The Red Room, 1908 Henri Matisse The Hermitage Museum, Paris

The Red Room, 1908
Henri Matisse
The Hermitage Museum, Paris

You may feel a surge of joy when you see the ORIGINAL Matisse “The Red Room.” You may be brought to tears. You will certainly be stopped in your tracks.

Perhaps you think you know “The Red Room” from a thousand dorm room posters, but no reproduction can capture the depth of the vermillion wallpaper streaking down right onto the table, the cobalt blue of the sky from the window, the yellows…oh, oh, oh…

Pastorales Tahitiennes, 1892 Paul Gauguin Hermitage Museum, Russia

Pastorales Tahitiennes, 1892
Paul Gauguin
The Hermitage Museum, Russia

The artworks of the finest impressionists — Matisse, Gauguin, Picasso, Monet and many others — are on display until mid-February 2017, at the new Fondation Louis Vuitton Museum in Paris.

Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris Observatory of Light by Daniel Buren, temporary installation

Fondation Louis Vuitton Museum, Paris
Frank Gehry, Architect
Temporary installation: Observatory of Light by Daniel Buren

One hundred thirty works of art have been allowed to leave the major museums of Russia, the Hermitage and the Pushkin, for the first time. Odds are we will never see these works together again in our lifetime.

The study in Sergei Shchukin’s house. Photograph: Heritage Images/Getty Images

The study in Sergei Shchukin’s house.
Photograph: Heritage Images/Getty Images

The collection was put together in the late 1800’s by Sergei Shchukin, a wealthy textile industrialist from Moscow. Twenty years later, after the Bolshevik revolution, Stalin and Lenin “nationalized” the collection, branding the paintings “degenerate” and dispersing them throughout Russia, some even exiled to Siberia!

Today, 100 years later, the collection is for the first time reunited in Paris, the blockbuster of all blockbusters…”Icons of Modern Art.”

Bonjour Paris!

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