'Keys to a Passion': the Fondation Louis Vuitton's debut show

Billionaire collectors are not all equal. Any of them can buy, but who can borrow? None as magisterially as Bernard Arnault, who this week launched Keys to a Passion, the first major exhibition at his Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, with a stash of loans that would astonish and enthral in any world-class museum.

Matisse's "The Dance" (1909-10) comes from the Hermitage, and Malevich's "Black Square" (1915) from St Petersburg's State Russian Museum. Important works by Brancusi, Kandinsky and Leger are visitors from MoMA New York. In the opening room, Oslo's incandescent Edvard Munch "The Scream" faces a howling Francis Bacon pope, "Study for Portrait", from Chicago. The first nude that Bacon painted, a voluptuous, monumental yet fluid figure seen from the back called "Study from the Human Body" (1949), inspired equally by Michelangelo and Degas, has exceptionally travelled from Australia and is a revelation for European audiences.

Lined up with casual authority, too, are works from series whose iconic status is forever fringed with dollar signs. A Giacometti "Walking Man" ($104m in 2010) strides at us as we enter the show. Three outstanding examples of the full, vigorous, curving forms in lilac, blue mauve and yellow of Picasso's erotic Marie-Therese paintings - "The Dream" fetched $155m in 2013 - join a stunning, privately owned plaster sculpture "Head of a Woman with Large Eyes", where the eyes of the artist's blonde young muse swell into breasts and the nose is a phallic protuberance.

Arnault has two stories to tell. The obvious one is that money talks. It has enabled Europe's richest private collector to command allegiance from public institutions worldwide, thus putting his own foundation, inaugurated last October, in premier league company. This is rare: too often private museums lose impetus by becoming mere showrooms for underwhelming hordes of their owners' latest purchases. With Keys to a Passion Arnault, by contrast, attempts to position his own collection within the continuum of modern art.

From the Musee Marmottan Monet and Musee d'Orsay come, for example, a pair of Parisian emblems: two of Monet's greatest "Water Lily" canvases, paintings of mourning and defiant, dissolving beauty made between 1916-19 by an artist at once grieving his dead wife and son and believing that the "Nympheas" were his contribution to France's war effort. Seeing these immersive, all-over paintings at Giverny in 1952 convinced the American painter Ellsworth Kelly "that I could make a picture of only one colour". Today, Kelly's bright, vibrant monochrome panels hang like curtains in the auditorium of the Fondation Louis Vuitton.

Arnault's second story, then, is historical. The criterion for selecting Keys to a Passion was "works which we deem to be keys to the creation of the 20th century". If this sounds at once overambitious and overfamiliar - it is after all the essential narrative every modern art museum seeks to tell - triumph lies in the execution. Few public institutions have the plums assembled here, and none has the freedom to arrange them, as here, without curatorial theory or geographical bias. The result is a reading of modernism without the -isms, fresh and alluring precisely because it is an old-fashioned celebration of individual heroic endeavour.

Grandly, luxuriantly, just 60 choice pieces by two dozen artists are displayed simply by genre: portraiture, landscape (including abstraction), works concerned with the pulse of modern life - Leger's chunky "Constructors with the Aloe" (1951) from Moscow's Pushkin Museum; Robert Delaunay's montage of footballers, biplane and Eiffel Tower in "The Cardiff Team" (1922) - and finally paintings resonant of musical rhythm, such as the whirling spheres and arabesques of Frantisek Kupka's "Amorpha: Fugue in Two Colors" (1912).

The crescendo here is a pairing of early and late Matisse: the strident, wild "The Dance", with its brutally saturated vermilion figures on intense blue, hangs for the first time alongside "The Sorrows of the King" (1952), the gouache cut-out featuring elderly musician king, veiled shadowy dancer - Salome dancing for Herod, or the artist in old age comforted by his muse? - and a tambourine player with oversized hands squatting at their feet. Matisse believed this panel had more "profound pathos" than any of his other cut-outs, and was "the equal of all my best paintings".

Every piece in this show represents a moment of creative breakthrough and daring. Most are famous; a few Nordic artists are unexpected. Emil Nolde's frenzied Baltic landscapes, "Early Evening" and "Sea off Als", painted between 1910-16 in a hut on a pebble beach, in primary colours taken straight from paint tubes, marvellously reinterpret nature as a highly charged energy field. Four versions of "Lake Keitele", crystalline water criss-crossed with frozen reflections, announce the arrival in the 21st-century modernist pantheon of Akseli Gallen-Kallela, obscure until he entered the collection of London's National Gallery in 1999.

Another Finnish artist was new to me: Helene Schjerfbeck, the only woman in the show. This is no tokenism. Schjerfbeck's series of stark, near-monochrome, huge-eyed, deeply introspective self-portraits between the ages of 53 and 82 hold their own in company with many more flamboyant portraits. Particularly compelling is the dialogue between Schjerfbeck's evolution at the end towards skull-like head and hollow eye sockets painted as a blur of dematerialisation, and Otto Dix's grotesque orange-crimson "Dancer Anita Berber" (1925), prematurely declining Weimar femme fatale: ravaged skin, sunken cheeks, claw-like hands tapering to the pointed nails of the cocaine addict.

Without pushing art-historical readings, Keys to a Passion offers other intriguing juxtapositions: Bonnard alongside Picasso, who disliked the French painter ("a potpourri of indecision"); Mondrian and Rothko, the sole American in a determinedly Eurocentric exhibition, drawing attention to the architectonic impulses of both.

Modernism as seen here is about the will to construct, creating individual, expressive visions of the world from building blocks of lines and colour, referencing tradition - "to create something is a sort of echo from one artist to another", in Bacon's words - without getting lost in appropriation and irony. This upbeat and instantly accessible show, therefore, meets the optimism and openness of Frank Gehry's ship-like building: glassy curving sails appearing to billow across the Bois de Boulogne, interiors changing with light and time, terraces affording generous views across all Paris.

Gehry's fantastical construction, with the initials "LV" carved like a silver brooch over the entrance, could have been just a rich man's toy; Keys to a Passion marks Arnault's foundation as a serious cultural player.

'Keys to a Passion', Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, to July 6 fondationlouisvuitton.fr

Photograph: New York Museum of Modern Art

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