Ivan Abramovitch Morozov

The five sons of the former serf of Rioumine (of which the four branches of their father’s famous company were de facto part at the end of the 19th century) had all inherited the entrepreneurial spirit of their father. This gene had to be so powerful that each brother separately (and the five together) created the Morozov group of the national textile industry.

Timofei Savvich became the owner of the factory in Nikolsk. Eliséi and Vikula became owners of the factory in Orekhovo-Zuev. The factories in Bogorodsk-Gloukhovsk belonged to Zakhar. Abram owned the one in Tver. When Morozov’s property was redivided in 1872, the cotton mills in Tver (the first town to be crossed by the Nicolas railway line linking the two Russian capitals) became properties of both Abram and David Abramovich.

Tver, Morozov factory

The managers of the Tver factory 1915

Arsenï Abramovitch

At the age of 21, Moscow University student Mikhail Abramovitch Morozov became the legal heir to millions from his father. That same year, Ivan Abramovitch left for Zurich and joined the Faculty of Chemistry at the École Polytechnique Supérieure. It should be noted that at that time such knowledge was particularly popular in the textile industry; Savva Morozov was also a trained chemist. In Switzerland, Ivan was passionate about art and studied diligently. He drew with students in architecture, and on Sundays went to paint landscapes in oil.

In 1898 and at the age of twenty-four, Ivan Abramovitch Morozov, a graduate specialist and the hope of his family, returned home to go directly to Tver, where thousands of workers weave calico, Indian and velvet, and where the factories of the Tver Manufacture Company, the famous empire of the Morozov, spread.

The young Morozov actively began his work. Production was increasing, opportunities were expanding, and owners were getting richer. Mikhail, one year older than his brother, Ivan, didn’t even want to hear about the factory. Arsenï, although he had studied in England and even had an internship in “production practices”, spent his days hunting or with his dogs. This did not prevent the brothers from receiving a substantial income on a regular basis, since they were equal shareholders of the company. Only Ivan matched the image of the typical manufacturer created by Russian literature. It must be said; however, that he played this role with great pleasure. Under a soft appearance – the painter Sergei Vinogradov called him “the calf with good eyes” – Ivan Abramovitch distinguished himself in business by being rational and sometimes even hard and inflexible, especially when it came to raising the wages of workers. Morozov was completely unfamiliar with “the Slavic dream inherent to the Russians”, considering that in business it can only be harmful.

Considered a “convinced capitalist and conservative”, Ivan Morozov was more than once accused of stinginess. In this regard, there was an anecdote that at a mass the rich merchant lent five rubles to his brother on condition that he returned them with interest.

However, it was absolutely impossible to accuse Ivan Morozov of not honestly loving the business he was leading because it was precisely this extraordinary tenacity in the effort to achieve his goal that enabled him to become, at twenty-five years, the head of the company. Until her death, his mother Varvara Alekseievna remained chairman of the board of directors. Ivan; on the other hand, held the permanent position of director of the company until November 1917 when he handed it down to the Workers’ Committee. The first strike in 1897 took place during his tenure. Much more serious was the year 1899 when Ivan Abramovitch was forced to leave Tver. Then came the unrest of 1905 which led to the first Russian revolution. Sergei Vinogradov recalls that after these events the owners never showed up again in the factory. The painter found himself to be the unwilling witness of boos and insults from the workers: “Mikhail had already died, while Ivan had put on a lot of weight. It was this obesity that caused the workers to swear rude and disgusting swear words. That time was bad – a time of mutiny.” However, even this disrespectful attitude on the part of its own workers did not prevent Varvara Alekseievna from allocating millions to improve the daily lives of workers: “It was an entire city on the outskirts of Tver. Nearly twenty thousand workers lived there. The layout of the small, working-class town was amazing. A huge theater had been built that could hold several thousand spectators, reading rooms, a library, and beautiful model apartments for workers.”

But neither the unrest nor the political tremors prevented the company from doubling its capital, which Morozov managed to do in less than a decade. He even managed to triple his father’s capital on the eve of the 1917 revolution.

Palace of Ivan Abramovitch Morozov in Moscow (photo 1920)

The choice of an old private mansion on the Pretchistenka, classic, without too much magnificence and having belonged to the widow of his uncle David Abramovitch, reflected good taste and great ambitions. Moreover, this house seemed to be in complete opposition to the pompous palace of his brother Mikhail’s Smolensky Boulevard with its aparthotel decorated “in styles” and was even more distinguished from the Moorish palace of his brother Arseni, who was so struck so by his oddity.

It should be noted here that so far very little is known about relations between the brothers. On the other hand, all memorialists considered it their duty to recall the despotism of their mother Varvara Alekseievna against her own sons.

In December 1901, Ivan Morozov met Eudoxie Kladovchikova (1885-1959), a young artist who performed at the restaurant “Iar”. From this relationship a girl, Eudoxie Ivanovna, was born on July 24, 1903. The marriage will only take place four years later, on July 27, 1907.

Restaurant “Iar”, Moscow, early 1900

Eudoxie Morozov portrait by Valentin Serov, 1908.

Actually exposed at the Trétiakov Gallery.

She married Serge Konowaloff on January 20, 1922. From this union was born an only child, Ivan (known as “Jean”) Konowaloff on December 10, 1922. Their divorce will be pronounced on November 15, 1937.

She married Mr. Kasaichvili on May 1, 1942. Their divorce will be pronounced on November 16, 1948. No children were born from this union.

She married Charles Lesca for the third time on September 28, 1953. No children were born from this union.

“On the way to the Trinity” by Constantin Fédorovitch Iouon

Oil on canvas 53 x 107

Trétiakov Gallery

Proof of purchase

The landscape is dominant in the Morozov collection because he had a preference for this type of landscape drawn, on the one hand, from his councilors, landscape painters and, on the other, from the lessons he had learned in his youth with his elder brother from Constantine Korovin. After graduating from Zurich’s Higher Polytechnic School, Ivan Morozov continued to paint landscapes in oil to relax.

Ivan Morozov, whom Vollard called “the Russian who doesn’t market,” was a welcome guest in Parisian galleries, auctions and exhibitions of all kinds. It is known that he could afford to spend between 200,000 and 300,000 francs per year on paintings, a sum that was available to few museums in Europe. For example, he bought from Durand-Ruel paintings for a quarter of a million francs.

Ivan Morozov was keen to show the main stages of contemporary art and to represent each painter in the most complete way, and in the same way in 1905, he approached the development of a painting gallery in his private mansion, the main building of an estate dating from the 1840s.

At his request, the architect Lev Kekuchev gave the rooms on the first floor a strict appearance of a museum, removing all the moldings and covering the walls with a gray and neutral fabric. As for the roof, there was a glass roof, through which the daylight entered as in the museums worthy of the name.

Reciept from Galerie Bernheim Jeune

Designing his collection as a collection of “works and not names”, Morozov could wait for years for a painting to represent a particular painter. Morosov had fifty impressionist paintings, including Monet, Renoir, Pissaro and Degas. The next generation was mainly represented by Van Gogh, Cézanne and Gauguin, the latter’s works having entered rue Pretchistenka after the painter’s retrospective at the Salon d’Automne in 1906. Morozov’s favorite work was Cézanne’s still life “Pèches et Pires”. In 1907, Ivan Morozov ordered a wall decoration for Maurice Denis for his hotel’s concert hall; these five panels of “the history of Psyche” painted for Morozov were exhibited at the 1908 Autumn Fair.

Later, it was to Pierre Bonnard that Morozov ordered the triptych “Mediterranean” for the main staircase of his hotel.

“Autumn morning in Eragny” Camille Pissaro

Oil on canvas 54 x 65

Pushkin Museum

The “Cézanne” Hall, in 1920, the former Morozov Palace became the “Second Museum of Modern Western Art”. However, nothing has been changed, from the place of the canvases to the carpet on the floor.

Events took such a turn in Soviet Russia that by 1918, the former owners had no recourse but to flee to save their lives. The collection of Ivan Morozov was nationalized by decree of Lenin on December 19, 1918.

The Morozov House on Pretchistenka Street and the collection it houses become “the second museum of modern Western painting”.

For a few months, Ivan Morozov was the assistant curator of his own collection (task of guiding visitors in the rooms).

Hôtel Majestic, Paris

In 1922, the two museums (Shchukin’s and Morozov’s) were united in a single entity “State Museum of Modern Western Art” and regrouped in the Morozov Palace in 1928. Between 1930 and 1934 some of the works were transferred to the Leningrad Hermitage Museum. Two paintings by Morozov (“Mrs. Cézanne in the greenhouse” by Cézanne and “Café de nuit” by Van Gogh) were handed over to an American gallery as part of the campaign to sell works of Russian museums against foreign exchange.

During the Second World War, the museum’s collections were evacuated to Novosibirsk, a painful journey that could not fail to leave marks on the masterpieces. Then, back in Moscow, the canvases stayed in their boxes for a long time. It was approaching 1948, the most tragic year for Soviet art and culture, when the fight against “cosmopolitanism” and all manifestations of formalism began. Categories where all the trends of modern painting were relegated since Impressionism.

It is only through successful risks that the project of the Museums Department of the Committee for Artistic Affairs could not be implemented: disperse the canvases in provincial museums, destroy some of them, and keep only the best works (as they see it) in the capital’s museums.

In 1948, after the museum closed (which had been closed since 1941), the paintings were arbitrarily distributed between the museums of the Leningrad Hermitage and the Pushkin Museum of Moscow.

En 1948 suite à la fermeture du musée (qui l’était depuis 1941), les toiles sont arbitrairement réparties entre les musées de l’Ermitage de Leningrad et le musée Pouchkine de Moscou.

In 1933, the Soviet government, in need of foreign currency, sold a number of paintings including Van Gogh’s “Café de nuit” and Cezanne’s “Madame Cezanne in the greenhouse” from the Morozov collection.

These two canvases were purchased by the American collector, Stephen Clark, through two galleries: the Knoedler Gallery in New York and the Matthiesen Gallery in Berlin.

Clark decided to bequeath the works to the University of Yale and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which took possession of the works upon his death in 1961.

Shchukin and Morozov’s collections remained invisible for a long time. It was not until the major exhibitions of French paintings in Moscow in 1955 and in Leningrad in 1956 that some of the paintings were permanently displayed. In the mid-sixties, almost all of the collections were finally visible, although without mention of the former owners to whom Russia had to own these jewels of modern art.