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

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 03-MAR-03

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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

"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, full of hints, puzzles, and fine discriminations--while looking at so much stupendous art is like trying to check the oil in a speeding truck. The show's insiderish self-regard, radiant with the leisurely delectations of an eminent curatorial team, including the museum's former chief curator of painting and sculpture Kirk Varnedoe, is unlikely to charm ordinary viewers, who, clutching their twenty-dollar, timed tickets, must elbow through packed rooms for disjointed encounters with the works. But the installation, by Varnedoe and the museum's curator-at-large John Elderfield, is crisp and considerately spacious, and to miss this event would be a shame. It will be a permanent reference point in the challenge of deciding what survives of the rich, estranged legacy of twentieth-century art in our drastically altered times.

At the heart of the show's appeal is a cultural come-on that has not changed: stardust. To have been the best at something in a sufficiently consequential way still earns historical figures--Albert Einstein, T. S. Eliot, Muhammad Ali--near-religious prestige. In the case of Picasso and Matisse, there's the added fascination...

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