Matisse's benefactors

Rumour has it that when Allis Helleland, the director of Copenhagen's State Art Museum, was planning the current Matisse exhibition, she travelled to the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg to negotiate the loan of some of their outstanding works by the painter. "Not a chance," she was told. "You don't understand," she is said to have replied, "I am not leaving until we have an agreement". She stayed, she got an agreement, and many paintings from the Hermitage's remarkable collection are in Copenhagen for Henri Ma- tisse: Four Great Collectors, which charts the development of Matisse's painting through his most formative and dynamic, innovative years.

The title encapsulates the rationale of the show and the reason Helleland had to have the Hermitage paintings. Copenhagen's State Art Museum has a qualitatively outstanding group of paintings by Matisse, largely associated with two Danish collectors. Throughout a significant phase of his career, the artist's most loyal collectors were two Russians, whose works are now in the possession of either the Hermitage or Moscow's Pushkin Museum. These four overlapping collections are linked on various levels - historically, geographically and even physically, since some works passed from one to another - and the show is as much about the collectors as about Matisse.

In the last few years, a great deal of attention has been paid to the role of investors and collectors in the making of artistic reputations and canons, and the real achievement of this show is to provide a vivid demonstration of the process in action. At the Paris Salon d'Automne in 1905, the uninhibited colour and formal roughness of the work of Matisse and his companions attracted widespread critical condemnation and prompted one observer to describe the painters as "wild beasts", thus giving a name to a movement: Fauvism. Matisse was the foremost pretender to the throne of the French avant garde, but he was still acutely vulnerable. It was at this stage that a French businessman, Andre Level, had the idea of speculating on the art market, and formed a consortium, Le Peau de l'Ours, to that end. He operated on the simple but effective principle that what is damned today is praised tomorrow, and Matisse was one of the artists whose work he bought.

At the same time, Matisse was taken up by the Stein family, siblings Gertrude, Leo and Michael, plus the latter's wife, Sarah. They were each buying, sometimes in competition with each other, and Sarah and Michael became vital patrons for Matisse. The interest of Gertrude and Leo slackened when Picasso became a presence on the scene, an event which also initiated the notional rivalry between the two great artists. While Picasso and Braque spearheaded the utterly radical, visually uncomfortable Cubism, Matisse continued to develop what he famously described in his Notes of a Painter as: "an art of balance, of purity and serenity devoid of troubling or depressing subject-matter . . . a mental soother, something like a good armchair in which to rest from physical fatigue".

Enter Sergei Schcukin, a wealthy Russian textile merchant and art collector, who had been buying Matisse's work since early in 1906. Like the Steins, he was one of a new breed of collector. Rather than buying to a pre-set formula, he wanted to ride the crest of the wave, and saw himself as a participant in the creative process: a prototype for Charles Saatchi. Eventually, he was to amass 37 Matisses and 50 Picassos. At home in his Moscow mansion, he delighted in scandalising visitors with his latest acquisitions, which wasn't difficult given that even the Impressionists were regarded as outrageous. One dinner guest so disapproved of a Monet landscape that he scribbled a derisory comment across it. Schcukin was soon joined by a younger, very astute collector, Ivan Morozov, a textile manufacturer whose taste for French art was influenced by his flamboyant elder brother Mikhail. Morozov built up an association with Maurice Denis, a painter prominent in a group of formalist anti-Impressionist artists called the Nabis. Denis's rather stilted and stylised allegorical compositions are out of fashion, but Morozov also bought Bonnard, and Matisse.

From early on, Schcukin intended that his collection should go to the State, although perhaps not quite in the way it did. First the advent of war in 1914, then the October Revolution in 1917, changed everything in Russia. Schcukin and Morosov were sidelined, their incomparable collections nationalised. Tragically, however, as despised bourgeoisie, both were at risk physically and felt compelled to flee abroad. Morosov died within a few years. Schcukin, the once-wealthy patron, found himself in the odd, acutely uncomfortable position of meeting Matisse with their roles reversed. When Matisse, collecting him from the railway station, expressed surprise that he was travelling second class, he wryly remarked: "You have to remain on good terms with the masses".

THE involvement of the Danish collectors in Matisse's fortunes is less straightforward. Both arrived relatively late on the scene, on the strength of a booming wartime economy. On the part of one, Christian Tetzen-Lund, there was an opportunistic, if commercially legitimate, element to his acquisition of a batch of works from the collection of Sarah and Michael Stein. The pictures had been on loan in Germany at the outbreak of war and become stranded. The Steins had reason to believe that they would never see them again, so when an agreement was brokered that Tetzen-Lund would buy them for a knockdown price, they may have felt that some financial return was better than nothing.

Tetzen-Lund, a corn merchant, was an enigmatic figure with a perplexing attitude to the art he collected. He bought and sold haphazardly, and all of the Stein pictures would have been lost to Denmark after the failure of tentative negotiations with the State Museum, but for the intervention of another Danish collector, Johannes Rump. As it was, several of Tetzen-Lund's best Matisses were bought by the American Alfred Barnes and others were dispersed.

Rump was a fascinating character and a mass of contradictions. A civil engineer and an idealistic social democrat, vocal on issues of public health, he financed his art collecting from his income as a speculative landlord, renting out buildings which didn't remotely meet his own standards of public hygiene. By the early 1920s, when he owned relatively few Matisses, he expressed the desire to donate his collection to the State Museum, but the conservatism of the institution led to a mealy-mouthed response to his offer. Undaunted, he set about beefing up his holdings of key artists, including Matisse. The sale of Tetzen-Lund's paintings provided him with a good opportunity, but he also bought elsewhere, very carefully and very intelligently - for by the 1920s, buying a Matisse had become a different proposition altogether. The State Museum is forever indebted to his extraordinary efforts.

The 50 or so paintings in the exhibition partially reconstitute these four collections to form an imaginary, ideal Matisse collection, one that includes many definitive works, including the rough-hewn Self-Portrait from 1906; harsh, linear nudes from 1908 and 1909; mellow odalisques from 1923; a brilliant study in light and shade, Interior with a Violin from 1918; the radical colour field of Harmony in Red from 1908; the pared-down, monumental La Danse from 1910, and several vibrant pattern-and-colour still lifes. The pictures, as serene and soothing as Matisse could wish, belie the passion and calculation, the fortunes made and lost, the wheeler-dealing and bargaining that are written into their histories. They also leave one with a sense of profound gratitude to Schcukin, Morozov, Rump - and even the decidedly unaltruistic Tetzen-Lund.

The exhibition Matisse: Four Great Collectors is at the National Art Museum, Copenhagen, until May 24th