'What next?' asks the man who put Matisse together: As the Museum of Modern Art's blockbuster show opens in Paris, Paula Weideger meets the man responsible: a softly spoken, former Leeds student

IT ISN'T only painters who are art world superstars these days. John Elderfield, director of the Department of Drawings at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and a curator in its Department of Painting and Sculpture, is riding the crest of a wave that most ambitious art-world surfers can only dream about.

Mr Elderfield organised Moma's Matisse exhibition, the nucleus of which was expected to open at the Centre Pompidou in Paris today after a successful four-month run in New York.

British critics who saw the exhibition described it as 'the show of the century'. Midway through the run, every reservable ticket had been sold; people queued from 5am for the 500 same-day admissions.

All this was not the work of a fast-talking New York sharpie, for John Elderfield, 49, is English. He was born and raised in Yorkshire, studied art and art history at Leeds University and did his PhD at the Courtauld Institute in London.

But the man responsible for the most comprehensive exhibition of Matisse's work ever mounted did not grow up in an art world family. His introduction to art came at the age of 11, when his widowed mother married an amateur watercolour artist and he joined his stepfather on painting expeditions. (John and his twin brother, Henry, now a Cambridge oceanographer, never knew their father, who was killed in the Second World War two weeks before they were born.)

When he went to university, Mr Elderfield had still not met a single person for whom art was a career. He imagined that architecture was the closest he could get to his interests in painting, but after a year studying the subject at Liverpool University decided it wasn't for him. By then he had been visiting galleries and had learnt about a course at Leeds that combined studio work and art history, run by the artist and critic Quentin Bell, now an emeritus professor of art history at Sussex University.

'It was a very eccentric course,' said Mr Elderfield when we met in Paris, where he is representing Moma at the opening of the Centre Pompidou's Matisse exhibition.

'Quentin had this idea that it was essential to understand stylistic development,' he said. 'He imported this wonderful woman who came from Manchester, I think it was. She lectured in white gloves on the development of corsets.' One result is that today Mr Elderfield is an art historian who defies recent trends, and focuses more on objects - paintings, drawings and sculpture - than on ideology.

Mr Elderfield, blond and bespectacled, seemed relaxed in the luxurious Relais Christine, where he and his American wife, the painter Jill Moser, were staying. Around the corner, Matisse had his studio overlooking the Seine. 'I'll only be able to hear you if you sit on my right,' Mr Elderfield said in his soft Yorkshire voice. 'It's a combination of jet lag and my giving up smoking.'

Moma's exhibition brought more than 400 works by Matisse together, including 275 major paintings. There were drawings, sculptures, paper cutouts and prints. Finland, the Vatican and Sao Paulo sent works; so did Reader's Digest and the Duke of Roxburgh. According to Jeanne Collins, director of Moma's Department of Public Information, at least 900,000 people visited the exhibition. The show was also a financial winner, although at a cost of dollars 5m (pounds 3.5m) it had been a huge gamble. Only half that sum was underwritten by Philip Morris, the sponsor.

'I really felt that if we didn't try to do the exhibition now, it was not going to be possible again,' Mr Elderfield said. This was because of the expense involved and the growing reluctance of collectors to lend.

Much of the exhibition's profit came from the sale of posters, notepaper and postcards. More than 100,000 people bought Mr Elderfield's catalogue in the United States, and even in Britain, where it is published as a Thames & Hudson hardback, the volume has sold well at pounds 48 a copy.

The Matisse exhibition also provided a boost to New York's ailing economy. A survey carried out by Moma showed that half the people attending the show came from 'out of town' - everywhere from Washington DC to Auckland. And more than 75 per cent of the visitors came specifically to see the show. New York's mayor, David Dinkins, ought to present John Elderfield with an artfully cut out blue key to the city.

Preparations for the exhibition began in 1988, but 1991 provided the most difficulties for the organisers. The collapse of the Soviet Union and, with it, that country's ministry of culture threw plans for loans from Moscow and St Petersburg into disarray. Without a Soviet government system to cover the cost of insuring the paintings, other guarantors had to be found. (One reason the entire Moma show has not gone to Paris is that the French government does not contribute to the insurance.)

Mr Elderfield and his wife have a house two hours' drive north of New York, where they try to spend half of each week and where he does his writing. This arrangement collapsed because of the demands of the Matisse exhibition. Mr Elderfield seems a little surprised that he didn't collapse with it. 'At one point I clipped a newspaper article about the family of a Japanese businessman who had just died,' he said. 'They felt he'd been worked to death. They were suing his company because he'd travelled a third of one year. I know that in 1991 I travelled for more than that.'

Mr Elderfield is as candid about the pleasures of preparing the Matisse exhibition as he is about his anxieties. 'After six visits to an institution to persuade them to lend, it's obviously a great thrill to get them to do it,' he says. But the real challenge, he believes, is 'to make sense of things which are so mysterious'. To try to fathom in the work of an artist 'that which one will never fully understand'.

He may thrive on hard work, but Mr Elderfield did not reach the top of his profession simply because of a narrowly focused ambition. In fact, for years he was unsure whether he wanted to be a painter or an art historian. After Leeds, he taught art at the Winchester School of Art, Hampshire, for four years, kept on painting and even had a picture in an annual show at the Hayward Gallery in London. But in 1969 he also started writing for art publications and then, while on a two-year fellowship to Yale University in the United States, began regular weekly reviews for the magazine Art Forum.

'I think that was the turning point,' he says. 'I found I enjoyed it enormously.' He returned to England, completed his PhD and in 1975 went to work for Moma in New York. Today he paints only occasionally.

In 1988, Mr Elderfield applied for the job of director of the Tate Gallery. 'They invited the shortlist to describe how they would organise the institution,' he explained. 'It became clear that what I wanted was to have a position that still allowed me to do exhibitions and write.' The post went to Nicholas Serota.

Mr Elderfield has not given up all thought of such a position, however. 'I still harbour this idea that it should be possible for museum directors to be scholars,' he says. 'It was certainly the case under the old British state-funded system.' Now, of course, museum directors have to be active and adept fund- raisers. Often they are expected to be showmen in the P T Barnum mould, too.

Has Mr Elderfield reached the peak of his career? Will anything he does in the future seem a let-down? 'It is a strange feeling,' he says. 'Given the range of possible subjects in 20th-century art, will there ever be anything as demanding as this to do again?'

However, something less complex to arrange and smaller in scope need not be less valuable or less personally demanding, he says.

Because he is high-minded and has such a gentle manner, it is easy to forget that Mr Elderfield is an ambitious man. 'One asks oneself what is possible. Could one ever do a Matisse and Picasso show?' he says.

If it is possible, the odds are that it will be done by John Elderfield.

'Henri Matisse 1904-1917', at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, till 21 June.

Matisse's Dance II (omitted, Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg) is featured in the Matisse exhibition which, after its New York run, is due to open in a reduced form at the Centre Pompidou in Paris today and run till 21 June. Independent readers are offered a chance to see the show. Answer the following questions:

1. What Russian magazine reproduced works by Matisse in April 1908?

2. Who commissioned Matisse to paint his Moroccan Triptych in 1912?

3. When did Matisse buy his first African sculpture?

The winner and a companion will fly from either Stansted, Leeds, Bradford or Newcastle to Paris with Air UK, Britain's third-largest scheduled airline (0345- 666777). The prize includes one night's accommodation for two, with breakfast, at the three-star Libertel Le Moulin, a CIP group hotel with modern facilities, in the heart of Paris.

Answers on a postcard to Matisse Competition, Arts, the 'Independent', 40 City Road, London EC1Y 2DB, by 9 March. The 'Independent' will run a special readers' offer of a weekend in Paris, including flights, hotel and Matisse tickets on Saturday 6 March.

(Photographs omitted)