Matisse Picasso

Before
Matisse and Picasso were only able to become the legacies that
they are because of the masters of art who came before them.
Matisse & Picasso
First
Meeting
Awareness
Both artists are working in Paris, and each
is aware of the others’ work.
Introduced by
mutual friend
and art collector
Gertrude Stein
Rivalry, Dialogue, and Friendship
Influences
Both Picasso and Matisse were heavily
influenced by Paul Cézanne, a French
post-impressionist painter who died in
1906. They both felt they had to reconcile with the legacy of his work before
being able to move forward, and they
1907: Both Matisse and Picasso
attend a major retrospective of
Cezanne’s work in Paris. The exhibition is now infamous as a landmark
in the history of art because of the
immediate impact it had on artists
like Matisse and Picasso.
Rivalry
Friendlier Engagements
As their careers begin to grow, Matisse and Picasso are hyperaware of the other’s
artistic accomplishments and see each other as rivals. They constantly work to
outdo each other, engaging in a sort of “boxing match.” However, their rivalry only
occurs because they intuitively understand each other’s genius at a time when the
much of the world is reacting to their subversive and revolutionary work with horror,
disbelief, and contempt. Their dialogue grows more intense as they both scrutinize
and learn from each others’ work.
The artists’ worlds collide as they become the two symbols of “high modernism” in the art world.
They start to see each other in person more regularly in 1934, running into each other in Paris.
They occasionally exchange written messages and they continually inquire about each other
through mutual friends. Art historian Jack Flam notes that when World War II breaks out in 1939,
the “trauma of war forge[s] a new solidarity between them.”
scrutinized his techniques almost
obsessively. Still, the two artists
learned very different things from
Cézanne and took his legacy in
different directions.
“Cézanne is the father
of us all.”
—a line attributed to both
Matisse and Picasso
“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.”
Picasso began painting Les Demoiselles soon after seeing
Matisse’s The Joy of Life and in direct competition with it and
later with Matisse’s Blue Nude. Matisse’s two paintings were
revolutionary and caused a furor among the public. Picasso,
early in his career, already felt a keen sense of competition with
Matisse: unlike most of the public at that moment, Picasso
recognized Matisse’s genius and knew his work was the only
work worth outdoing.
Appropriation and Parody
Cubist Experimentation and Dialogue
Early Exchange
By 1913, Picasso was deep into cubism—the movement that
began with Les Demoiselles. Around this time he began to experiment with mixing some Matissean elements with his cubism, and
Matisse responds by himself experimenting with cubist styles.
These experiments became a major back-and-forth dialogue
between the two as they rapidly created paintings in response to
one another. About 15 later, Picasso painted a final reply that has
a stunning resemblance to one of Matisse’s works.
With Les Demoiselles, Picasso tried to do just that: his
painting is even more ugly, more violently sexual, and more
shocking. He shies away from the bright colors and curviliear nature of Matisse’s work, opting for angularity and
monochromaticism. But Picasso had learned from Matisse,
as well: particularly from the stylistic mixings of African
“primitivism” and the work of Paul Cézanne that occur in
Blue Nude.
1906: Both artists see
exhibition of Paul Gauguin’s
“primitivist wood carvings,”
which influence Blue Nude and
Les Demoiselles
Fall 1906: Matisse shows
Picasso a carved African
statue, spurring Picasso’s
interest in African art which
strongly influenced Les
Demoiselles
Art hisorian Yve-Alain Bois writes of this painting, “Is Picasso
saying something to Matisse, or settling a score, or correcting
him? All of the above: he is saying, among other things, that
the two of them belong to the same tradition; he is signaling
that he too can use strident colors, provided he subdues their
contrast with the interlarding of black between them; and he is
amending Matisse’s distributive mode of composition.”
“Do you like Matisse?”
“Well, Matisse...
he understands things.”
1907: Matisse and Picasso trade
paintings: each artist picks one of
the others’ to take. Each select a
painting that was different from
their own style and which they felt
they could learn from.
“That Matisse possessed such a language rankled and provoked
Picasso, and the work he produced in response to Matisse has an
In the 1930s the two artists work on a few pieces that parallel one
another. Picasso, aware that Matisse has been hard at work for years
on a mural in Philadelphia called The Dance, tries his hand at the
theme in anticipation of the reveal of Matisse’s piece.
aggressive edge to it that mixes admiration with something nearing
jealousy,” Flam writes. Matisse must have been startled by the
exhibition Picasso’s staged just a years after Matisse’s: “never in
the 26 years they had known each other had either so aggressively
incurred on the others territotry or so blatantly appropriated the
other’s imagery.”
Around the time of the dance exchange, Swiss publisher Albert Skira
commissions both Matisse and Picasso to illustrate new editions of
separate classic books of poetry. Both created lined etchings for the
books, which were hailed as major achievements.
“I have not seen Picasso for years...
I don’t care to see him again...he is
a bandit waiting in ambush.”
1914: An major auction featuring
works by Matisse and Picasso is
held in Paris. The auction solidifies
the two artists’ preeminence on
the world market.
Soon after, Matisse begins illustrative work for another book while
Picasso works on a set of 100 etchings called the Vollard Suite.
The images in these two works deal with similar themes of violence
and classical mythology.
Friendly Exchanges
Homage
During the 1940s and early 1950s, the artists’ mutual influence
can be seen clearly as they quote one another in a number of
artworks. They visit each other often and continue to learn from
one another.
Soon after Matisse’s death, Picasso begins work on the Women of
Algiers series. The original Women of Algiers was an 1834 painting
by Romantic artist Eugéne Delacroix and was one of the earliest
inspirations for Matisse’s odalisques. Picasso’s resulting series
contains clear Matisse references.
In 1933, Picasso produces a drawing of his studio that clearly
depicts one of Matisse’s odalisque paintings. The image is an
homage and signals a lessening of tension between the two artists.
Next Picasso works on a series that pay homage to Matisse’s Vence
interiors, paintings that had Picassoan elements to begin with.
1930: As a juror at the Carnegie
International, Matisse persuades
the jury to award a first prize to
Picasso for a rather old-fashioned
painting, Portrait of Mme. Olga
Picasso (1923).
—Matisse, 1926
—Picasso in response to Japanese
artist Richiro Kawashima, 1913
Matisse dies in 1954 at the age of 84. He produces artwork until the very end. His death
affects Picasso deeply: he stops painting for over two weeks before he dives into an almost
crazed frenzy of work. His immediate paintings are a clear homage to Matisse, whose work
Pic-asso would continue to wrestle with until his own death 20 years later.
During the ten years before Matisse’s death, Matisse and Picasso engage in true friendship.
They meet often in private, participate together in public events, and interact with their art.
Still, neither is ever completely able to escape bouts of jealousy and competitiveness—those
persist until the end. Yet their relationship is marked during this period with uncommon
tenderness and nostalgia for their shared past. And as always, their respect for each other
is extraordinary.
Parallels
Just before and immediately after viewing a retrospective of Matisse’s
work in 1931, Picasso paints a number of works that show clear engagement with the Matisse’s paintings, particularly his 1920s odalisques.
Picasso appropriates a variety of clear Matissean elements: decorative
patterns, languishing voluptuous nudes, and rich bright colors. Historian
Jack Flam speculates that Picasso, deeply in love with his new model and
mistress, Marie-Thérèse Walter, needed to use a visual language he had
not explored before—but that Matisse regularly used.
Picasso Mourns Matisse
Friendship
Late 1930s and early 1940s: The two
artists, though living far apart from
each other, exchange various works
as gifts. Here is Matisse’s Basket of
Oranges (1912) in Picasso’s Paris
studio in 1943.
1932: Almost exactly one year
after Matisse’s retrospective,
Picasso’s opens in the very
same gallery.
1931: A large Matisse retrospective opens in Paris. Picasso
attends and feels a renewed
sense of competition with his
old rival.
Bois also writes, “[Picasso’s] work of mourning is undoubtedly successful. It is as if the death of Matisse had freed a particular fiber
which Picasso always kept repressed in his art, as if he had to wait
for his partner’s demise to be able to publicly acknowledge how much
he cared for him.”
“We must talk to each other as much as
we can. When one of us dies, there will
be some things that the other will never
be able to talk of with anyone else.”
1949: Matisse hangs Picasso’s
Portrait of Dora Maar next to his
bed. “The anguish of the figure,
the terrible expression of this
face” are what he says moves
him to the painting.
1945-6: A joint exhibition of
Matisse and Picasso is held in
London and then travles to
Brussels and Amsterdam. This
is a catalog from the show.
Picasso’s series tells “of Picasso’s admiration for [Matise’s] works of
1947–48, which had filled him with envy at the time, or at least
anxiety,” writes art historian Yve-Alain Bois.
—a line attributed to both
Matisse and Picasso
—Picasso
Paul Cézanne, The Three Bathers (1879-82)
The Joy of Life (1905-06)
Blue Nude (1906)
Goldfish and Palette (1914)
Still Life with a Plaster Bust (1916)
“In Goldfish and Palette, Matisse builds on
the way Picasso was flattening and fracturing the planes in pictures such as The Card
Players—in effect, reworking Picasso’s
versions of ideas that Picasso had himself
based on Matisse’s earlier works.”
—Art historian Jack Flam
Matisse in this painting “seeks to incorporate
some of cubism’s disjunctive language while
keeping the expansiveness and decenteredness
of his own best work....It constituted one of
Matisse’s few really accomplished blendings of
his own compositional system with the cubist
idiom.” —Art historian Yve-Alain Bois
Jeannette V (1916)
Odalisque with Magnolias (1923)
Odalisque with a Tambourine (1926)
Decorative Figure on an Ornamental Ground
(1926)
The Dance (1931-33)
Hair, illustration for Mallarmé’s Poésies (1932)
Nymphs and Faun, illustration for
Mallarmé’s Poésies (1932)
The Blinding of Polyphemus, illustration
for Ulysses (1934)
Oceania, The Sky (1946)
Large Red Interior (1948)
Interior in Yellow and Blue (1946)
Interior with Egyptian Curtain (1948)
Matisse
“ Only one person has
the right to criticize me
.. . . It's Picasso.”
“The picture mixes such diverse aspects of...tradition in such unusual ways that it
seems at once to be not only a summation and synthesis of the whole of Western
painting but also a sustained attack on it.” —Art historian Jack Flam
Matisse went in debt to purchase this painting in 1899. In 1936 he
wrote, “In the 37 years I have owned this canvas, I have come to
know it quite well, though not entirely, I hope; it has sustained me
morally in the critical moments of my venture as an artist; I have
drawn from it my faith and my perseverance.”
“Even more than The Joy of Life, [Blue Nude was] a direct attack on the tradition
to which it belonged.” —Art historian Jack Flam
Scale accelerated
1900
Matisse spent the 1920s in Nice, a city in southern France on the coast of the Mediterranean. Inspired by multiple trips to the
French colonies in North Africa, such as Morocco, he painted countless odalisques: women lounging in suptuous, decadent
settings meant to refer to Turkish harems.
1910
Paul Cézanne, Bibemus Quarry (c. 1900)
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907)
The stylistic differences between the figure
and ground, the sculptural qualities of the
figure, and the abstractness of the background caused a stir when this painting was
first shown. Some considered it Matisse’s
best work, and some were scandalized by it.
Scale accelerated
1920
1940
1930
The Card Players (1913)
Harlequin (1915)
Still Life: Bust, Bowl, and Palette (1932)
Bust of a Woman (1931)
Nude Asleep in a Garden (1934)
Large Nude in a Red Armchair (1929)
Seated Bather (1930)
In paintings like this one, “Picasso mixes Matissebased decorative elements with the fractured planes of
synthetic cubism.” —Art historian Jack Flam
“After looking at your painting again and
again, he [Matisse] honestly recognized
that it was superior to anything you had
done so far... He expresses the feeling
that his own ‘goldfish’ might have led to
your Harlequin.” —Art dealer Léonce
Rosenberg in a letter to Picasso, 1915
“The similarities between the two pictures [Matisse’s
Still Life with a Plaster Bust and Picasso’s Still Life:
Bust, Bowl, and Palette] are extraordinary... Is Picasso
saying something to Matisse, or settling a score, or
correcting him? All of the above.” —Art historian
Yve-Alain Bois
After viewing Matisse’s sculpture at the
exhibition of his work, Picasso “in response...
began to model in clay, creating heads and
figures that gave a similar emphasis to mass,
sometimes responding directly to specific
Matisse sculptures.” —Art historian Jack Flam
“A violation of Matisse’s territory is made all the
more acute” by Picasso’s blatant sexual imagery on
“a pose and setting long associated with Matisse.”
Picasso uses the red cushion with a Matissean
pattern to make the “riff on Matisse” unmistakable.
—Art historian Jack Flam
“An overt parody of Matisse’s Odalisque
with a Tamborine.” —Art historian
Yve-Alain Bois
“It is an attack on the complacency Picasso
associated with Matisse—even in what was
considered Matisse’s most vigorous recent
image.... Decorative Figure had been related to
a new toughness in Matisse’s work; Picasso
translates it into something that is much,
much tougher.” —Art historian Jack Flam
Art historian Yve-Alain Bois describes this
painting as one in which Matisse “pays
tribute” to Picasso by using cubist idioms.
In the 1940s, declining health forced Matisse, now in his 70s, into a wheelchair. No longer able to work at an easel, he began
experimenting with paper cutouts, which he could create in bed. The cutouts filled him with renewed vigor, and they constitute
some of the greatest works of his lifetime.
Games and Rescue on the Beach (1932)
Three Nude Women, illustration for Ovid’s Metamorphoses (1931)
The Embrace III from the Suite Vollard (1933)
1950
1960
The Studio (1933)
Woman-Flower (1946)
The Kitchen (1948)
Claude in His Crib (1948)
The Chinese Chest of Drawers (1953)
Women of Algiers version H (1955)
The Studio at ‘La Californie’ (1955)
The Studio at ‘La Californie’ (1956)
“A couple of weeks after the exhibition of [Matisse’s] Mallarmé illustrations closes,
[Picasso] pays homage to his rival....In the drawing...one of Picasso’s balooning nudes
crouches in levitation on a table, contemplating a picture...that depicts, unmistakably,
a sleeping Matisse odalisque.” —Art historian Yve-Alain Bois
Picasso paints this after bringing his
new mistress, Françoise Gilot, to meet
Matisse. There Matisse told him, “If I
made a portrait of Françoise, I would
make her hair green.”
“[The Kitchen] could hardly be conceivable without Matisse’s recent large (‘decorative,’
all-over) cutouts, such as Oceania, the Sky...the sheer breadth of The Kitchen is Matisse’s.”
—Art historian Yve-Alain Bois
“[The painting’s] Provencal floor tiles and wroughtiron arabesques are direct quotes from Matisse’s
Vence interiors...[but Picasso] is resisting Matisse.”
—Art historian Yve-Alain Bois
“This canvas represents Picasso’s first attempt to
deal with...[Matisse’s] Vence interiors...[he chooses]
Interior in Yellow and Blue as a reference—that is,
a picture in which Matisse ostensively alludes to his
own [Picasso’s] syntax.”
—Art historian Yve- Alain Bois
“Version H, the eighth canvas...is the most Matissean picture of the series, with
its bright colors, loose texture, and large unpainted areas.” —Art historian
Yve-Alain Bois
“Nothing seems to me more Matissean in
Picasso’s entire oeuvre: the brushwork, the flat
planes of pure color,...even the quotation of a palm
tree. And yet, what could be more Picassoeque...?
The work is a hybrid: Picasso has cofathered a
canvas with his competitor.” —Art historian
Yve-Alain Bois
“The palm trees, the complex architecture of a Moroccan dish, the leafy pattern of the
Art Nouveau doors, the sensuous texture—the set is clearly awaiting Matisse’s entry.”
—Art historian Yve-Alain Bois
Picasso
“ All things considered, there
is only Matisse.”
Cézanne’s influence on Picasso’s cubism can be clearly seen in paintings like this,
where Cézanne abandons perspective in favor of two-dimensional planes that
have contrasting lights and textures.
Designed by: Jenna Blake
Bibliography: Bois, Yve-Alain. Matisse and Picasso. Paris: Flammarion, 1998.
Flam, Jack D. Matisse and Picasso: The Story of Their Rivalry and Friendship.
New York: Westview Press, 2003.
Trachtman, Paul. "Matisse & Picasso." Smithsonian Magazine. Feb. 2003.
“If The Joy of Life is one of the landmarks in the history of art,
the Les Demoiselles . . . changed its very course. It remains
the most significant single twentieth-century painting.”
—Art historian John Golding
“Picasso’s various sitters, alone or grouped, male or female, are all siblings of
Matisse’s odalisques, especially in the image of three naked women that
opens Ovid’s fourth book.” —Art historian Yve-Alain Bois