A Russian buys the future

The man who bought this brick-red slab of interlocked bodies was Sergei Shchukin, a Moscow textile magnate with one of the boldest eyes in Europe. Over six years he carried more than fifty Picassos back to Russia, along with rooms full of Matisse, and hung them in his Moscow mansion where young Russian painters came to gawp. Three Women went east. For a decade the most advanced art in Paris lived, improbably, on a wall in Moscow.

Then history reached in. The 1917 Revolution swept Shchukin’s world away; his collection was nationalised and he fled to Paris, leaving his Picassos to the new Soviet state. They passed into a Museum of New Western Art — and there they became an embarrassment.

Under Stalin, modern art was branded bourgeois formalism, decadent and dangerous, and in 1948 the old collection was broken up and largely shut away. Three Women went to the Hermitage in Leningrad, where for much of the Cold War it sat in storage, too radical to hang. So the canvas that helped invent Cubism spent its middle age hidden in a Soviet basement — a fitting, strange afterlife for a picture about three women carved out of red rock, waiting to be seen.