icasso/Matisse
Harriet Zinnes
Perhaps there are no two artists in modern times who have so ardently captured the imaginations and the devotion of art lovers than Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso.
Matisse, the Frenchman, Picasso, the Spaniard, who spent part of his life in France, the art center of the twentieth century, stars of the times but essentially notorious rivals. Yet late in the life of Picasso, he conceded that the artists had been following the same path all along. Matisse even said that they were "strangely in agreement."
The current exhibition (through May 19, 2003) of Matisse/Picasso or if you will Picasso/Matisse at MoMAQNS (the Museum of Modern Art, Queens), as the catalogue of the show notes, "marks one of the most fascinating and creative dialogues in the history of art." Though the organizers of the exhibition are five well-known international curators (John Elderfield, from the Museum of Modern Art, Kirk Varnedoe, from Princeton, John Golding, from London, Elizabeth Cowling, the University of Edinburgh, Anne Baldassari and Isabelle Monod-Fontaine from Paris) they explore what the Museum calls "the complex lifelong relationship between two modern masters" with what seems a singular integrated vision.
Certainly there was rivalry between these masterly painters. Picasso acknowledged in fact (through rivalry, jealousy?) that "No one has looked at Matisse’s painting more carefully than I, and no one has looked at mine more carefully than he." It is quite wonderful, therefore, to be able to see the pairing so judiciously arranged by the curators. It is hardly necessary to consider the exhibition a play for judgment. How can one judge between such exhilarating masters? It is enough to see the results of the exchange between the artists. To consider Picasso’s painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) with Matisse’s Bathers with a Turtle (1908) is certainly to see the early influence of African art and the cubist emphasis of Picasso and its variations in the work of Matisse The strong colors of Matisse are there, and the fragmentation, the broken curves of Picasso are already dominating.
The exhibition is comprised of seventy-eight paintings, twenty-eight sculptures in painted sheet metal, bronze and plaster, twenty-nine works on paper, with drawings and cut-paper collage in addition to two woodcuts. When in 1917 Matisse moved to Nice, and Picasso stayed in Paris, the dialogue between the artists was less in evidence but it was certainly still there. Consider the use of the harem-girl motif, the odalisques of Matisse and the striking, dark response of Picasso such as his Woman in an Armchair (1927). And then there were the strange nudes of Picasso from 1925 to 1930, so unlike the sensuous figures of Matisse. But then Picasso fell in love with Marie-Therese Walter and became for a time a bit more Matissean.
The curators end the exhibition with self-portraits of the artists. Matisse’s Violinist at the Window (1918) and Picasso’s remarkable rather frighteningly dark The Shadow–but that was painted in l953. Picasso’s life had changed.
This is certainly a show not to be missed whether one can’t resist what is dire in the sculptural effects of Picasso’s paintings or the flamboyant colors of Matisse, even his Decorative Figure on an Ornamental Background that caused alarm in l926 when viewers looked at this strange sculptured nude figure though still ensconced within Matisse’s usual flamboyantly colored flat background.
