Seduced by Paris masters

Before New York, before London, there was, of course, Paris, and long did she reign. This vast exhibition aims to trace the developments in painting and sculpture that took place in Paris over the course of seven decades, amid the array of -isms that, for the first four, dominated international artistic culture. Featuring 280 works, it is wildly ambitious.

The first room focuses on the artists of Montmartre. It's a room dominated by the sultry reds suggestive of furtive sex and dangerous liaisons. This is a gay Paris hot on the heels of Toulouse-Lautrec's Moulin Rouge, before its slow, painful decline into raging impotence and, finally, hopeless sterility. (This, of course, is an oversimplified narrative, and there is a huge 1960 canvas by Yves Klein that alone goes some way to disproving the version that says Paris was defunct after 1950.)

However, the trouble with exhibitions of this type is they tend to give equal weight to everything. There are just as many lesser-known artists here as there are the truly innovative and radical - such as Picasso, Chagall, Mondrian and Derain - who have earned their place in history. There are, for instance, almost three times as many Fautriers as early, Parisbased Matisses. Bombarded by so much visual stimuli, a sort of strange revisionist exercise occurs.

That said, it's great to see works that don't often get much of an airing. And, as show-stoppers go, it does manage to convey a sense of Paris as a brilliantly fertile stewing pot.

Until Apr 19, Royal Academy, Piccadilly W1, daily 10am to 6pm (Fri to 10pm), £9, £8 concs.

Tel: 020 7300 8000
www.royalacademy.org.uk
Tube: Green Park/Piccadilly Circus