Never Mind Picasso, It's Matisse and the Curator

www.nytimes.com By ROBIN FINN

MUCH as the good husband is not supposed to covet his neighbor's wife, the good curator is not encouraged to covet a museum's art. But, hurrah, the Museum of Modern Art's terribly British curator at large, John Elderfield, briefly drops his second-skin decorum and diplomacy — cribbed from C. P. Snow novels — and makes a tiny confession inside this blah conference room at the museum's office near Rockefeller Center.

Nothing larcenous, mind you. Merely a flight of fancy that causes Mr. Elderfield, 59, to work up a blush beneath his silver hair and scholarly specs, and to lower his voice as if the texts, some written by him, in this book-lined room have ears. Matisse, it seems, has exerted a giddy influence on him for 35 years and shows no sign of letting up. Factor in some Picasso and before you can say, "Blue Nude"-"Two Nudes," Mr. Elderfield, whose cubist-patterned socks and polka-dot Miyake tie hint at a whimsical soul behind the gray business suit, undergoes a kid-in-a-candy-store transformation.

His harmless excursion into covetousness occurred last month as he and his co-curator, Kirk Varnedoe, installed the blockbuster "Matisse Picasso" exhibition commandeering the museum's temporary headquarters in Queens. Sixty-seven works by Matisse (Mr. Elderfield's hero) are displayed in an intricate dialog with 68 works from Picasso (Mr. Varnedoe's hero). It was installation as intoxication.

"When you're hanging the pictures," says Mr. Elderfield, "you can maintain the fiction that these are all yours. But then you're finished, and people come, and there's a slight postpartum feeling, you know, that you've lost them. During the installation, Kirk and I started making a list of the works whose actual owners we felt don't deserve to have them, but it got too big." Naughty boys.

Mr. Elderfield is a Courtauld Institute of Art-trained dabbler whose Upper West Side apartment, shared with his companion of 20 years, Jeanne Collins, is dotted with landscapes, some on wood, some on canvas, painted by him, not Matisse or Picasso. If he could take one painting home, it would be "Bathers With a Turtle." But wait. It might be politically correct — Mr. Elderfield, slyly paraphrasing Nelson Rockefeller, says he learned his politics at the Modern — to select a painting by each artist.

Now he's getting greedy. Which two paintings?

"I've gotten quite attached to those final two surrogate self-portraits that end the show," he says, referring to "Violinist at the Window" by Matisse and "The Shadow" by Picasso. "To my delight, I've been told people have been found crying in front of them."

Not to digress, but what was his and Mr. Varnedoe's rationalization for exiling a zillion dollars' worth of masterpieces to a concrete-floored facility that more resembles a warehouse than a museum? Not counting the practical reason, the $80 million renovation of the Modern.

"Queens has its good and its bad points, but we sort of concluded the big raw space reminds us of an artist's studio and lends the works a different kind of resonance," he says. "Or maybe this is just our justification."

He paired Matisse and Picasso once before, linked by Cubism, at the close of the Modern's 1992 Matisse retrospective; it was a snap success, but why reprise it? Even Mr. Elderfield needed convincing after his mentor, John Golding, proposed a show for the Tate that morphed into a collaboration of museums in London, Paris and New York.

"It isn't King Kong versus Godzilla," he says of "Matisse Picasso." "It's about what it means to make works of art in a context where there's somebody else of your stature. I never understood, before working on this show, how Matisse wouldn't have been as great without Picasso pushing him, or how Picasso wouldn't have been as great without Matisse."   MR. ELDERFIELD comes from Lazenby, a village in Yorkshire. His father, in the British Air Force, died two weeks before he was born. He and a twin brother were raised by another war widow, his maternal grandmother, until his mother remarried. His stepfather, an amateur artist, taught him to paint, and he studied painting at the University of Leeds under Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf's nephew; after a foray into architecture, he immersed himself in art history.

He saw his first Matisse in London in 1968, and was floored. "I'd had tremors before the earthquake," he says, "but nothing like that."

While on a fellowship at Yale, he began writing for ArtForum, and his work was noticed by the Modern's Bill Rubin; they chatted, but Mr. Elderfield went back to a teaching job in Leeds and forgot about the Modern until he received a phone call in 1975. The Modern needed a curator. First assignment: assemble an exhibit of Matisse and the Fauves, and fast. Go to Paris and confer with Matisse's daughter: "Terrifying!" Write the catalog in three months; open the show in six.

Mr. Elderfield's next project involves a virtual unknown, the Venezuelan painter Armando Reverón, but there's been a snag — the domestic unrest in Venezuela. "As much as I believe in the power of art to work wonders in the world, Caracas has more important things to think about at the moment than someone from MOMA knocking at their door and asking to borrow their paintings," he says. "I can wait."