The story
In the early hours of 20 May 2010, a burglar the press later called Spiderman cut a padlock, removed a window pane and left the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris with five paintings, by Picasso, Matisse, Braque, Modigliani and Léger. The alarm system had been waiting weeks for repair. The thief, Vjeran Tomić, was convicted in 2017 with two accomplices, one of whom told the court he had thrown the canvases into the rubbish in a panic. None has been found. Among them was Henri Matisse's Pastorale, a small landscape painted in 1905, the year the Fauves got their name.
The museum holds the City of Paris's own collection of 20th-century art, and it occupies the east wing of the Palais de Tokyo, a colonnaded building above the Seine put up for the International Exhibition of 1937. One work from that exhibition ended up here. Raoul Dufy's La Fée Électricité, a mural of some 250 panels made for the pavilion of electricity, wraps around an entire curved hall and tells the story of electricity from the thinkers of antiquity to the power station.
Matisse is the other reason to come. The museum has two versions of his Dance from the early 1930s, arching panels of leaping figures that grew out of a commission from the American collector Albert Barnes. An early start was abandoned unfinished and turned up rolled in his Nice studio in 1992. The next was set aside after Matisse discovered a mistake in the measurements, and he painted a third version for Barnes. Those two Paris panels now hang together in a room of their own, near paintings by Amedeo Modigliani and Pierre Bonnard.
