Forty years ago, in 1945, the French battleship Le Terrible steered into the harbor of Stockholm. Loaded with a number of third-rate French Modernists headed by the “official” painter of the French navy, the once-Fauve Albert Marquet, her mission was to manifest, on the periphery of Europe, the unbroken grandeur of French culture—and to bring home sorely needed export incomes to a country still heavily afflicted by war damage. Since then much water has flowed under the bridges of the Seine, and gunboat diplomacy has been replaced by more sophisticated methods. Still, the Terrible incident may