Few experiences are so exhilarating as seeing art before completion. The Russian show at London's Royal Academy is a composite work of art. I sneaked in to see it last week, to wander on my own through its echoing rooms, as technicians adjusted a light here and a nameplate there. The pictures were like actors at final rehearsal, testing their voices, adjusting their makeup, looking askance at each other. The effect was surreal. As the spotlights dimmed and brightened, Matisse's dancers seemed ready to swirl from their frame and escape down Piccadilly to a nightclub.
The Royal Academy's latest blockbuster is enjoyable not just for the celebrity of its works - built round 50 French impressionist and postimpressionist masterpieces - but because it tells a story. It sends us away informed as well as inspired. Given the poor quality of some of the Russian works, it may send many engrossed in dispute. Why was France alone so creative in the 1900s?
Russia at the time was America's equal in industrial muscle, and probably superior in taste. The country was immensely rich. That wealth yielded collectors no less astute than their American counterparts, trawling west Europe for paintings, as Catherine the Great had done a century before. In particular, they turned their attention to France. Today we admire the impressionist treasures in America's great museums but understandably forget the trove that has slept undisturbed mostly in the vaults of St Petersburg's Hermitage and Moscow's Pushkin Museum.
At the turn of the century, the two most prominent collectors were the textile tycoons Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov. Their purchasing was near manic. Shchukin bought more than a hundred early Picassos and personally commissioned Matisse's La Danse, a more vivid version of that in New York's Museum of Modern Art. These men filled their Moscow mansions with Manet, Bonnard, Monet, Renoir, Cézanne, Van Gogh and Gauguin, and invited artists to see them.
The exhibition strides confidently through this narrative. It opens with pensive 19th-century Russian landscapes and portraits, including Ilya Repin's celebrated picture of Tolstoy barefoot in peasant garb. Over them - indeed over the whole exhibition - hovers a cloud of tense dramatic irony, the viewer's awareness that all this would soon end.
From here we are led directly into the explosion that impressionist France brought to the salons of Moscow. Here are Monet's Poppy Field, Manet's bar scene, Cézanne's Woman in Blue and Renoir's exquisite garden group. We pass into the main gallery, dominated by Matisse's apotheosis of the dance, painted in response to Picasso's poised Demoiselles d'Avignon.
Five naked revellers, bursting from all times and none, hurl themselves about the canvas in the 20th century's homage to primeval energy. Opposite hangs Bonnard's vision of the dance, but here the participants cavort decorously in a bucolic Grasse landscape. The two works, painted at the same time, are at different ends of every spectrum, yet are embraced by the same creative enterprise. Their distraught conversation is flanked by Picasso's Dryad, Gauguin's Sweet Reveries and Braque's gloriously shaded landscape of the Castle at La Roche-Guyon. The exhibition is worth a visit for this room alone.
Sated with such riches we next hear the sound of Russian music (except there is sadly no music) in the form of a room devoted to Diaghilev. His Ballets Russes and Stravinsky's Rite of Spring were one Russian response to the impact of postimpressionist France. Bakst depicts the suave impresario with his old nanny, sad but emphatically present in the background.
Russian art now takes over, as painters stumble to meet the French challenge. They begin with their roots in iconography, symbolism and the patriotic realism championed by Tolstoy, Mussorgsky and Borodin. As France makes its impact, the consequences can be grotesque. Petrov-Vodkin's two boys dancing naked against a green and blue background is a horrible spoof of Matisse.
Painters of whom few will have heard seem derivative, mimicking expressionism, cubism, fauvism, even surrealism. Yet gradually they emerge into the light with a voice of their own. The names and works become familiar once more. We see Chagall's despairing Red Jew and his surreal love picture, Promenade. We see Kandinsky's Winter and Malevich's bold abstracts. At last the message seems to have taken hold. There is hope.
Suddenly it stops. Two brief decades of cultural penetration come to an end and darkness gathers. After the revolution most of these pictures disappeared from view, and by 1948 Stalin pulled down the shutters on the Pushkin Museum, to which Shchukin and Morozov had bequeathed their collections. It was, he said, "a breeding ground of formalist views and obsequiousness before decadent bourgeois culture".
My one regret is the absence from the show of the art of which Stalin approved, by way of contrast and warning. It ends on a dying fall in the emotional emptiness of dictatorship. There is only Tatlin's 1919 model of a gigantic spiral tower that, it was hoped, would be revolutionary Russia's answer to the Eiffel Tower. It was never built.
The works on display come from four museums, the Hermitage and the Russian in St Petersburg, and Moscow's Pushkin and Tretyakov. They offer merely a taste of the treasures buried in their vaults, which few people alive will ever see. About 90% of the Hermitage's collection is not on view, including works that any other museum, city or nation would give a fortune to exhibit. Yet, at the same time, these museums are chronically short of funds for showing or conserving what they have, let alone for acquiring or commissioning new work. They are the most extreme case of asset rich and cash poor.
Sooner or later the professional museum fatwa that treats these places as private curatorial archives and denies their governors freedom to trade collections must crumble. The crude chauvinism that says that a work of art must be "saved for the nation", even if then buried by the nation, is the most arrogant of imperial leftovers. Art should be displayed. Russia has more works of global appeal than it can possibly handle, yet desperately needs money to look after a fraction of what it has.
When Russia was rich, it garnered the choicest works of France and Italy, as Britain did before it and America afterwards. Today new lands and new publics should be able to purchase and enjoy at least what Russia (and others) cannot possibly display. International conventions can be drawn up to prevent abuse, like those of Britain's Museums Association and others debated in last September's issue of the art magazine Apollo. For example, pictures should be sold only to replenish collections, not to repair roofs, though even that is surely worth doing in extremis.
The world does not come to an end if a Monet or a Matisse hangs on a wall in Los Angeles or Dubai rather than being stored in a basement in Moscow or London. The world is enhanced thereby. Russia will always have treasures and to spare to stage a display like this. What it cannot display it should sell to those who can. Pictures are painted to glorify the light of day, not the gloom of vaults.
If you are interested in the painting exhibits, you can check them out here.
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