Paris and the Russian avant-garde

In the early years of the twentieth century Paris was the centre of the international art world. The embodiment of ‘modernity’, it attracted ambitious artists from around Europe and further afield.  Since the latter years of the nineteenth century, wealthy Russians like Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov had opened their collections of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist, Symbolist, Fauve and Cubist art to a select public, including artists. A significant number of Russian artists subsequently moved to Paris and worked in close proximity and collaboration with their French and international contemporaries, creating works that produced an exciting synthesis of these new avant-garde impulses and their own rich artistic heritage.