Modern masterpieces come to London

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 1917 revolution. The focus is on works exploring the cross-cultural exchange between Russia and France from 1870 to 1925.

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 Museum and the State Tretyakov Museum in Moscow and the State Hermitage Museum and the State Russian Museum in St Petersburg - have not previously cooperated either.

The exhibition was made possible by 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 vulnerable to claims for the restitution of art seized in the revolution. One of Shchukin's heirs spent several years trying to reclaim works.

As Britain had no legislation protecting loans against seizure in such disputes, the Russians effectively refused to lend works.

But new legislation will give works such as those from the Russian museumsimmunity from seizure. Much of the work of this period in Russian museums was originally collected by businessmen such as Pavel Tretyakov, Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morosov.

Shchukin and Morosov, both from wealthy textile merchant families, scoured Paris to acquire masterpieces by Impressionists and Post-Impressionists such as Monet, Renoir, Cezanne, 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 paintings in his palatial home in Moscow.

But both men had their private collections nationalised after the 1917 revolution. They themselves fled to Western Europe.

Buit 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.