Slate's Bizbox
art: The big picture.

The Armchair Painter Strikes BackFor many, Matisse's genius took second place to Picasso's. Should it have?

By Judith Shulevitz
Posted Tuesday, Feb. 18, 2003, at 6:33 PM ET

Click here to view the slide show discussion of Matisse and Picasso.

Picasso and Matisse ended up as friends, but they didn't start out that way. At the turn of the century, the young Picasso stole a pair of important collectors, Leo and Gertrude Stein, away from Matisse, and his followers scrawled anti-Matisse slogans on the sides of buildings in Paris. Picasso's aggression would probably have been dismissed as the usual competitiveness of the upstart with the more established rival—Picasso was 25, Matisse 37 when they met—but it flared up just as a generation of brash young modernists went looking for a leader to help them do away with the past. Although Matisse's stylized nudes and strange, bold colors had already earned him the title of the "Fauve" or wild beast, of the Parisian art scene, he was too reserved to play the revolutionary. So, the charismatic Picasso became known as the avatar of modernism, while the more retiring Matisse was forced into the role of the bourgeois overly committed to outdated modes of representation.

One of the many virtues of "Matisse Picasso" at the Museum of Modern Art in Queens is that it exposes the wrong-headedness of this story line. If you took this show at face value (and you shouldn't, at least not entirely, because the show by necessity downplays just how broadly each artist borrowed from other painters and other traditions, and because many of Picasso's greatest canvases are not shown), you would, in fact, conclude the opposite: that Picasso's entire career was actually a struggle to master the lessons of Matisse's difficult art, while Matisse forged inexorably ahead, absorbing Picasso's innovations as he went.

There's a poetic justice to this reversal, although it too may be overly schematic. Everything came harder to Matisse than to Picasso. Matisse studied law before he became an art student; he was poor and married with children and had to struggle for years to find his own style. Picasso, by contrast, was a celebrity before he was out of his teens and was able to master a wider range of styles. Both men moved at the same time toward abstraction. Picasso's example may have pushed Matisse further in that direction than he would otherwise have gone, but Matisse proceeded slowly because he understood the value of what was being left behind.

What handicapped Matisse, in part, was his insistence, as he streamlined his forms and sought a vocabulary more appropriate to an increasingly industrialized society, that he not lose touch with the physical world. His sense of form and color, his locatedness in the space through which he moved, was such that he could draw a goldfish as a flat orange oval with a black contour and still make us feel the goldfish acutely, make us aware of it as a thing in itself.

Picasso, on the other hand, transmogrified at will. His ambition was to dissociate art from the world, to free it from the bonds of representation. He was less interested in form itself than in how to reduce it to a series of signs. Matisse took things in; Picasso turned his hostility on them, reinventing them as a disembodied language. His paintings fascinate in the way that disfiguring accidents do.

There is something daring about organizing an exhibition around a rivalry—as if it were an aesthetic idea as important as any other. In Matisse and Picasso's case, at least, it was. Picasso has long been considered the more important artist—the one who pointed modern art toward its Conceptualist future. And yet, at a time when Conceptualism seems exhausted, when it seems to spin itself out in increasingly self-referential banalities, it is Matisse's more grounded paintings that seem to suggest a way out. Matisse's nudes, no matter how flattened or abstract, tell us a great deal about the women who modeled for him. Picasso's nudes tell you what he felt about them. Both men painted autobiographically, but Matisse's paintings record his passage through a world experienced with great intensity. Picasso's record his own almost unmanageable emotions.

In the following slide show, made up of nine pairs of paintings from the MoMA exhibition, we look at how the two artists irked, prodded, taught, and stole from each other. In almost every case, Matisse leads; Picasso follows.

Click here to view the slide show.



Print This ArticlePRINTDiscuss this in The FrayDISCUSSEmail to a FriendE-MAIL
Share on FacebookPost to MySpace!Share with MixxDigg ThisShare with RedditShare with del.icio.usShare with FurlShare with Ma.gnolia.comShare with SphereShare with Stumble Upon
Judith Shulevitz is a former culture editor of Slate. She is writing a book about the Sabbath.
Photographs of: Henri Matisse, Self-Portrait, courtesy of Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, Johannes Rump Collection © 2003; Pablo Picasso, Self-Portrait With Palette, courtesy of Philadelphia Museum of Art, the A.E. Gallatin Collection, 1950 © 2003; Matisse, Le luxe (I), courtesy Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, Musée National d'Art Moderne/Centre de Création Industrielle, achat á l'artiste en 1945 © 2003; Picasso, Boy Leading a Horse, courtesy of rhe Museum of Modern Art, New York, the William S. Paley Collection © 2003; Matisse, Blue Nude: Memory of Biskra, courtesy of the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Cone Collection © 2003; Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest © 2003; Matisse, Bathers With a Turtle, courtesy of the Saint Louis Art Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Pulitzer Jr. © 2003; Matisse, View of Collioure, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection, 1998 © 2003; Picasso, Landscape, and Woman in Yellow courtesy of private collection © 2003; Matisse, Goldfish and Palette, courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, gift and bequest of Florene M. Schoenborn and Samuel A. Marx © 2003; Picasso, Harlequin, courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest © 2003; Matisse, Bowl of Oranges, courtesy of private collection © 2003; Picasso, Still Life With Pitcher and Apples, courtesy of Musée Picasso, Paris © 2003; Matisse, Large Reclining Nude (The Pink Nude), courtesy of the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Cone Collection © 2003; Picasso, Nude in a Black Armchair, courtesy of private collection © 2003. All rights reserved.
Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum
What did you think of this article?
POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES
Washington Post
The Washington Post
OPINIONS
Unsung Statesman
Marc Thiessen | By the time he left office, Jesse Helms had become a mainstream conservative.
David Broder: Unabashed Racist