Monday 23rd March 2026

Picasso in St Petersburg
The Hermitage and its Masters of Modern Art
by Rosamund Bartlett

The pioneering Moscow collectors Shchukin and Morozov emigrated after the Revolution and their collections were united to create the pioneering State Museum of New Western Art.  In 1948, however, Stalin ordered its closure. This lecture recounts the museum's history.  It tells how a brave female curator helped rescue the museum's most radical paintings for the Hermitage amid fears they would be destroyed, and what happened next to Matisse's The Dance and dozens of Cubist masterpieces by Picasso.​

Dr Rosamund Bartlett

Rosamund Bartlett is a writer, lecturer and translator whose work ranges across the arts, and across the cultures of Europe, from Italy to Norway.  She began her career as an academic in Slavic studies after completing her doctorate at Oxford, and has held fellowships both in the UK and at the European University Institute in Florence.  In 2024 she became a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Brasenose College, Oxford. 

She has written on music and literature for institutions including the Royal Opera House, the National Theatre and the Salzburg Festival, and now writes about art for Apollo and The Burlington Magazine.  The author of biographies of Tolstoy and Chekhov, whose works she has translated, she is currently writing a book about the revolution in the arts which took place in early 20th-century Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kyiv and Odesa, and its connection to modernist developments in Paris, Munich and Milan. Rosamund has led art, architecture, design and music tours throughout Europe, and contributes regularly to Proms events and opera broadcasts on the BBC. Her lecturing work has taken her from the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford where she lives, to the V&A in London, and to the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney.