After seeing the rooms of the Winter Palace, two Leonardo da Vinci canvases, and twenty-six Rembrandt canvases, museum fatigue set in and I was ready to leave the Hermitage. Just then our guide dropped us off on the third floor, where the modern paintings are, and my energy level exploded. The thirty-seven small galleries here are crammed with pieces from Picasso, Chagall, Cezanne and other masters. They rival the selection of modern paintings on display at MoMA and the Art Institute of Chicago.
At the heart of the collection are a number of groundbreaking works by Henri Matisse, including Dance and Red Room. Seeing Dance for the first time, after knowing it from reproductions, was convulsive. It’s huge, like a mural, and rendered in sour, unpretty reddish hues. Seen at this scale, practically life-size, the flatness of the rendering is incredibly brazen. It’s not pictorial really and not graphic really and yet it depicts a world that is, dramatically and spatially, complete. The canvas was coursing with energy, as if it would burst from the wall. (It would certainly benefit from being moved to a larger gallery.) My favorite Matisse was Game of Bowls, a smaller canvas that shows three boys playing on the lawn. The composition is simple, strange and calm. There is something primal about the means – smears of color – with which the boys are rendered, and with which their joy is captured. Standing in front, I felt the jolt that turn-of-the-century Parisians must have felt when encountering modern painting for the first time.