Monday 10th Februray 2025

Matisse in Moscow
by Rosamund Bartlett
 

In October 1911, Henri Matisse travelled to Russia to stay with his most important patron Sergei Shchukin. The wealthy Moscow businessman had commissioned two enormous canvases which now rank amongst the artist’s greatest works. After Matisse created a scandal exhibiting Dance and Music in Paris, he was invited to help install them in the stairway of Shchukin’s mansion. This lecture tells the story of how Shchukin fell in love with Matisse after infatuations with Monet and Gauguin, how Matisse fell in love with Russian icons, and how his riotous paintings revolutionised the young Moscow avant-garde.

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Dr Rosamund Bartlett

Rosamund Bartlett is a writer, lecturer and translator whose work ranges across the arts, and across the cultures of Europe, from Italy to Norway.  She began her career as an academic in Slavic studies after completing her doctorate at Oxford, and has held fellowships both in the UK and at the European University Institute in Florence.  In 2024 she became a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Brasenose College, Oxford. 

She has written on music and literature for institutions including the Royal Opera House, the National Theatre and the Salzburg Festival, and now writes about art for Apollo and The Burlington Magazine.  The author of biographies of Tolstoy and Chekhov, whose works she has translated, she is currently writing a book about the revolution in the arts which took place in early 20th-century Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kyiv and Odesa, and its connection to modernist developments in Paris, Munich and Milan. Rosamund has led art, architecture, design and music tours throughout Europe, and contributes regularly to Proms events and opera broadcasts on the BBC. Her lecturing work has taken her from the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford where she lives, to the V&A in London, and to the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney.