State Museum of Modern Western Art

The State Museum of New Western Art existed in Moscow from 1923 to 1948, built on the nationalised 1918 collections of industrialists Ivan Morozov and Sergei Shchukin. Both had bought works by Matisse, Picasso, Cezanne and Gauguin directly from Paris studios before WWI - the holdings were the world's largest concentration of French avant-garde. In 1948 Stalin closed the museum as "formalist" and split the works between the Hermitage and the Pushkin Museum. No museum address survives today, but the former collector homes of Shchukin (Bolshoy Znamensky Lane) and Morozov (Prechistenka Street) are identifiable and bear memorial plaques.