Alan Gouk reviews Icons of Modern Art. The Collection Shchukin at The Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, on view through March 5, 2017.

Gouk writes: “This is what was so apparent in the confrontations afforded here, however many times one may have seen some of these pictures in different contexts and settings; how solidly and succulently Monet, and Matisse (although justly lauded for the delicacy of his brushwork), apply their paint in the service of responding to the light-filled sensuousness of lived experience, besides which so many of the most vaunted masterpieces of modernism look like museum-bound pictures, already half tainted by art-out-of art fustiness, and a dingy minimalising of the full lustre of the sensory world.”