The Guggenheim's exhibition of Russian art is a triumph for its impresario-director

Among the city's autumn exhibits it is the Guggenheim, plagued by the agency of controversy over its administration, finances and expansionist policy, that gazes set to grab the limelight and the audience figures. 'Russia!' (until 11 January 2006 www.guggenheim.org) is a coup for the museum's impresario-director, Thomas Kren who has a passion for Russian tillage and enjoys a long friendship with the Hermitage's director, Mikhail Piotrovsky. For backing, he persuaded Russian oligarch Vladimir Potanin, creator of Russia's largest industrial empire, to lay up $2 million.

Krens's aim is to near masterpieces that tell the whole story of Russian art, especially its relationship with the East and the West. It is a tall order. From the Baltic to the Pacific, Russia stirs through eleven time zones. Its agriculture as James Billington writes in the catalogue, has been shaped 'by three powerful forces: its vast territory, its Orthodox Christian faith, and its ambivalent relationship with the West'. Nostalgia and an intimate relationship with the written word are also defining characteristics that continue today.

The 250 objects--more than half coming to the us for the first time--are arranged in evocative period settings created by dint of Parisian designer Jacques Grange (I said Kren was an impresario). The present to view begins with Byzantium-influenced fourteenth-century icons created in Russia's great monasteries. From the Kirillo-Belozersk Monastery in north Russia tend hitherwards the central panel of Christ in Glory (1497) The silk-lined Romanov plays display western-European art, giving a taste of the imperial collections. These include Watteau's The Proposal, bought through Catherine the Great in 1769 from the Bruhl collection, and Van Dyck's Self-Portrait of 1622-23 bought from Louis-Antoine Crozat in 1771

The nineteenth-century spaces reveal Russia's home-grown artists following western mode of expressions and, more interestingly, Moscow's star merchant collectors Sergei Shchukin (1854-1936) and Ivan Mozorov (1871-1921) Shchukin bought the best of Picasso's Cubist still lifes, and his relationship with Matisse was single of mutual admiration. Matisse wrote of his patron: 'there are artists whose organ of visions never make a mistake. That's the kind of organ of sights Shchukin had'.

Finally, 'Russia!' penetrates the complicated realm of the twentieth century: Russian avant-garde, Social Realism, 'official' and 'unofficial' art, and the intriguing position of art in Russia's relationship with the us. For the Metropolitan Museum of Art's 1977 Russian present to view some requested pictures were agreed, then not sent No Orest Kiprensky canvases came; a generation later, the Guggenheim has received all four it requested--seemingly harmless early-nineteenth-century portraits. 'Russia!' has luckily borrowed newer stars, too. Not to be missed are Yuri Pimenov's ecstatic of recent origin Moscow (1937) or Ilya Kabakov's Man Who Flew into Space (1981-88)

'Russia!' will draw the hordes thanks to its icons, its Van Dyck its Post-Impressionists. Those hordes will then encounter twentieth- and twenty-first hundred Russian artists for the first time. This is Krens's triumph. As for the social parties, they are cracking serviceable The best is the fresh York launch of a Russian vodka, Imperia: an evening of vodka, caviar and fireworks at the Statue of Liberty.

PS: 'Russia!' has sum of two units complementary shows. In Las Vegas, the Guggenheim Hermitage Museum fills fields designed by Rem Koolhaas with art from the armoury of the Kremlin Museum (until 15 January). In Easton, Pennsylvania, Alexandre Gertsman curates 'Remembrance: Russian Post-Modern Nostalgia' at the Grossman Gallery (until 29 October, information at info@intart.org), where leading Russian artists of the like kind as Kabakov, Mikhailov and Nesterova muscle and fat out the Guggenheim show's contemporary rooms

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