Matisse was born in flat, gray Picardy in 1869. His father pushed him to be a lawyer and Matisse didn’t dabble with paints until he was 20 and recuperating from appendicitis. He barely got into art school at the ripe old age of 26. At the same age Picasso had already whizzed through the blue and rose periods and was busy inventing cubism. But Matisse had a 12-year head start; when he and Picasso first met at Gertrude Stein’s apartment in 1906, Matisse was the leader of the most avant-garde artists in Paris, the fauves, or “wild beasts.” Wild as he was on canvas, Matisse in person was poised, well dressed and as punctual (as his son later said) “as a Swiss express.”
Picasso was born in Malaga, in sunny southern Spain. He was dirt poor, scruffy and at first knew only enough French to interject a “oui, oui” into Paris’s soiree chatter. But Picasso instantly realized who’d have to be deposed in order for him to become avant-gardiste No. 1, and Matisse knew a dangerous up-and-comer when he saw one. So they exchanged paintings. Each cagily selected a weak work by the other (Picasso picked a portrait of Matisse’s daughter; Matisse chose a clumsy still life), so that when artist friends came to their studios to talk about the current scene they could say, “Oh, yeah, that guy.”
Two 1906 self-portraits tell the story better than words can. The bearded, mature Matisse, trying for a little dash by wearing a brightly striped sailor shirt, looks quizzically out of the frame with an eye cocked warily at… Picasso? Pablo is all business with palette in hand and the quiet confidence of a young contender heading toward the center of the ring. The first round went to Picasso. He was championed by such poet-critic heavyweights as Andre Breton, Guillaume Apollinaire and Jean Cocteau. A host of artists, including Georges Braque and Andre Derain, defected from the fauves to the cubists. Matisse felt toppled. A case of bronchitis in 1917 sent him to Nice (where he stayed, more or less, until his death in 1954). A decade later, he was still complaining about Picasso, telling his daughter that he was “a bandit waiting in ambush.”
The incurably Don Juanish Picasso had suddenly decided in 1918 that he wanted to marry the Russian ballerina Olga Kokhlova. But in 1927 he became involved with a 17-year-old German, Marie-Therese Walter. On vacation in Brittany, he had to tiptoe away from the stern and jealous Olga to snuggle with Marie-Therese in a beach cabana. Meanwhile, the famously married Matisse (whose oeuvre would be infinitely weakened without all those succinct and probing portraits of Madame Matisse) ended up falling for the nurse he hired to look after his wife when she took sick. When the nurse was banished from the house, Matisse tried to meet her secretly. That resulted in histrionic doings with a revolver, a suicide threat–in other words, a Picasso scenario. Sex also leaked into the art. Matisse treated himself to a retrospective at a Paris gallery in 1930, only to have Picasso come along a year later and give himself a bigger one in the same place. Picasso showed a slew of paintings of women. They were, as art historian Jack Flam says, clearly “a way of declaring his triumph over the older artist not only as a painter, but specifically as a painter of sensuous images of women–as a lover.”
So who won? One critic at the time called Picasso’s retrospective “very bad sub-Matisse, very bad, false.” While we’re not so harsh, we’ll have to go with Matisse as a painter. As dizzyingly inventive as Picasso is with shape and form, he tends to think his way through color–you can almost hear him saying to himself, “Now, a red-orange accent here and some medium blue there.” Matisse just does it. Take the trees in the middle ground in “View of Collure” (1908). Who else could have shown so convincingly how they catch the sunlight? He used a really drab olive green, made ingeniously translucent so that the white canvas showing through gives just the right glow. At least once in almost every single painting in the MoMA show, Matisse pulls off this sort of little miracle. Picasso gets the nod, however, as a sculptor–even on canvas, he “sculpts” more than paints–and as a sheer visual inventor. In the relatively few three-dimensional pieces among the 130-odd artworks on view, both the heft and the wit are almost all with Picasso.
After World War II–which Picasso survived by lying low in Paris and Matisse rode out in the Vichy south–the two eminences became genuine friends. Picasso ensconced himself nearby and visited Matisse frequently. They still argued, of course. While Matisse decorated the chapel in Vence, Picasso grumbled that he was “van Gogh without God.” When the news of Matisse’s death was phoned to Picasso, he had someone say, “Picasso has nothing to say about Matisse, since he is dead.” Defense mechanism? You bet. Picasso admitted that “all things considered, there is only Matisse,” and, on his own deathbed almost 20 years later, his last words to his doctor were “You are wrong not to be married. It’s useful.” Picasso’s fading consciousness was sliding back toward Matisse.
These two great soulmates have always deserved a return engagement like this. Big museum exhibitions, remember, are really just reshufflings of existing material. Usually, nothing new is created in them, and the viewer’s pleasure consists in seeing the separate works of art they contain. Sometimes, though, there’s a vibration of living interaction that thrums through the galleries. “Matisse Picasso”–the individual works, the pairings on the walls and the eternal tango between modernism’s two greatest artists–has it. You would be wrong to miss such a show. Its like won’t come along again any time soon.
