The Guggenheim's exhibition of Russian art is a triumph for its impresario-director

Apollo, Oct, 2005 by Louise Nicholson

Among the city's autumn shows it is the Guggenheim, plagued by controversy over its administration, finances and expansionist policy, that looks set to grab the limelight and the audience figures. 'Russia!' (until 11 January 2006, www.guggenheim.org) is a coup for the museum's impresario-director, Thomas Krens, who has a passion for Russian culture and enjoys a long friendship with the Hermitage's director, Mikhail Piotrovsky. For backing, he persuaded Russian oligarch Vladimir Potanin, creator of Russia's largest industrial empire, to put up $2 million.

Krens's aim is to present masterpieces that tell the whole story of Russian art, especially its relationship with the East and the West. It is a tall order. From the Baltic to the Pacific, Russia moves through eleven time zones. Its culture, as James Billington writes in the catalogue, has been shaped 'by three powerful forces: its vast territory, its Orthodox Christian faith, and its ambivalent relationship with the West'. Nostalgia and an intimate relationship with the written word are also defining characteristics that continue today.

The 250 objects--more than half coming to the us for the first time--are arranged in evocative period settings created by Parisian designer Jacques Grange (I said Krens was an impresario). The show begins with Byzantium-influenced fourteenth-century icons created in Russia's great monasteries. From the Kirillo-Belozersk Monastery in north Russia comes the central panel of Christ in Glory (1497). The silk-lined Romanov rooms display western-European art, giving a taste of the imperial collections. These include Watteau's The Proposal, bought by Catherine the Great in 1769 from the Bruhl collection, and Van Dyck's Self-Portrait of 1622-23, bought from Louis-Antoine Crozat in 1771.

The nineteenth-century rooms reveal Russia's home-grown artists following western styles and, more interestingly, Moscow's star merchant collectors Sergei Shchukin (1854-1936) and Ivan Mozorov (1871-1921). Shchukin bought the best of Picasso's Cubist still lifes, and his relationship with Matisse was one of mutual admiration. Matisse wrote of his patron: 'there are artists whose eyes never make a mistake. That's the kind of eyes Shchukin had'.

Finally, 'Russia!' enters the complicated realm of the twentieth century: Russian avant-garde, Social Realism, 'official' and 'unofficial' art, and the intriguing position of art in Russia's relationship with the us. For the Metropolitan Museum of Art's 1977 Russian show, some requested pictures were agreed, then not sent. No Orest Kiprensky canvases came; a generation later, the Guggenheim has received all four it requested--seemingly harmless early-nineteenth-century portraits. 'Russia!' has successfully borrowed newer stars, too. Not to be missed are Yuri Pimenov's ecstatic New Moscow (1937) or Ilya Kabakov's Man Who Flew into Space (1981-88).

'Russia!' will draw the crowds thanks to its icons, its Van Dycks, its Post-Impressionists. Those crowds will then encounter twentieth- and twenty-first century Russian artists for the first time. This is Krens's triumph. As for the social parties, they are cracking good. The best is the New York launch of a Russian vodka, Imperia: an evening of vodka, caviar and fireworks at the Statue of Liberty.

PS: 'Russia!' has two complementary shows. In Las Vegas, the Guggenheim Hermitage Museum fills rooms designed by Rem Koolhaas with art from the armoury of the Kremlin Museum (until 15 January). In Easton, Pennsylvania, Alexandre Gertsman curates 'Remembrance: Russian Post-Modern Nostalgia' at the Grossman Gallery (until 29 October, information at info@intart.org), where leading Russian artists such as Kabakov, Mikhailov and Nesterova flesh out the Guggenheim show's contemporary rooms.