition. Striking museum workers forced the cancellation of the exhibit’s opening for two days. The workers, who finally abandoned their blockade at midday on the second day, demanded better job security and protested against a rise in admission fees at the multi-functional center, the most popular cultural venue in the country.
A ruling in the lawsuit is expected in May.
