This spring was a good time at the Museum of Modern Art. With the combined forces of Atget’s photographs of Paris at the turn of the century, Rousseau’s landscapes, portraits, and fantasies, and fifty years of Matisse drawings, MOMA had on hand a blockbuster-sized celebration of Paris, the classical center of modern art. These shows were hung by a curatorial staff that hasn’t given in to the idea of the museum as a rat maze; the installations were human-scale, free-flowing. And visitors were feeling a special euphoria—at the Matisse show they were smiling, almost cooing—because they didn’t have to fight against the kind of prepackaged reactions enforced by MOMA’s Primitivism show and the Van Gogh and Manet retrospectives at the Metropolitan last year.

Rousseau and Atget were pursuing their dream-like visions at the moment when Europe was first embracing the idea of the unconscious. Like sleepwalkers, they moved to the rhythm of the age. Brought together at MOMA, Rousseau (especially in his suburban landscapes) and Atget conveyed a feeling of turn-of-the-century Paris that was like perfume in the gallery air. They personified the spirit of the city and the time, and they amazed us because the effects in their work seemed to be achieved effortlessly, almost mindlessly. The Matisse drawing retrospective was bewildering in different ways.¹ Matisse is the most self-aware of artists, and his work, so very controlled, is mysterious because he often arrives at his magical effects after consciously setting a problem for