Examining Brushes With Greatness

A wealth of paintings and sculptures by Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, two of the 20th century’s artistic giants, are being displayed together in an exhibition that probes a complicated, decades-long friendship that enriched the work of both men.

The show at the Tate Modern opened May 11 to ecstatic reviews and has been drawing large crowds to the cavernous former power plant on the River Thames.

Curator Elizabeth Cowling says the idea for the joint exhibit came, in a way, from Picasso himself.

“You’ve got to be able to picture, side by side, everything Matisse and I were doing at that time,” he once said of the latter years of their careers, when their friendship was closest. “No one has ever looked at Matisse’s paintings more carefully than I. And no one has looked at mine more carefully than he.”

The side-by-side displays at the Matisse-Picasso show include 131 works covering more than 50 years and include some of the artists’ best-known masterpieces.

Art historians have long known about the ties between the contemporaries, who were friends and rivals from the time they met in Paris, where they are thought to have been introduced to each other by writer Gertrude Stein and her husband, Leo, in 1906.

Both helped define modern art, but they are often seen as its opposite poles--Matisse the meticulous master of bold colors and striking surfaces, painting calm, lovely images, while the more turbulent Picasso turned reality on its head to make pictures seething with emotion, much of it dark.

Cowling said seeing their art together would show viewers that neither artist fits neatly in his assigned category.

“People are going to find Matisse a far tougher, more outrageous, more daring artist than they thought, which is very good, because he was that,” she explained. Seeing his paintings next to Picasso’s, she said, will highlight their “scratchings, repainting, a sense of extraordinary energy ... that will give the lie to these notions that Matisse did it all easily.”

Picasso, she continued, emerges despite his frequent stylistic shifts as more careful and thorough than is generally recognized.

“You think this bohemian with an outrageous private life, and you think he’s just working almost thoughtlessly, out of genius,” she said. “This is somebody who worked ... hard, who finished things carefully ... a very reflective artist, a thoughtful artist.”

Exhibition organizers also hope to show that the Matisse-Picasso relationship was more complicated, and more fruitful, than previously realized.

Competitiveness spurred both artists and particularly needled Matisse when the fame of the younger Picasso began to surpass his own. He was even said to have been jealous when press reviews of a joint 1946 show in London portrayed the Spaniard as a rebel pushing the bounds of artistic acceptability.

And although their styles were different, they often inspired each other to experiment with new ideas. Matisse’s bold use of color pushed Picasso to move away from monochromatic images, and Picasso’s Cubism encouraged Matisse to rethink his portrayal of shape and perspective.

“This is what often happens when artists are part of a group; what the other does is a stimulus and a challenge,” Cowling said. “It gives you courage.”

The exhibition groups the artists’ works by theme, beginning with side-by-side self-portraits painted in 1906 and moving through landscapes, still-lifes and nudes, among other subjects.

The paintings--often quite different at first glance but sharing common elements on a closer look--seem to deepen each other’s power, and their arrangement traces the way in which the two men influenced and fed off one another.

The 1906 self-portraits, painted when Matisse was already recognized as a leader of the French avant-garde movement and Picasso was a young upstart, highlight the differences between the two.

Picasso’s “Self-Portrait With Palette” is done in a somber mix of grays, browns and white. It shows the artist with his dark eyes cast downward, looking haunted and mournful. Matisse’s piece is filled with color--he wears a bright, striped shirt; his face is shadowed with green; and dabs of blue hang behind his head.

Later works echo one another more directly as the men take on similar subjects, borrowing and then reinterpreting ideas and techniques.

Matisse’s “The Studio, Quai Saint-Michel,” of 1916-17, shows a model reclining on a red chaise as an easel rests nearby in front of an empty chair, its occupant seeming to have stepped briefly away.

It hangs next to Picasso’s 1928 “Painter and Model,” a far more abstract representation whose subjects’ bodies are depicted in spare lines and shapes. The scene is an unusual one for Picasso, who rarely painted from live models.

The artists’ commonalities grew even clearer toward the end of Matisse’s life.

The influence of his famous 1950s paper cutouts--blue silhouettes mounted on a white background--are clearly visible in the flat sheet-metal sculptures Picasso did a decade later, after his friend’s 1954 death.

The show has so far won rave reviews. The Guardian newspaper called it “momentous, tremendous,” and the Observer pronounces it “a rare and tremendous achievement.”

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“Matisse Picasso” is on view at the Tate Modern through Aug. 18. It will be at the Grand Palais in Paris from Sept. 25 to Jan. 6, 2003, and at New York’s Museum of Modern Art from Feb. 13 to May 19, 2003.