Londoners have been anticipating the arrival of Matisse's The Dancers and other treasures from Russia's Hermitage Museum, but now the paintings are caught in a diplomatic row, as reporter Sophie Grove writes from London:

Diplomatic wrangles almost never touch the lofty world of Art. But in London, The Royal Academy's hotly anticipated exhibition 'From Russia' is suddenly caught in the cross fire of disintegrating international relations. This week the Russian government retracted its promise to loan 120 masterpieces from the Hermitage in St Petersburg and the Pushkin museum in Moscow.

The show should have been an example of cultural diplomacy at its best. Vladimir Putin had been lined-up to write a forward to the Catalogue and was to fly over to join Prime Minister Gordon Brown for the opening ceremony in January. The works, including Matisse’s The Dance, have been splashed tantalizingly all over the London underground for months.  Now -- for the moment at least -- it's all off.

The official line is that insurance issues have prevented the works from making it to London. Russian curators fear there will attempts by relatives of the original owners, to seize the costly works -- and flaws in the British legal system might let this happen.
But the frosty relations after the death of Alexander Litvinenko from polonium poisoning may also have something to do with the cancellation. Since then, frost has turned to a hard freeze after the Kremlin refused to extradite a prime suspect, Andrei Lugovoi, and the subsequent expulsion of four Russian diplomats from London in July. Russia has since evicted four British diplomats from Moscow and, earlier this month, ordered the British embassy to shut down its cultural operations outside Moscow -- a move the Foreign Secretary David Miliband described in his blog on Saturday as “illegal”.

For the moment it looks as if the whole show is embroiled in a diplomatic tit for tat. Even so, in the midst of his Christmas shopping, The U.K. Minister for Culture, Media and Sport is rushing through some new legislation to resolve the insurance issues and secure the safety of the works of Kandinsky, Tatlin, Malevich and Matisse.  Whether or not that will speed passage of the paintings, time will tell.