Macron inaugurates Morozov art collection exhibit in Paris

Paris, September 22 (BNA) French President Emmanuel Macron inaugurated, on Tuesday, the opening of the exhibition dedicated to the art collection built by the Russian industrialist brothers Ivan and Mikhail Morozov at the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris at the turn of the twentieth century.

Macron was accompanied by his wife Brigitte and Bernard Arnault, the French luxury magnate and owner of the Fondation, who helped cut bureaucratic and diplomatic red tape to make the show a reality.

The exhibition brings together 200 masterpieces by prominent French artists such as Monet, Renoir and Van Gogh along with Russian masters including Malevich or Korovin, all on loan from museums in Russia, according to Reuters.

The Elysee Palace said in a statement that it represented another step in the “Trianon Dialogue”, an initiative to strengthen relations between French and Russian civil society, notably through cultural cooperation launched by Macron and Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2017.

It’s the Fondation’s second show for major Russian art collectors, and it follows the Sergei Shchukin Collection exhibition in 2016, which attracted 1.3 million visitors.

This is the first time the group has traveled outside Russia since its inception thanks to the foundation’s partnership with the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow and the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow.

Like the Shchukin collection, most of the artworks of the Morozov brothers were nationalized after the 1917 revolution, and then were mainly assimilated into the collections of Russian museums.

The exhibition will run from September 22, 2021 to February 22, 2022.

HF