Iron curtain masterpieces at the Royal Academy

More than 120 paintings will be presented at the Royal Academy next year after years of negotiations with galleries such as the Hermitage and the Pushkin.

The loans will include some seized from wealthy collectors at the time of the revolution in 1917. The focus is on works exploring the cross-cultural exchange between Russia and France from 1870 to 1925.

Sir Norman Rosenthal, the academy's exhibitions secretary, said: "This is very exciting. People have been trying to get some of these paintings to come to Great Britain for decades.

"Although we have had shows like Matisse Picasso [at Tate Britain], there has never been anything on this kind of scale before."

The four museums involved - the State Pushkin and the State Tretyakov museums in Moscow and the State Hermitage and the State Russian museums in St Petersburg - have not co-operated before either.

The exhibition was made possible because of new legislation being introduced in the UK which will prevent the seizure of works of art whose ownership is disputed.

Until now, the Russian government was open to claims for the restitution of art seized in the revolution. The heir of one major collector, the businessman Sergei Shchukin whose collection was confiscated by the revolutionaries, has spent years trying to reclaim works.

As Britain had no legislation protecting loans against seizure in such disputes, the Russians refused to lend works. But new legislation will give works such as those from the Russian museums immunity from seizure.

Much of the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist work in Russian museums was originally collected by businessmen such as Shchukin, Pavel Tretyakov and Ivan Morosov.

Shchukin and Morosov, both from wealthy textile merchant families, scoured Paris to acquire masterpieces by painters such as Monet, Renoir, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse and Picasso.

Matisse's The Dance, which has never been lent to Britain before, was one of the most important of the many paintingsin Shchukin's palatial house in Moscow. But both his and Morosov's collections were nationalised after the 1917 revolution while they fled to Western Europe.

However, artistic life continued to flourish until the death of Lenin in 1924. "The whole thing came to a rather tragic end with Stalin," Sir Norman said.

From Russia, sponsored by E.on, will run from 26 January to 18 April 2008.