TWIN PEAKS.(Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Musuem of Modern Art, New York, NY)

"Matisse Picasso," which has come to the Museum of Modern Art's temporary home, in Queens, after triumphant appearances in Paris and London, is a marvellous exhibition with a frail hook. With sixty-seven mostly top-drawer paintings, drawings, and sculptures by Picasso and sixty-six by Matisse, the show hardly needs a pretext, but it has one: a running dialogue of mutual attractions and abrasions between the twin godheads of modern painting. "This exhibition tells one of the most compelling and rewarding stories in the entire history of art," the catalogue introduction by the art historian John Golding begins. I'll buy that. But to extract the story--an elliptical tale, ...