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Uploaded 02/09/02
Matisse Picasso
Tate Modern, London:
11 May–18 August 2002
Les Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais,
Paris: 25 September 2002–6 January 2003
Museum of Modern Art, New York: 13
February–19 May 2003
Matisse Picasso at Tate Modern has just finished, but moves on
to Paris and New York later this year and early next respectively.
One of the finest exhibitions of many years, it is a collaboration
between the Tate, the Réunion des Musées Nationaux/
Musée Picasso with the Musée National d’Art Moderne/
Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris and the Museum of Modern Art, New
York. It is primarily a selection of paintings, but includes sculptures
and a fine section of works on paper. The exhibition has been jointly
curated by a team of six curators, two from each city: Elizabeth
Cowling (Edinburgh/London), John Golding (London), Anne Baldassari
and Isabelle Monod-Fontaine (Paris), and John Elderfield and Kirk
Varnedoe (New York). The catalogue is scholarly and comprehensive,
thus keeping alive the marvellous connections and interaction between
the artists and their works long after the exhibition has moved
on.
The cost of the exhibition (sponsored by Ernst and Young) has been
astronomical. The value of the works exceeds £1 billion. It is unlikely
that such an exhibition will ever be mounted again. Its existence
is largely due to the persuasive and determined John Golding, Chief
Curator.
For the past six years, he has had to tussle with reluctant lenders
in London, Paris, New York, Los Angeles and Leningrad, negotiate
with the autocratic and protective heirs of the respective artists’
estates and impose his vision of a show that will change our perception
of how modern art was shaped.1
John Golding is a painter and distinguished scholar. He is author
of Cubism 1907—14. In curating Picasso’s Picassos
(1981) and Picasso Sculpture/ Painter (1995) at the Tate,
he gained the confidence of the families. The visual connections
and groupings of works are the product of a painter’s eye.
In addition, the exhibition has been supported by a vast team of
assistants and experts. It is an unmissable exhibition. Indeed it
is in effect, three exhibitions in one: a Matisse retrospective,
a Picasso retrospective and an exhibition devoted to their relationship
and their remarkable visual repartee.
Matisse and Picasso are widely recognised as the two most influential
artists of the twentieth century ‘twin giants of modern art’.
The exhibition explores the close relationship between the two artists.
John Golding states emphatically, ‘This exhibition tells one
of the most compelling and rewarding stories in the entire history
of art’.2 In a recent interview he said, ‘For the first
time, you can see how two great artists interacted on each other
— how simultaneously they fed off each other. It’s one
of the great love stories of all time. They were totally complementary
and each of them realised instinctively his need for the other’.3
The relationship from 1906, when they first met, to 1917 was at
times tempestuous; there was open rivalry between them. At a time
of dramatic innovation when some of the finest art was produced
the two artists vied for position and reacted dramatically to each
other’s work. In 1917, Matisse moved from Paris to Nice. Picasso
became more involved with the Surrealists. During the Second World
War Matisse was isolated in Nice, Picasso lived in occupied Paris.
After the war Picasso moved to the south of France. There, their
relationship really blossomed. Reviewers have been apt to portray
the Matisse Picasso exhibition as a Heavyweight Boxing match with
Picasso in the blue corner and Matisse in a multicoloured corner.
According to certain critics we will argue forever as to which artist
is the best and the most important. Golding concedes that, ‘Picasso
is the greater in the sense that he revolutionised more aspects
of art — he’s a much more volatile, innovative artist.
Matisse was the greatest colourist of his age but always more restrained’.
Matisse’s art (b.1869) was in part a response to the pain
he experienced in much of his life. When he was only twenty, recovering
from a serious illness (in Northern France), he decided to abandon
his legal career and pursue his true vocation as an artist. He experienced
severe poverty and self-doubt until he was 40 when the Russian merchant
Sergei Ivanovich Shchukin began to buy paintings. When Matisse met
Picasso in 1906 he was beginning to feel confident and self-assured.
A vital experience for Matisse came in 1912 when he first visited
Morocco. The glorious colours there, the simple exotic forms were
liberating. In 1917 his move to Nice accorded him the opportunity
to paint freely. Illness again, in 1941, forced him to compromise
his activity when cancer confined him to his bed for the rest of
his life. Far from going into decline he spent his last years in
bed creating the most extraordinary and wonderful paper cutouts
and designing the Chapel in Vence. He died in 1954. The exhibition
includes a number of very fine examples of this late period. Matisse’s
well-known statement on art establishes the very different nature
of his work from that of Picasso’s, ‘A work of art must
carry in itself its complete significance and impose it upon the
beholder even before he can identify the subject matter. What I
seek is an art of balance, purity and serenity devoid of troubling
or depressing subject matter, an art which might be for every mental
worker, be he a businessman or a writer, like an appeasing influence,
like a mental soother, something like a good armchair in which to
rest from physical fatigue’.5
Picasso’s artistic career began with the recognition of his
precocious work as a young child. He was a dramatic individual and
all his life he maintained a political conviction: indeed he remained
a member of the Communist Party and was dedicated to the Peace Movement.
His most famous anti-war work Guernica, painted during the Spanish
Civil War, is one of the most famous and powerful anti-war paintings
of the 20th century.
Matisse and Picasso’s personal and artistic relationship dates
back to 1906 when they were both regular visitors to the studio
of Gertrude and Leo Stein. Both were aware of each other’s
work already, but only met at the introduction of the Steins at
the time Picasso was painting his famous Portrait of Gertrude Stein.
In the early stage of their artistic friendship there was overt
rivalry. In March 1906 the Salon des Independents exhibited Matisse’s
Le Bonheur de Vivre, which Picasso was deeply affected by. Matisse
was then celebrated as the leader of the Fauve Movement, ‘which
represented all that was most advanced and audacious in young French
painting’. Yet in old age Picasso admitted, ‘You have
got to be able to picture side by side everything Matisse and I
were doing at that time. No one has ever looked at Matisse’s
painting more carefully than I; and no one has looked at mine more
carefully than he’.6
The two personalities were quite opposite. Matisse was older than
Picasso by 12 years. He had trained as a lawyer, dressed immaculately
and was erudite. Although he had experienced hardship earlier in
his career he was, by 1906, quite self-assured. Matisse was criticised
for being bourgeois all of his life. Picasso, on the other hand,
produced precocious and brilliant work as a child and as a young
man. Like Matisse he was always very prolific in his output. Success
came quickly and he possessed great self-confidence. John McEwan
observes: ‘Picasso’s need to break the bounds of convention
was the result of burning self-confidence; Matisse’s search
for artistic peace and purity the compensation for long travail’.7
Picasso’s personality was more volatile, ‘He could be
capable of unkindness, even of cruelty, but such was his magnetism
that those whom he had hurt or wounded invariably were irresistibly
attracted back to him. He was elemental. Like nature itself he was
unpredictable and he ignored all conventions: a born bohemian’.8
Gertrude Stein probably exaggerated the animosity between the two
artists. Matisse later recalled that the early years of their contact
were characterised by ‘intellectual generosity’, and that
‘disputes were friendly’.9 Intense curiosity, Golding
observes, was an essential element in their early relationship;
they visited each other’s studios frequently. In 1907 they
exchanged pictures: Picasso gave Pitcher, Bowl and Lemon, 1907.
Matisse gave Portrait of Marguerite, 1906. Similar in size and medium
only, the two works show the artists at different stages of their
careers and with quite different preoccupations and temperamental
dispositions.
In terms of freedom from convention, Matisse had progressed further.
If Bonheur de Vivre, 1905—6, characterises Matisse’s departure
from academic convention and the development of a life-enhancing
colourist language, the portrayal of an Arcadian dream, Picasso’s
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907, is a cataclysmic work that
redefined painting in a most fundamental way. These two paintings
are sadly absent from the Tate Modern; Les Demoiselles will be included
when the show goes to New York in May 2003. They are pivotal works
and are discussed accordingly in the catalogue.
Les Demoiselles is a complex painting that brings together many
of Picasso’s interests at the time. A brothel scene, and the
product of numerous studies and previous works, Picasso was also
responding to Matisse’s experience of North Africa (Blue Nude:
Memory of Biskra, 1907) and his collection of African masks. In
Matisse’s work the female figure is by conventional standards
quite ugly; in Picasso’s they are quite damned. The figures
cease to be individuals — each aspect of their bodies exists
only as elements in the overall concept. But there is also a vicious,
iconoclastic treatment of the human form — a complete disenchantment
is in evidence. In philosophical terms Nietzche’s stormy sea
pervades the presentation of the figures. Although the figures in
Matisse’s Bathers with a Turtle, 1908 are ugly from an academic
viewpoint, there is nonetheless tenderness in their demeanour. Matisse’s
blues and greens create an Arcadian spirit in so much of his work.
Picasso used African masks for their formal properties but also
to denote a disenchantment with Western civilisation: implied is
the view that in ‘primitive’ societies, a direct and authentic
experience of life could be made available. Matisse, like most people
at the time who saw Les Demoiselles, disliked it intensely. Indeed
he felt profoundly threatened by it. Matisse collected African art
but his work was not greatly affected by it. Picasso on the other
hand, embraced their ‘anti-aesthetic’ qualities.
What Matisse and Picasso were doing in 1906—08 was not unusual.
But figure compositions traditionally required that they be composed
so as to tell a story; in consequence, such compositions had the
complementary functions of describing an internal narrative and
finding a place in the external narrative of the history of painting.
Matisse and Picasso, in 1906—08, challenged the necessity that
figure compositions describe an internal narrative. In doing so,
they took on the complementary function of challenging the external
narrative of historical continuity. Both Les Demoiselles and Bathers
were thus interpreted as debasing and overturning the traditions
of Western painting.10
Where Picasso’s greatest influences for Les Demoiselles came
from tribal art and the art of Paul Cézanne, Matisse’s
response in Bathers was influenced by Italian art of the fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries, for example Giotto.
Cubism enabled Picasso to ‘possess his subjects’11 by
viewing them from all angles, not just a single point. Matisse found
Cubism too austere and cerebral and the suppression of colour was
contrary to his primary passion. Matisse claimed ‘Picasso shatters
forms — I am their servant’. Golding continues, ‘The
Cubism of Picasso and Braque involved the reinvention of the vocabulary
of painting (and subsequently of sculpture) in the interests of
creating an art that was representational but anti-naturalistic.
Matisse’s art, throughout his entire life, is tinged by naturalism.
For him, art ‘consists of a meditation on nature, on the expression
of a dream which is always inspired by reality’.12
Between 1914 and 1917 Matisse felt he could not ignore Cubism.
He was influenced to some extent by Juan Gris in Collioure in 1914.
By engaging with certain aspects of Cubism, Matisse produced a number
of works that were rigorous in their structure. Indeed, by allowing
a dialogue with Picasso during these years (and also with Gris)
Matisse strengthened the formal structure of his painting. By the
outbreak of the war in 1914, Picasso and Matisse were recognised
as the two greatest living artists. In Golding’s view, in spite
of the visual splendour of the great majority of Matisse’s
art, he was in the final analysis ‘more pondered, more intellectually
calculated, than that of Picasso’.13 On the surface Matisse
has been seen as sensual and therefore not intellectual and yet
an artist like Milton Avery, an absolute disciple of Matisse and
a precursor of Abstract Expressionism in America, created paintings
that were part of a direct dialogue with Matisse. And yet in certain
instances they are also slightly mocking in response to what he
believed was Matisse’s tendency to be too serious.
Matisse and Picasso both achieved works that broke from established
convention; at times these were iconoclastic in the process; great
dramas took place on the canvas itself. Certain brushstrokes in
Les Demoiselles, for example, appear to have been carved in paint
rather than applied in a normal manner. The process of discovery
was at times a learned affair, with thousands of drawings and preparatory
works attributable to both artists. And yet the late paper cutouts
of Matisse have a purity and candour that comes from Matisse’s
unique approach. They are a form of sculpting in time — mid-air
with colour, not with a brush or with a pen, but with scissors.
The true exploratory quality of both artists is one of the most
exciting and moving aspects of this exhibition. The dialogue they
also maintained is so informed that it does in fact alter one’s
perception of the way their art evolved.
During the war years, the relationship between Matisse and Picasso
changed when Picasso created a number of naturalistic, Ingresque
portraits. Further, he worked with Jean Cocteau and Serge Diaghilev
and composer Erik Satie. He travelled to Rome; in 1918 he married
ballerina Olga Khoklova. In the 1920s he produced large, neo-classical
works. Living in Nice, Matisse’s work became more naturalistic.
At this stage the interaction between the two artists was probably
the least important. In fact, Matisse did not wish to see Picasso,
describing him as a ‘bandit waiting in ambush’. Unlike
Picasso, Matisse was extremely self-sufficient creatively; he in
fact shunned social activity and artistic collaborations. Matisse
tended towards being reclusive though he did visit Renoir and was
increasingly interested in the work of Pierre Bonnard. Picasso loved
the theatre, women, and social interaction and disliked Bonnard
intensely.
Golding adds to his list of wedges between Matisse and Picasso
at this stage, the Surrealist ethos that increasingly dominated
Paris in the 1920s.
The interchangeability of imagery, particularly of facial and bodily
parts, was something in which the Surrealists were to revel. Picasso
never became a true Surrealist, primarily because he was unable
to approach the external world, to use a phrase of André
Breton’s ‘with eyes closed’. Surrealism’s ideal
way of facing perceived reality. Nevertheless he was to become,
together with De Chirico and Marcel Duchamp, one of the three major
influences on visual Surrealism.14
The Surrealists proudly claimed Picasso as one of their own. Picasso
exhibited with them, but Breton and Cocteau both disapproved of
Matisse and so, to some extent, he fell from grace.
The female figure in the form of an anonymous woman becomes important
in Matisse’s Nice work. He found the overtly erotic work of
the Surrealists quite offensive. Oriental and languid, these women
inhabit a dreamworld. Picasso’s nudes of the late twenties,
on the other hand, are charged with an overwhelming sexuality. Picasso
later admitted the sexual drama in these works denoted autobiographical
qualities as his marriage to Olga floundered. Matisse’s private
life remained private — no hint is given through his painting
even when in 1940 he separated from his wife of many years.
Picasso used all aspects of life for his art. For Matisse, art
was perhaps an alternative or substitute for life. Where Matisse
produced beautiful odalisques in the 1920s, Picasso produced anti-odalisques.15
A new muse in Picasso’s life, however, in 1932, Marie-Thérèse
Water, brought about a new artistic development, using ravishing
colour. The many changes in Picasso’s work were considered
by some critics to signify ‘too eclectic and by implication
too intellectual an artist’.16
By 1922 both artists were achieving recognition in New York. From
1940—45 Matisse and Picasso did not see each other at all.
By then, however, their friendship was firmly established. It was
not possible during these war years for the two artists to see each
other’s work on a regular basis although they exchanged a number
of important paintings. Matisse underwent major surgery in 1941.
As a result he painted less and concentrated on drawing. Both artists
were internationally recognised by the end of the war, at which
point the French government acquired major works from each artist.
In the winter of 1945—46 their parallel exhibitions at the
Victoria and Albert Museum in London was a symbolic pairing of the
two.
In 1947 Picasso moved to the South of France. He and his partner
Françoise Gilot visited Matisse fortnightly. In spite of
their close friendship, Matisse believed that Picasso visited him
primarily to steal his ideas and yet he obviously benefited from
Picasso’s visits very much. Matisse enjoyed Picasso’s
vitality and amusing character; Picasso enjoyed Matisse’s serene,
peaceful disposition. Picasso greatly valued Matisse’s opinion
on his work. Picasso was critical of Matisse’s involvement
with the Chapel at Vence, suspicious as he was of any religious
affiliation. Stations of the Cross, at Vence, interestingly reveals
‘one of Matisse’s rare and unwilling recognition of the
existence of pain and suffering, of the tragic in life’.17
Appropriately these images show the clear influence of Picasso.
Matisse died in November 1954. In the years that followed, Picasso
painted a series of works that are both forms of tribute and mourning.
During 1963 and 1964 he painted studio interiors very much inspired
by Matisse’s works on the same subject. By this stage however,
Picasso was able to assert himself again and establish a total and
dramatic vision in the form of graphic work and sculpture. ‘The
final stages of Picasso’s activity as a sculptor relate him
yet again to Matisse in that they involved the use of scissors and
paper. Picasso had watched the evolution of Matisse’s decoupage
with fascination’.18 The end of Matisse’s life and the
years that followed it are profoundly moving. The visual signs and
forms, worked on by Matisse over a lifetime, are taken by Picasso
as a tribute to his great friend and fellow genius. The interaction
is celebrated today thanks to the brilliant and subtle initiative
of John Golding and Co.
1. John Whitely, Telegraph Magazine, London, May 5, p.52.
2. John Golding, ‘Introduction’, Matisse Picasso, Tate
Publishing, London, 2002, p.13.
3. Golding interviewed by Whitley, op.cit., p.52.
4. Matisse, ‘Notes of a Painter’, in Jack Flam, Matisse
on Art, Oxford, 1973. Revised edition, Berkeley and Los Angeles,
1995.
5. Quoted by Golding, ‘Introduction’, op.cit., p.13.
6. John McEwan, Sunday Telegraph, May 12, 2002, Review, p.11.
7. Ibid, p.11.
8. Golding, op.cit., p.13.
9. John Elderfield, Catalogue, p.43.
10. Golding, ‘Introduction’, p.15.
11. Ibid, p.15
12. Ibid, p.15
13. Ibid, p.19
14. Ibid, p.20
15. Ibid, p.21
16. Ibid, p.24
17. Golding, Catalogue, p.301.
Janet McKenzie
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