THE thieves who raided the Paris Museum of Modern Art have taken an astonishingly well-selected group of connected works that add up to a history of the 20th-century avant-garde in its glory years. What underworld connoisseur ordered this impeccable crime?

Henri Matisse's La Pastorale (1905) is an important step in his discovery of an idyllic world of pure colour and unshackled eros. The calmly posed nudes listening to pan pipes in a bright woodland are closely related to his masterpiece Le bonheur de vivre, started the same year. The thieves have stolen Arcadia itself — this beguiling vision of a free, untroubled life goes to the heart of what makes Matisse the 20th century's most gracious dreamer.

Georges Braque's 1906 painting L'olivier près de l'Estaque shows him under the influence of Matisse and the so-called “wild beasts” or Fauves, whose release of savage colour was the revolutionary artistic discovery of the mid-1900s. It is an intense and fiery landscape that makes you feel the heat — and perhaps that physical impression of the sunburnt air is telling, for Braque would soon create in collaboration with Picasso a far more tangible, carnal art than that of the ethereal Fauves.

Pablo Picasso's Le pigeon aux petits pois is a formidable manifestation of their earthy “cubism”. On a cafe table, the world is taken apart as a hungry diner might decompose the carcass of a bird like bones sticking out of unrecognisable meat, fragments of objects and letters — a candle, a claw — emerge from planes of brown and white pigment. Lines slashed through space or across flatness give you not the sight, but the actual weight and texture and taste of the world.

— The Guardian, London