When the great Matisse retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art ended, in January 1993, it was followed for one amazing week by an unpublicized epilogue—a small show that could only be described as modernist heaven. Improvised at the last minute by the retrospective’s curator, John Elderfield, the two-room installation set a nearly ideal selection of iconic Matisses among equally iconic Picassos. The Matisses included the Baltimore Museum of Art’s Blue Nude (Souvenir of Biskra) (1907) with her wrenched hip, the Pompidou’s sketchily brushed trio of nude bathers, Le Luxe I (1907), the monumental Bathers with a Turtle (1908) from St. Louis, and their austere, near-abstract sisters, Bathers by a River (1909–1910, 1913, 1916) from the Art Institute of Chicago, plus three of MOMA’s bronze Backs. The Picassos, all from MOMA’s own holdings, included the hefty Two Nudes (1906), against a red curtain, and Les Demoiselles d’Avignon(1907). If you cared at all about the complex history of twentieth-century art, the show was near-perfection, an eye-testing demonstration of how potent ideas are stated, absorbed, and transformed by artists’ practice and, at the same time, an uplifting tribute to the power of sheer visual inventiveness. But if spending time with this astonishing assembly was exhilarating, it was also exhausting. The rare, perhaps never to be repeated, opportunity to see, side by side, widely dispersed pivotal works that had often been made in response to one another demanded that you look hard and think hard. You were forced