Finding the modern French paintings at the Hermitage is not easy—and that’s without taking into account the time and effort it takes to get to St. Petersburg. Once you get past the clogged entrance and the hostile babushka selling tickets, you have to follow a sporadic trail of easy-to-miss signs, negotiate a series of elaborately decorated state rooms and corridors, refuse to be waylaid by astonishing amounts of malachite, lapis lazuli, and colored marble, thread your way around clusters of multi-lingual visitors, locate a hard-to-find dingy back stair, and climb to the third floor to what must be the most unprepossessing but mercifully uncrowded exhibition spaces in the entire complex. The reward for perseverance, of course, is the stunning group of Matisses, Picassos, Gauguins, Cézannes, and other modern masters, drawn from the collections assembled by the Moscow tex- tile merchants Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov in a few short y ...

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