Great rivalry has always fostered creativity. Throughout history, talented contemporaries–Verdi and Wagner, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Gauguin and van Gogh–have tested, taught and trumped one another, pushing each other to experiment in ways they might never have dared. In this summer’s biggest blockbuster exhibit, London’s Tate Modern has gathered 131 paintings and sculptures–many seen together for the first time–to explore the complicated relationship between Matisse and Picasso. Drawing on descriptions by mutual friends like Gertrude Stein and the artists’ own prolific articles and letters, “Matisse Picasso” (through Aug. 18) covers the formative years in the development of cubism through Matisse’s familiar “Jazz” cutouts in the 1950s. During the early part of that period, Matisse’s expressive forms and bold, unconventional use of color had already established him as the darling of the avant-garde; Picasso was still defining his style. But the competition spurred each on to greater innovation.
Matisse once said that he and Picasso were as far apart “as the North Pole is from the South Pole.” The two artists seemed to divide the world and take possession of opposing elements. Matisse embodied color, light, harmony; Picasso shattered the visible universe to explore its savagery. Matisse turned his eye outward and contemplated nature. “What I dream of,” he wrote, “is an art of balance, of purity, of serenity, devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter.” Picasso preferred to look inward, striving to depict nature through the lens of his own conflicted psyche, describing the process of painting as “a kind of struggle between my interior life and the external world as it exists for most people.” In his work, he preferred to use “common objects from anywhere: a pitcher, a mug of beer, a pipe,” to tell the story. “They’re what I wrap up my thoughts in. They’re parables.”
At the heart of this clash was a fundamental disagreement about the purpose of art. In a preface to a 1915 Matisse-Picasso exhibition in Paris, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire compared Matisse’s work to an orange, “a fruit of dazzling light.” Like van Gogh’s sunflowers, his paintings are a deeply felt celebration of all that is wonderful in creation. Picasso’s fruit bristles with the murkiness of myth. In a 1919 still life, he re-enacted humanity’s first rebellion: two apples are poised on top of a squat, feminine pitcher and two have fallen onto the table, ejected from Eden. Watching him compose a still life of a skull and leeks, Gilot recalled admiring its forms and balance, then watching as a dissatisfied Picasso moved the skull around until “he finally found a spot that was much more unexpected than the original one and provided just the kind of fateful juxtaposition he was seeking, where the balance hung by a thread.”
In fact, the artists’ differences were so profound that many critics refused to see any stylistic similarities between them. But when their works are seen side by side, their mutual influence becomes apparent: Matisse looks a little darker, and Picasso a racy provocateur who drew on his rival’s themes. Sometimes they impacted one another in unsuspecting ways. Gilot recalled Matisse’s dropping by Picasso’s studio in 1948 and examining his latest work, bothered by an aspect of a nude painting he did not understand. “He took out a notebook and made a quick sketch of the painting to take home with him for further study and then sketched nine or 10 others in a quick, approximate manner,” she said.
Occasionally their rivalry bordered on theft. In 1906 Matisse visited Algiers and became interested in collecting tribal masks. On his return, he exhibited his “Blue Nude,” whose twisted, muscular body and fierce sexuality appalled critics, who thought he was mocking a traditional artistic form. When, in response to “Blue Nude,” Picasso produced his groundbreaking “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” in 1907, Matisse was shocked by Picasso’s aggressive appropriation of tribal art. Years later Matisse wrote to his daughter calling Picasso a “bandit, waiting in ambush.”
Matisse responded to “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” with “Bathers With a Turtle” (1908), sparking a trend in Western art. For the first time, the audience was invited to participate actively in a painting; we are included almost as a fourth character, who shares the bathers’ surprise at Matisse’s bright turtle. From there, Picasso went on to paint women who look directly out at viewers, challenging them to gaze back. At the Tate Modern’s dazzling exhibit, it is impossible not to. “Matisse Picasso” shows that of all the things the two artists shared, the most critical was their passionate determination to outdo each other. And the legacy of each is much richer for that.
