Old masters, impressionists, and moderns : French masterworks from the State Pushkin Museum, Moscow /

This handsome volume presents 76 paintings from the seventeenth to twentieth centuries, most French in origin and all found in Moscow's Pushkin Museum, an impressive gathering currently touring the U.S., most of it for the first time. The authors present a history of the Pushkin Museum (established in 1898 and opened in 1912, it is now Moscow's number two art museum after the Hermitage) and detailed accounts of each painting in the show. Included is much fresh information about unfamiliar work by such top French artists as Poussin, Ingres, Renoir, and Cezanne, as well as such lesser knowns as Vigee-Lebrun, Couture, Fromentin, and Manguin. Collected for the most part by Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov, who presented them to the Russian people in the late 1920s, these paintings were later locked up by Joseph Stalin, who considered them corrupt. It was not until the 1960s that the public was allowed to see these works, and now many more viewers will bask in their light. --Victor Cassidy

Certainly a less recognized institution than the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad, Moscow's State Pushkin Museum nevertheless holds an outstanding and wide-ranging collection. French art is particularly well represented, and this catalog of a 2002-03 U.S. loan exhibition (Houston, Atlanta, Los Angeles) highlights 75 paintings from the 17th to the 20th centuries; the holdings of works by Czanne and cubist artists are spectacular. Each painting receives a color illustration and a page or two of commentary by a Pushkin Museum curator. All the big names are present, some with multiple works (Monet, Cezanne, Matisse, etc.), but several very interesting works by secondary artists (Albert Marquet, Constant Troyon, Francois-Marius Granet, etc.) round out the survey. Though the book breaks no academic ground, its solid reproductions of this collection are a welcome addition to art history collections. Recommended for general and undergraduate collections.-Jack Perry Brown, Art Inst. of Chicago Libs. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.