Russia Calls Off Major Art Loan As Ties With Uk Worsen

Russia's ongoing cultural dispute with Britain escalated dramatically today when officials in Moscow announced they were canceling a major exhibition of Russian and French masterpieces at the Royal Academy in London.

The director of Moscow's Pushkin museum said the exhibition - From Russia: French and Russian Art Masterpieces of 1870-1925 - would not take place. The show was due to open at the RA on January 26.

It was supposed to be one of the highlights of the RA's year. Irina Antonova, the Pushkin's general director, said that the paintings from four Russian state museums would not be loaned to the UK because of worries that they might be subject to legal claims and would not ultimately be returned to Russia.

"I learned about this only last night," Antonova said. "The British side did not guarantee the return of the exhibition, which includes masterpieces of Russian and French art from four Russian museums - the Puskhin Museum, the State Hermitage Museum, the Tretyakov Gallery and the Russian Museum."

She added: "As negotiations on such guarantees have ended unsuccessfully, the decision on returning all the exhibits to Russia has been made." The announcement takes place against a backdrop of deteriorating relations between Russia and Britain. It follows the Kremlin's decision last week to close the British Council's two regional offices in St Petersburg, Russia's second city, and Yekaterinburg.

Russia's foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, admitted the closure was in response to Britain's expulsion of four Russian diplomats in July over the Alexander Litvinenko affair. Russia had indicated the offices could stay open if Britain dropped its investigation into Litvenenko's murder, a demand the UK government refused.

Today's announcement is a severe blow to the Royal Academy, which had hoped the dispute could be resolved in time. Many of the 100-plus paintings have never been shown in Britain before.

They include Matisse's Dance (11), measuring four meters by three meters, six Gaugins, a handful of important Cezannes, and works by Renoir and Picasso, including his extraordinary The Dryad, produced the year after he painted the groundbreaking Demoiselles D'Avignon.

The works - currently on show in Düsseldorf - will now be packed up and returned to Russia.

"There was a situation not very long ago in which the return of our paintings following an exhibition in Europe was endangered. We are not going to step on the same rake again," Antonova told the Interfax news agency today.

Many of the paintings originally belonged to Sergei Shchukin, one of tsarist Russia's most prominent collectors. His descendants, including his grandson, Andre-Marc Delocque-Fourcaud, have lodged several failed legal claims to get back the works, which were seized by Russia's communists in 1917 and declared state property.

Britain had promised to deliver a 'letter of comfort' assuring Russia that its works would be returned. But with anti-British sentiment now official Kremlin policy, this appears not to have satisfied Russia's bureaucrats and the Russian government's two main cultural agencies, Roskultura and Rosokhranultura.

In an interview with the Guardian in October the director of St Petersburg's renowned Hermitage Museum, Mikhail Piotrovsky, expressed optimism that the RA show would go ahead as planned.

"Culture is not politics. There is much more good will. We will find a solution," he said, adding: "The Royal Academy is our friend." He noted: "We have a long tradition of hysterical relations from time to time between Britain and Russia going back to the Great Game."

He went on: "'This exhibition is very important for Britain. It is a beautiful exhibition. It's made up of Russian avant-garde, and Russian collections of the European avant-garde."

"If the RA show doesn't happen this will be a great disappointment for the UK because many of the paintings have never been exhibited in your country before," Lydia Iouleva, the director of Moscow's Tretyakov gallery, told the Guardian in October.

Ms Iouleva said she was especially fond of Ilya Repin's 1901 portrait of a shaggy bearded Lev Tolstoy, which hangs in the exhibition next to Renoir's 1878 portrait of the actress Jeanne Samari. "You can see the connections," she said.

The Department for Culture Media and Sport is currently drafting legislation, which will guarantee art works 'immunity from seizure', preventing the kind of legal actions that now threaten the RA show. But it appears that the department has moved too slowly to save next month's exhibition.

Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, and the prime minister, Gordon Brown, were both supposed to contribute forewords to the exhibition catalog. Brown has not met Putin since becoming prime minister, and officials have indicated there is no likelihood of a meeting ahead of next summer's G8 summit.