By Edmund Brown

        After more than 70 years, Moscow's Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts has dusted down a unique collection of art, one that represents a depth of commitment to art rarely seen anywhere in the world. Its collated works stand as a singular tribute to one of Russia's foremost names in private art collection — they are the more than 500 items of the reunited collection of Prince Nikolai Borisovich Yusupov.

Interior Pushkin Museum

Moscow, Russia

    The exhibit "Learned Whim: The Collection of Prince Nikolai Yusupov" takes its name from the lines of a poem written by Yusupov's friend Alexander Pushkin and marks the 250th anniversary of Yusupov's birth with a remarkable cataloguing of the prince's lifelong quest for European art, pottery, sculptures and curiosities.

    "Yusupov provided us with the opportunity to lift the lid on the riches and culture of the 18th century and did so much to feed our country with the treasures of European art. Therein lie the roots of Russia's cultural traditions, which so flourished during the 19th century," said Lyubov Sovinskaya, Yusupov collection curator and an art historian with 30 years of experience. Her words testify to Yusupov's influence over Russian art.

    On par with the other great families of 18th century Russia — the Sheremetyevs, the Shuvalovs, the Stroganovs and the Golitsyns — Yusupov (1751-1831) was a wealthy statesman, as well as a diplomat and counselor to the tsarist family. A private collector of immense personal wealth, Yusupov (see photo on page I) was also a patron of the State Hermitage museum in St. Petersburg, helping the museum to build its own collection through his brief yet productive period as director. Yusupov's collection — which he compiled during several trips abroad and which contained pieces by European masters — is also widely credited with building the foundation on which art collecting grew in Russia. Yusupov's collection was unrivaled until the turn of the last century, when Moscow merchant-collectors Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov began to bring the works of the impressionists and post-impressionists to Russia.

    In 1808, Yusupov set off on a tour of Europe, pursuing a passion for art that was to continue until the end of his life. Yusupov not only began to accumulate Dutch, Italian, Flemish and French masterpieces, including original Tiepolos, Van Dycks, Davids and Greuzes, but along the way met Voltaire, Rousseau and Beaumarchais. On leaving France in 1810, Napoleon presented Yusupov with two vases of Sπvres porcelain. The two had struck up a friendship that would ultimately save Yusupov's personal collection from looting by invading French armies in 1812.

    The Yusupov estate at Arkhangelskoye, 60 kilometers outside Moscow, became the main repository for Yusupov's ever-increasing collection. Following Yusupov's death in 1831, his son moved much of the collection to St. Petersburg, to the family palace on the Moika. When revolution transformed the imperial system in 1917, the Arkhangelskoye Estate was nationalized and the party's top brass built their dachas on the estate's grounds. They also began to ruthlessly pillage the treasures Yusupov had brought to Russia. It was only thanks to the smuggling of some of the works out of Russia by Yusupov's descendant Felix — better known for his part in murdering the Siberian monk Rasputin in 1916 — that the collection was saved from total ruin.

    It therefore seems nothing short of a miracle that the joined energies of the State Hermitage, the Arkhangelskoye Estate Museum and the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts have been able to restore Yusupov's collection to it's former glory.

    "It was very important for us to show Yusupov as an active figure in Russian culture. His value as a collector and patron formed the cultural sphere of Russia," said Pushkin Museum director Irina Antonova. The cultural sphere Antonova talks of is the medley of bustling European art that proved so popular in 18th-century Russia. Throughout the five rooms and two colonnades the Pushkin Museum has given over to the exhibition, the collection is dominated by the sentimentality of the French school: Nicholas de Courteille (1768-1830) paints "Brothers in Arms" and Hubert Robert (1733-1808) relieves us of the sentiment a bit with a series of gravity-defying ruins, all with the obligatory washerwomen in the foreground. There is also work from individual celebrities such as Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725-1805), Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825) and Pierre-Paul Prud'hon (1758-1823).

    The Italian school is well represented by Pietro Antonio Rotari (1707-62). Daniel Gardener (1750-1807) and Gavin Hamilton (1723-98) provide heavy brushstrokes from England. And the Flemish school is, as ever, rowdy with a drunken harbor brawl from Jan Cossiers (1600-71). In the museum's well-lit White Room, the highlight of the collection has to be the two paintings by Rembrandt (1606-96) — "Painting of Man" (1658) and "Painting of Woman with a Feather" (1660) — courtesy of the National Gallery in Washington.

    It was these last two masterpieces, here hung behind thick glass, that the young Felix Yusupov managed to save from the Soviets by spiriting them first to Crimea and then to Europe. They eventually ended up in the United States and, according to statements Arkhangelskoye Estate director Vladimir Dulgach made to The Associated Press, cost the Pushkin Museum $40,000 to insure and transport to Russia.

    The plethora of some 300 paintings — both biblical and secular — are not the sole focus of the collection. In a bizarre cross between antique shop and car-boot sale, glass cabinets at the museum are filled with the curiosities and foibles of the travelling prince. Aside from ornate jewelry and antique clocks from Paris and Rome, a library — reconstructed from some of Yusupov's 16,000 volumes — has been arranged, complete with furniture from the Arkhangelskoye Estate and a life-size model of Yusupov himself.

    Elsewhere, among world maps from 1793 and china from Prague, as well as books with titles like "Safe and Assured Ways for the Conservation of Health" and the classic 1708-11 edition of "Voyage Around the World" by Woodes Rogers, there are covering letters from artists expressing their deep gratitude to Yusupov for showing an interest in (and ultimately placing an order for) their art. One such letter, dated July 24, 1779, tells of Jacob Hackert's "deepest respect and honor that your greatness should order my paintings."

    The three years it has taken the three museums to research and catalogue the exhibit is hardly a fair reflection of just how arduous the museums' task was. "The work is continuing and will continue as long as there are investments in the project," Dulgach said Monday.

    However, their combined efforts have more than paid off, resulting in a well-presented tribute to Russia's best-known private collector.

    "Learned Whim: The Collection of Prince Nikolai Yusupov" (Uchyonaya Prikhot: Kollektsiya Knyazya Nikolaya Yusupova) runs to Nov. 11 at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, located at 12 Ulitsa Volkhonka. Metro Kropotkinskaya. Tel. 203-7998/9578. 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., closed Monday.