Among the most memorable paintings in the Museum of Modern Art’s great Matisse retrospective in 1992, an exhibition full of memorable paintings, was a solemn frontal image of a bearded man seated tensely erect, hands clasped in front of him. Painted in 1916 to 1917, the period of some of Matisse’s most compelling portraits, it was striking even in the company of the Beaubourg’s fetching vision of the actress Greta Prozor, seated in an armchair, and the Guggenheim’s stiffly upright Italian Woman, that strange picture in which the swooping plane of the background threatens to engulf the figure. The portrait of the bearded man was pared down to essentials: a rigid full-face figure against a dark ground, as hieratic as a Byzantine pantocrator, as implacable as an Egyptian statue. Matisse described the curve of his model’s smooth, bald skull and high cheekbones with an authorative circle that irresistibly recalled both the conceptualized drawing of icons and the solar disk poised on the brow of some Egyptian deities. Color was as deceptively simple as the composition: dull blacks and earthy flesh tones, accented by the grayed whites of a neat beard, generous shirt cuffs, and a tidy collar. The man’s black suit, punctuated only by the discreet flicker of a red Légion d’Honneur rosette in the lapel, all but merged with an expanse of black wall, but the elegant, sculptural head was framed and dramatized by a schematically rendered portion of a painting hanging behind him.

That the portrait