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Paris blockbuster Shchukin art show tops million mark in 'highest turnout for exhibition in France in 50 years'

A Paris exhibition of one the world's greatest private collections of modern art has surpassed the million mark, making it the most popular show in 50 years in France.

Such are the crowds of people flocking to see "Icons of Modern Art" at the Louis Vuitton Foundation, it was extended for weeks beyond the initial closing date, staying open day and night and ends on March 5.

The exhibition features the cream of the breathtaking collection of 250 paintings amassed by Sergei Shchukin before the Bolshevik Revolution, which had never before been seen outside Russia.

The show includes 29 works by Picasso, 22 by Matisse, 12 by Gauguin and other top-notch Cezannes and Van Goghs that the wealthy textile merchant acquired on trips to Paris before the First World War.

"If a painting gives you a psychological shock, you should buy it. It's a good one," was his motto. Although not for sale, the collection today would be worth billions.

With 60,000 people a week flocking to the spectacular though relatively small private gallery designed by Frank Gehry, its hours have been extended to cope with rocketing demand, with doors opening seven days a week until 11pm this month.

On the final Saturday of the extended run, the foundation in the west of the French capital is staying open untill 1am 

The last exhibition to attract that many people was one on Tutankhamun in the Petit Palais in 1967, according to Le Monde. 

The gallery -- paid for by the French luxury goods tycoon Bernard Arnault -- is laying on a breakfast every morning for visitors in the final week when doors open at 7am.

As well as the impressionist and post-impressionist masterpieces, the exhibition also includes 30 major pieces from the Russian avant-garde suprematist and constructivist movements, loaned by the Tretyakov State Gallery in Moscow and the Russian Museum in St Petersburg.

Shchukin, who fled Russia for Paris after the revolution, was particularly close to Henri Matisse, whom he brought to Moscow in 1911 to decorate his palatial home.

Lenin himself signed the decree to expropriate the works, before Stalin scattered the collection to museums in Moscow and St Petersburg, denouncing some of the greatest masterpieces of 20th-century art as "bourgeois and cosmopolitan".

A century later, the success of the exhibition is also a coup for Russian diplomatic "soft power" at a time of high tension between President Vladimir Putin and François Hollande, who last year criticized Russian intervention in the Syrian city of Aleppo as a “war crime”. In response, Mr Putin subsequently cancelled a Paris trip in which he would have visited the exposition.

The show opened within weeks of the inauguration of a culture center featuring a massive Russian Orthodox cathedral, whose imposing golden domes now vie with the nearby Eiffel Tower on the banks.

Mr Putin was also supposed to christen this. While he has still not shown up, the cathedral is complete and the show is the talk of the town.