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| Sunday, 6 April 2003 |
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This ambitious confrontation, which had already attracted 500,000 visitors to the Tate Modern in London and will end its course at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York, benefits, in Paris, from the presence of numerous extra drawings and, above all, from an exceptional painting by Picasso, Three Women, on loan from the Hermitage Museum in Saint-Petersburg in Russia. The very first joint Matisse-Picasso exhibition, acclaimed by Guillaume Apollinaire as a meeting between the two most famous masters who represent the two opposing great trends of contemporary art, had taken place in ... 1918. It was a fiasco! atisse (1869-1954) and Picasso (1881-1973), who had met in the winter of 1905-1906 through their American patrons and common friends Gertrude and Leo Stein, have often been presented as rivals who hated each other. In reality, however, they respected and appreciated each other and cultivated a veritable artistic fraternity according to Matisse, without ever working together but sometimes influencing each other in spite of their very different paths. For Picasso, there is only Matisse, while Matisse maintained, there is only one person who has the right to criticise me and that is Picasso. e are as different from each other as the North Pole from the South Pole, Matisse had noted. Born in Cateau-Cambresis, in the North of France (which recently reopened its renovated Matisse Museum, calm, collected, well-dressed, fond of harmony and keen on light and colour, Matisse was reputed for being the leader of the Fauve movement. Indeed, he had nothing in common with the fiery and impulsive Andalusian bohemian, younger by 12 years, who was to invent Cubism and revolutionise painting in 1907. his key painting was too fragile to make the journey from Paris. So was the luxuriant Joy of Living presented by Matisse at the 1906 Salon, shortly after his meeting with Picasso who was astonished by it. he exhibition opens with the two paintings that Matisse and Picasso exchanged as early as 1907 (the portrait by Matisse of his daughter marguerite and the still life Jug, Bowl and Lemon that Picasso had just finished and their self-portraits (1906). Thus begins the formidable confrontation between the works of the two artists from 1906 to 1960, supported by 76 paintings, 28 sculptures, 47 drawings and a dozen glued papers and cut-out gouaches. the itinerary is chronological but also follows themes (portraits, nudes, still lifes, interiors, etc.) with, sometimes, a big gap in the dates between two juxtaposed works which seem to echo each other across dozens of years. From the very first room, the great part played by these two inventors of modern art clearly stands out. Both of them transgress the aesthetics of the female body, Matisse with his Blue Nude, memory of Biskra (an odalisque with blue-hued flesh) and Picasso with his Nude Woman with Raised Arms, with her face and body looking as if they had been cut out with a sickle (presented in Paris for the first time), shocking their contemporaries in 1907 by the ugliness of these anatomies. Later on, the two painters worked together for a long time on other series of voluptuous or convulsed, seated, reclining or sleeping Nudes. The confrontation is astonishing for instance between the Large Reclining Nude (Pink Nude) by Matisse and the deformed and violently embracing Figures on the Seashore by Picasso during his Surrealist period. Picasso breaks up forms whereas I am a slave to them, Matisse notes. I can't help it, said Picasso. I add, I cut off and I move while Matisse lets the line come on its own and the model from itself and recreate itself. Pablo said to Henri, I have the drawing and I look for the colour while you have the colour and you look for the drawing. Another theme is still life. Still Life with a Skull and Crossbones by Picasso (who had just discovered the hanged body of a young comrade who had committed suicide, in the Bateau Lavoir) is sown side by side with the light-filled Still Life with a Basket of Oranges by Matisse which Picasso bought and kept in his private collection until his death. Another Bowl of Oranges led Guillaume Apollinaire to say, in 1916, If Henri Matisse's work was to be compared to anything it would have to be an orange for, like it, Henri Matisse's work is the fruit of brilliant light. Large canvases such as Matisse's Moroccans and Picasso's Three Musicians show how they both used black. A magnificent series of carved heads (Fernande and Marie-Therese side by side with Matisse's Jeannette and Henriette) allow us to follow the way in which each of them did sculpture like a painting, to change means, (in the words of Matisse). Matisse, who had settled in the South of France where Picasso often went to visit him, died on 3rd November 1954. However, it did not mean the end of the dialogue between the two. Picasso paid homage to him with a series of 15 variations on Delacroix's Women of Algiers, specifying that "On dying, Matisse bequeathed his odalisques to me" His sculptures cut out of iron sheets in the 1960s echo the paper Blue Nudes by Matisse nailed to his bed by illness and which are exhibited in the same room. We have to talk together as much as possible, Pablo had said to Henri. When one of us dies, there will be things that the other will no longer be able to say to anyone. An exceptional scientific site (the biggest research and documentation site on Matisse and Picasso) has been created on the Internet (www.matissepicasso.org) offering researchers and the public access to the very rich collection of archives of the Picasso Museum and of the Matisse family. A bilingual French-English data-base and a multi-criteria search engine gives free access to 10,000 documents. ACTUALITE EN FRANCE |
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