ART: Tea With Sugar

A nine-by-twelve-foot canvas of five loosely sketched, bright pink nudes swinging in a wild dance across emerald green grass under a vivid blue sky hung last week on the walls of Manhattan Art Dealer Pierre Matisse, flanked by a group of photographs and autograph letters. Bewildering to the cautious mind, the canvas was of first importance to the U. S. art world for it was a full-size preliminary sketch for La Danse, the most famed mural decoration that Dealer Matisse’s father, bearded Henri Matisse, ever did. Few U. S. art lovers have ever seen the original. With its companion piece, La Musique, another arrangement of pink nudes on green grass, it is one of the chief treasures of Moscow’s Museum of Modern Western Art.

The son of a solid wheat dealer of northern France, Artist Matisse dutifully began life as a lawyer’s apprentice, was forced to give up his law studies when a severe attack of appendicitis left him an invalid for many months. Painting was suggested to help his convalescence and he liked it so well that he never opened a law book again.

Never one to starve unnecessarily, Henri Matisse discovered that an art student could make a fair living as a museum copyist. For ten years, while his own painting swung further and further to the Left, while his interest in oriental art—Persian miniatures in particular —grew by leaps & bounds, he worked for the Government making microscopically exact copies of the great paintings in the Louvre for private collectors and provincial museums. By 1906 Artist Matisse, still youthful, but bearded as he is today, had given up copying, was the leader of an insurgent group of painters who were derisively called Les Fauves (Wild Beasts).* Outraging conservatives, they acquired much publicity but few customers. To Paris from Russia, three years prior, had come one Serge Stchoukine, an immensely wealthy Muscovite whose fortune came from importing the one luxury that rag-wrapped moujiks would not do without: tea. Tea Tycoon Stchoukine had bought the 18th Century Troubetzkoy Palace, filled its rococo halls with gilded French furniture and crystal chandeliers. He also had an instinctive appreciation of what the younger French artists were trying to do. In Paris he bought the Fayet collection of Gauguins outright, bought one canvas from Henri Matisse. He liked it. In 1906 he was back in Paris for more Matisse pictures, but his walls were getting so crowded that he insisted they must be painted to certain specified sizes. Three years later Teaman Stchoukine was still convinced that Henri Matisse was a fine painter, gave him carte blanche to decorate the grand staircase of his palace. In his narrow knickerbockers and high laced shoes, Artist Matisse frequented at that time the Moulin Rouge and the Moulin de la Galette, contemplating the dancing cocottes that lame Toulouse-Lautrec had painted so shrewdly a few years earlier. Artist Matisse felt that the farandole, a sort of strumpets’ ring-around-a-rosy popular at both music halls, would be a suitable subject for the grand staircase of a Moscow bourgeois, and that is what he sent to his patron, reduced to simplest terms of nude figures and primitive colors.

Tourists in the Soviet capital may see the originals any day for a one-ruble ticket, but no longer in the Stchoukine mansion. Friend and fellow collector of Tea Tycoon Stchoukine was I. A. Morosov, who refined in the Ukraine beet sugar to put in Stchoukine tea. He also had a mansion, bought French moderns at a time when the rest of the world scoffed. Both collections were nationalized by the Bolsheviks in 1918, run as separate museums for a while, then assembled in the Morosov mansion in 1928. Drastically weeded by Soviet experts, strengthened by many additions from other bourgeois and aristocratic homes, the collection today is equalled only by that of Dr. Albert Barnes, the Argyrol tycoon of Merion, Pa. No book on modern French painting can claim authority without mentioning at least a dozen works in Moscow’s Museum of Western Art. Of Picasso alone, it boasts over 50 pictures.

* Members: Matisse, Braque, Van Dongen, Vlaminck, Duffy, Friesz.