For art lovers unable to visit Soviet museums, for anyone fascinated by painters' views of past and present times, this large and brilliant display of French paintings in the Pushkin Museum is a source of lasting joy.

"Illustrated and beautifully produced, Old Masters, Impressionists & Modern tells the story of the Russian taste for French art. Essays highlight such collectors as Catherine the Great, members of the Russian nobility such as the Yusupovs and the Golitsyns, and the early twentieth-century merchant-patrons Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov. The book's authors relate how works from these distinguished collections were united at the Pushkin Museum to form one of the most impressive arrays of French paintings outside of France. The book reproduces and discusses seventy-six of the museum's most important holdings, including masterpieces by Nicolas Poussin, Jacques-Louis David, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Camille Corot, Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Paul Cezanne, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso, some of which are also landmark works in the history of art."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

The rich tradition of French painting was an important influence on Russian art from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1920s, a period that saw the rise of many of the most important movements in modern art. A magnificent visual record of an unprecedented event, this book, the catalogue of an ambitious exhibition of master paintings from the four greatest museums of Russia, examines the interaction of these two great cultures. Drawing on the collections of the State Russian Museum and the Pushkin Museum in Moscow and the Tretyakov Gallery and the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, the book presents outstanding examples of Salon painting, Impressionism, Fauvism, and Cubism in France, and related movements in Russia, among them The Wanderers, Constructivism, and Suprematism. Paintings by Renoir, Cezanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Matisse are reproduced, along with works by Kandinsky, Tatlin, and Malevich. Key episodes in the story of this fascinating exchange include the vital role played by the great Russian collectors Ivan Morosov and Sergei Shchukin, whose preeminent collections of French art were an inspiration to the Russian avant-garde; the ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev's promotion of Russian art in France in 1906; and Henri Matisse's visit to Russia in 1911.

The Russians have loved and admired French art since its first flowering after the Renaissance. This selection represents the most representative works of the French masters in the 500 years during which French painting dominated the art world.

"Examines the problematic serial nature of ... [Pissarro's] urban works"--Foreword.