Dour, driven and professorial in bearing, Matisse peers out sternly from the darkness at the start of his great Paris exhibition. Impeccably displayed at the Pompidou Centre, this revelatory show differs from its acclaimed New York predecessor by focusing on his exceptional achievement between 1904 and 1917. They were his finest years, the period when he irradiated modern painting with a revolutionary vision of colour at its most blazing and sensuous. But in this early self-portrait he looks earnest, almost puritanical — a man encircled by shadows and beset with anxiety.

Part of the strain conveyed by Matisse's frowning features may have stemmed from a suspicion that time was against him. At the beginning of 1904 he was little-known, already approaching his 35th birthday and short of money. The allowance from his father had ended three years before, forcing his wife to open a millinery shop. But Vollard, one of the most respected avant-garde dealers in Paris, was about to give Matisse his first one-man show. He probably hoped that success was at last within reach, and th

Picasso, with whom he exchanged paintings in 1907, must have acted as an additional spur. For the Spaniard was working on Les Demoiselles d'Avignon at the time. These were the years when 20th-century art defined its most radical identity. And as if in response to Picasso's challenge, Matisse embarked in 1908 on an annus mirabilis of his own.

This ability to toughen his instinctive hedonism with pictorial rigour becomes more and more formidable as the exhibition proceeds. The two versions of Matisse's dithyrambic decoration, Dance, are brought together to disclose exactly how he revised, criticised and transformed the whole image. Having been commissioned to paint this immense tour de force by his most generous and enlightened patron, the Moscow merchant Sergei Shchukin, he executed a full-size first version which looks vivacious enough when seen on its own. Here, however, Dance I appears surprisingly feeble pitched against the overwhelming finality of the second version. The pale pink figures seem tentative and slack as they prance in a circle on a blue-green ground which might have been inspired by the garden in Harmony in Red. Matisse was surely right to regard it as a study rather than a fully convincing achievement.

The prodigious Harmony in Red marks the moment when he took the risk of uniting the dinner-table and the wall behind in a single field of warm red pigment. Its richness saturates the canvas. But Matisse animates the image by flaunting the patterns on table-cloth and wallpaper alike, allowing their deep blue arabesques to arch and wave across the composition like fantastic underwater plant-life. The redness also acts as a wonderful foil for the lemons scattered over the table-top.

Outstanding among them is Luxe, calrne et volupté, an idyllic canvas entitled after a line from Baudelaire.. Female nudes recline and dry themselves on a seashore speckled with dabs of high-keyed colour. The debt to the optical dazzle of Pointillism is clear. And

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