Spanish lessons

For art, everyone knows that France was modernity’s launching pad.

Now consider this: Modern French painting would have been nowhere without Spain. Absolutely nowhere.

That is the provocative lesson -- partly intended, partly inadvertent -- offered by two ambitious museum exhibitions in New York that just happen to coincide this spring. French painting, absent a massive injection of artistic input from the Iberian Peninsula, would likely have withered on the vine somewhere around 1842, mired in tired academic arguments. The work of Spanish painters offered something new, pertinent and vivifying, and its impact was felt right through World War I.

“Manet/Velazquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting” is the show that tackles the subject head-on. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 226 paintings and works on paper have been gathered in one of the most richly satisfying exhibitions of recent memory. If you love painting, see “Manet/Velazquez” -- or live to regret it.

At the Museum of Modern Art’s temporary outpost in Queens, meanwhile, “Matisse Picasso” charts the fitful interaction between two titans of 20th century painting -- one French, the other Spanish. It starts in 1906, when the two artists began to meet with some regularity, and it examines 34 pairs (or larger groups) of works arranged in a loose chronology. (Matisse died in 1954, Picasso not for another 19 years.) The exhibition doesn’t have the broad aim of the Met show, restricting itself instead to an influential artistic dialogue. But together the exhibitions suggest that the transformational impact of Spanish art in 19th century France partly paved the way for Picasso’s profound impact on 20th century Paris.

‘FRIENDS BUT ENEMIES’

Not surprisingly, given the protagonists, there’s a lot of great painting to be seen in “Matisse Picasso” -- that is, presuming you can get past the crush of visitors crowding the galleries. Oddly, it may be the thinnest exhibition with the fattest retinue of great paintings ever mounted. Halfway through, the show feels less like a probing dialogue between gifted, and hugely ambitious, artists than like a celebrity smackdown. “Who won the competition?” is an inevitable, if not very productive, question to find yourself pondering.

Matisse and Picasso were certainly competitive -- “They were friends but enemies,” wrote the poet, collector and salon diva Gertrude Stein, wielding a typically incisive oxymoron -- and nowhere more than in the first decade of their prickly mutual regard. Matisse, 12 years Picasso’s senior, was a newly established art star when they met. The leading painter of the Fauve movement, considered art’s cutting edge, he had just finished “The Joy of Life.” The vividly chromatic, voluptuous vision of a lush Arcadia upped the ante of Cezanne’s revered paintings of bathers.

Young Picasso was nonplused. He soon embarked on a painting whose subject was also voluptuous nudes, but of a rougher, less Edenic sort. His pleasure grove consisted of dames in a brothel -- “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” the young ladies of a red-light district in Barcelona.

Matisse’s “Joy of Life” isn’t in the show (Philadelphia’s Barnes Foundation does not lend), but his wild 1907 “Blue Nude: Memory of Biskra” is. Its chunky reclining nude under a palm has a roller-coaster contour, bluntly carved from color and outlined in indigo-black. She possesses a ferocity hitherto unseen in Matisse.

Picasso flipped.

Introduced to African sculpture by Matisse, Picasso repainted his demoiselles and added African masks and lozenge-shaped heads derived from ancient Iberian sculpture. The prostitutes glare out at a viewer -- cast in the role of customer or madam -- in an audacious confrontation. Picasso was tearing Western painting down to its foundations to rebuild from scratch. Matisse saw the painting in Picasso’s studio. He hated it.

The show’s knockout moment comes early. “Les Demoiselles” hangs next to Matisse’s brilliant retort, “Bathers With a Turtle.” Actually, the moment makes the entire show worth seeing, though the pairing is closer to a draw than a knockout for either artist. Picasso’s painting unlocked the door to Cubism, which sent art off into a whole new direction, and it deserves its status as liftoff for the 20th century. But Matisse’s picture is an enigmatic marvel, an unprecedented tour de force.

And it sure is weird. Matisse had just returned from Italy, where he’d been mesmerized by Giotto’s frescoes at Padua’s Arena Chapel, and the new work features mottled color and Giotto-like simplicity. On a strip of grass by the sea, three monumental bathers stop to feed a turtle. Strongly vertical, the three figures are woven against three horizontal bands of color -- earth, ocean, sky. No figure touches any other. They’re like notes on a musical staff.

The seated nude looks on impassively. The standing woman, derived from an African sculpture, anxiously gnaws at her hands. The crouching woman, her back to us as she holds out a leaf to the crimson turtle, is anonymous; her fetal form speaks of origin.

The picture is disquieting, despite, or maybe because of, its pastoral subject. Unlike Matisse’s other paintings of Arcadian bathers, which recall classical myths of Venus or ancient stories of Eden, this one brings no familiar, elemental narrative to mind. That seems to be its point -- and a primary source of its power. A simple, monumental depiction of nature is flooded with vivifying estrangement.

To act not as storyteller but as life’s fragile, hard-won connecting tissue is here asserted as art’s profoundest role. The rebirth of Modern painting would, for both these artists, recall the birth of art itself.

The contest for preeminence between Matisse and Picasso was certainly vehement, but it was also short-lived. Their fierce give-and-take couldn’t last long -- not when the cataclysm of World War I intervened. Picasso was just 26 when he painted “Les Demoiselles,” but he was 37 when the horrible war ended. He and Matisse, nearly 50, were then the artist-kings of Paris. There was nothing left to prove.

The show continues to point to moments over the subsequent 35 years when they acknowledged one another through their work. But the exhibition narrative, so tightly woven in the first two rooms, gets loosey-goosey fast. It becomes something of an empty exercise, as if Picasso and Matisse were the only big-deal artists alive and had no interest in anyone or anything else. Their period of greatest influence had passed.

NAPOLEON’S EFFECT

Over at the Met, meanwhile, “Manet/Velazquez” starts big and never lets up, demonstrating something we’ve always sort of known and now won’t forget. When Diderot completed his mammoth encyclopedia in Paris in 1772, there were entries on eight schools of painting -- none of them Spanish. By the time Edouard Manet held his celebrated solo show of 1867, almost half the 53 works exhibited were of Spanish-related subjects. He had gone to Madrid two years earlier expressly to see the Prado and the work of Diego Velazquez (1599-1660), whom he now bluntly described as “the painter of painters.”

You better believe it.

At the show’s entry, Velazquez’s full-length portrait of a court jester emoting is so drop-dead you might not make it into the first gallery. Next to it, Manet’s foppish homage, “The Tragic Actor,” seems almost ham-handed.

What happened in France between Diderot and Manet? Napoleon, mostly. Assorted imperialist adventures, including prominent fiascoes in Spain, had the otherwise beneficent effect of making Paris more cosmopolitan. By the mid-1830s, French constitutional monarch Louis-Philippe amassed a huge collection of Spanish painting -- the first in France -- which he proudly installed at the Louvre. For a time, there were more Spanish paintings there than at the Prado.

Goya, Murillo, Ribera, El Greco, Zurbaran -- the show’s excellent selections show the profound impact Spanish art had on French artists, including Corot, Courbet, Degas, Delacroix and even Baudelaire’s emblematic “painter of modern life,” Constantin Guys.

To oversimplify, the visual rhetoric of idealist painting, typified by Italian masters such as Raphael, was replaced by the acutely observed naturalism of Spanish painting. Refined porcelain finishes got bumped by robust technique, helping to pave the way for the brushy, stippled surfaces of Impressionism. The sunny confidence on the face of Ribera’s cheerful portrait of a club-footed urchin, the austere piety of Zurbaran’s kneeling St. Francis, and the casual glamour of women seated on a balcony in front of shadowy male figures in a masterpiece attributed to Goya all speak to the emergent sense of vital possibilities and daunting perils in post-revolutionary Paris.

Velazquez’s “Portrait of the Jester Pablo de Valladolid” (circa 1632-35), one of nine pictures by the artist here, is a breathtaking demonstration. It betrays none of the sober antiquarianism espoused by the official arbiters of taste at the French Academy. For them, Plutarch’s “Life of Phocion” was a hot ticket, and “base subjects” like bullfights and club-footed urchins were, in the grave words of their 17th century hero, Poussin, nothing but a distraction where “feeble talent could hide.”

Instead the jester painting depicts an actor, one who thrives through wit and artifice. The palette is limited to dramatic blacks against brown, with flashes of color restricted to the expressive face and hands. Amazingly, no horizon line or juncture of floor and wall describes the space; instead, his bodily presence creates the luminous abstract atmosphere he occupies.

The figure’s right side, where his arm and leg move back, is a nearly smooth line; it flattens him out, like a decal on the picture’s surface. By stark contrast, his left side, which strides toward us, is a contour described by a billowing serpentine ruffle. Magically it seems to inflate his body into a physical mass within the abstract space.

Painting is not a miracle to believe in, this Velazquez insists. It’s a miracle to look at.

Manet understood. After centuries dominated by Renaissance and Baroque painting that implored a supplicant’s faith in church, state or the directives of an academy, this invocation of the wondrous vagaries of individual worldly experience held extraordinary power.

Before he went to Spain, Manet painted jaunty, eye-grabbing pyrotechnics -- Lola Melea, the flamboyant star of a traveling Spanish dance troupe, shown as a formidable, flower-bedecked bundle of coiled energy; the flashy artists’ model, Victorine Meurent, brandishing a lance and a hot pink cape as an impossible female bullfighter; a male toreador laid out on the ground, dead.

After Spain, he marshaled more nuanced gestures. His famous picture of a little boy in military garb, “The Fifer,” shows the lad adrift within the same atmospheric optical space occupied by Velazquez’s jester. (“There’s nothing but air surrounding this fellow,” Manet had marveled to a friend about the Spanish portrait.) When he painted Emile Zola’s portrait, seated at his writing desk, he put in the novelist’s hands a volume of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts open to an article on Goya, whose etching of Bacchus hanging on the wall at the back is based on a Velazquez painting.

As subject matter for art, the worldly knowledge that came to replace uplifting historical morality plays was not necessarily pleasant. Goya, whose virtuoso work turned toward dark acknowledgment of grim disappointments as he grew older, revealed deep shadows cast by the Enlightenment. Radical doubt made him the first authentically modern painter.

A Spaniard who ended his disillusioned years in self-imposed exile in France, Goya was the first artist with a truly modern sensibility. For the next century, the example of Spanish art and the presence of Spanish artists would prove critical in Paris. They distracted French painters from their antiquarian classical fixations and pushed them headlong toward originality by embracing the conflicted spirit of modern life.

Christopher Knight is The Times’ art critic.

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The French-Spanish connection

What: “Manet/Velazquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting”

When: Tuesdays-Thursdays, 9:30 a.m.-5:30 p.m.; Fridays-Saturdays, 9:30 a.m.- 9 p.m.; Sundays, 9:30 a.m.- 5:30 p.m. Closed Mondays

Where: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Ave., New York

Ends: June 8

Price: Free. Suggested donation: $12, adults; $7, students and seniors

Contact: (212) 535-7710

Also

What: “Matisse Picasso”

When: Sundays, Mondays and Thursdays, 10 a.m.- 5 p.m., Fridays-Saturdays, 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Closed Tuesdays-Wednesdays. These are special hours during “Matisse Picasso”

Where: Museum of Modern Art QNS, 33rd Street at Queens Boulevard, Long Island City

Ends: May 19

Price: Advance tickets required: adults, $20, seniors and students, $15.50; under 16, free

Contact: (212) 708-9400

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A dialogue in paint

The impact of Spanish painting on French artists helped define Modern art. In 1838, the mysterious painting of women on a balcony attributed to Francisco de Goya was installed in the Louvre’s new Spanish Gallery, where a teenage Edouard Manet saw it. After an eye-opening trip to Madrid, 36-year-old Manet painted a dramatic Parisian version. In 1907, the young Spaniard Pablo Picasso painted his aggressive, fractured image of prostitutes. Henri Matisse, appalled, replied with “Bathers With a Turtle,” which turned for inspiration to Giotto, father of the Italian Renaissance.