Russia 'cancels' blockbuster London art show, Yazzy's at www.williamverdult.com

According to Timesonline.com, a blockbuster exhibition of French and Russian paintings at the Royal Academy of Art in London next month is in doubt after Russia appeared to cancel it.

A museum official in Moscow said today that the loan of 120 paintings including important pieces by Matisse, Van Gogh and Kandinsky had been called off because Britain could not guarantee the art would not be seized over private legal claims.

Zinaida Bonami, deputy director of the Pushkin Fine Arts Museum, told the AP that the federal cultural agency had notified the musem and three others that it would not issue an export licence for the works.

However, Moscow has apparently not informed the Royal Academy, which was this morning trying to discover whether the exhibition can still go ahead. The Academy released a statement saying that it was confident the exhibition would open to the public as scheduled on January 26. "Preparations for the exhibition are proceeding as planned," it said.

The decision comes against a backdrop of worsening diplomatic tension between Britain and Russia, largely prompted by the poisoning of the emigre Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko in London last year and Moscow's refusal to extradite the former KGB officer suspected of the killing.

This exhibition was already sensitive because many of the works were nationalised after the Russian Revolution in 1917 and have been the subject of legal claims by the collectors' heirs.

The original agreement for the show to go ahead was secured only with the personal support of Gordon Brown and President Putin and after the submission of a "letter of comfort", signed by the British Government, to reassure the Russians that everything would be returned.

Russia has previously announced that it would no longer lend any of its works to countries without anti-seizure laws after 55 paintings held by the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow were impounded in 2005 while on loan to Switzerland. The seizure was the result of a financial dispute between a Geneva trading company and the Russian State, although the works were released days after the Swiss Government intervened.

Britain is one of the few European countries without an anti-seizure law - although one is going through Parliament - which is why it took such a strong commitment from the Government to secure the loan. Four years ago, the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg refused to lend Titian's Saint Sebastian to the National Gallery in London.

The Royal Academy is hoping to attract hundreds of thousands of visitors to From Russia: French and Russian Master Paintings 1870-1925 and believes that the show will be as popular as its record-breaking Monet exhibition.

The show, which opens in London in January, explores the links between French and Russian art during a period that witnessed some of the most important developments in modern art, including Impressionism. Some of the greatest works by Renoir, Cezanne, Van Gogh and Gauguin will hang alongside those by Kandinsky, Malevich and Chagall.

Many have never been seen outside Russia. The star of the exhibition is set to be The Dance by Matisse.

Diplomatic relations between Moscow and London are currently more strained than at any time since the end of the Cold War.

Last week David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, compared Russia to Iran and Burma after the Kremlin ordered the British Council to close its outlets in St Petersburg and Yekaterinburg by January.

"I think it's a very sad fact that there are two countries in which the Council is not allowed to operate. That is Burma and Iran,'' he told the Commons foreign affairs select committee.

"I just hope the announcement today from Russia does not signal they are taking steps down that road. That is unwholesome company in which to be.''

Britain has vowed to defy the order, which Sir Anthony Brenton, the British ambassador to Moscow, described as the latest retaliation in the diplomatic dispute over the Litvinenko murder