EXIBITION: The Matisse Picasso exhibition, currently in London, is not just a cynical marketing exercise, writes Aidan Dunne. Given the two artists' rivalry - and respect for one another - over 50 years, it is a brilliant idea
Matisse and Picasso are two of the most famous artists of the 20th century. Either name attached to an exhibition would be enough to generate huge interest. Put the two together and you're virtually certain to have a super-blockbuster on your hands. So is the Tate Modern's big summer show, Matisse Picasso, a cynical marketing exercise? Strangely enough, no.
In fact the exhibition, whatever its marketing potential, is a brilliant idea, because the two giants, though their artistic personalities were always separate and distinct, were famously watchful of each other. "No one," as Picasso said, "has ever looked at Matisse's painting more carefully than I; and no one has looked at mine more carefully than he." Hardly surprising that they have habitually been pitched against each other but, strikingly, no-one has ever done something like this before. That is, looked as carefully at both bodies of work as they did themselves, with the aim of disentangling the threads of influence that tie them, sometimes tightly, together throughout some 50 years of artistic endeavour.
This influence often takes the form of statement and response, with one spurred to greater efforts by the example of the other, but it can also be distinctly mischievous, as when Picasso mocks Matisse with images of violently deconstructed figures reclining in armchairs, calculated ripostes to his espousal of an art as soothing as a comfortable armchair.
The guiding presence behind the project is the painter and art historian John Golding, which virtually guarantees some astute observations and juxtapositions. Certainly no-one is better qualified as an observer of art of the Cubist era.
His book on the movement is unsurpassed in the quality of its detailed visual analysis and, more significantly, in its ability to capture the excitement of discovery that attended the efforts of its practitioners. One of the strengths of the show, as with David Hockney's ground-breaking book on optics in art history, Secret Knowledge, is that it hinges on looking at the work, not on historical preconceptions. And Golding has a great eye, continually drawing out overlaps, correspondences and meaningful differences between works by both artists.
Despite the curatorial muscle behind the project, including the co-operation of both families, not everything was possible. MOMA in New York was never going to send Les Demoiselles d'Avignon across the Atlantic. So, alas, you cannot see Les Demoiselles and Matisse's notional response, the enigmatic Bathers with a Turtle, side by side unless you travel to the show during its spell at MOMA. But apart from that, MOMA, and many other institutions and individuals were extremely generous, so that you will see work in this show (in London, New York or subsequently at the Grand Palais in Paris) that you are unlikely to see otherwise.
Matisse was 12 years Picasso's senior. When the Steins took him to the younger painter's studio in 1906, he was the more established artist, "the king of the Fauves". But each was already aware of the other. Picasso acknowledged that Matisse's daring painting The Joy of Life, was a spur to his imaginative ambition and perhaps prompted Les Demoiselles. But, as Golding notes, for all his innovative flair, Matisse "remained an artist in the classical French tradition". It is extraordinary to see how Picasso, for much of the time with George Braque, and working essentially from the same starting point, so to speak, as Matisse, absorbed a variety of influences and struggled towards articulating something as radically different as Cubism.
As time went on, Picasso continually reinvented himself, as a theatrical designer, a neo classicist, a surrealist.
Whereas Matisse tended to be viewed, from the vantage point of the avant garde, as a conservative, an established but passé figure. He didn't help his own cause by advocating an art of soothing harmony. Yet for all the light decorativeness of his touch, all his apparent frivolity, as evidenced by those buoyant images of beautiful odalisques reclining in sun drenched interiors, his art is always worried and considered.
Both proved they were brilliant draughtsmen, though not necessarily at the same time. Picasso, more impulsive, extreme and uneven, was also a quick-witted, instinctive genius and a shameless artistic opportunist - "If it's worth stealing, I steal it," as he boasted. Not for nothing did Matisse, during one of their frosty spells, label him "a bandit waiting in ambush". Yet even Picasso had his limitations. He was a sculptural painter, always seeing things in the round, uneasy with the flat, patterned surfaces that were Matisse's preserve.
Nor was he remotely the colourist Matisse was and, from Cubism onwards, compositionally his paintings are relatively heavy-handed. When he tried to "do" colour in a saturated, Matisse-like way he was as unconvincing as Matisse the reluctant Cubist. When he overtly takes on board the lessons of Cubism, Matisse is never less than uneasy. He doesn't have the inventive fluency of Picasso at full throttle. It is when Matisse absorbs Cubist ideas and makes them entirely, even idiosyncratically his own that the results are really interesting. Rather than opportunistic thievery, he took ideas on board and pondered them long and deeply. It seems likely that the Cubists' radical opening up of pictorial space, of developing the idea of an emptiness, influenced him crucially.
In terms of character they were poles apart. Matisse, friendly but always formal, was usually attired like a businessman, rather at odds with the lyrical freedom suggested by his work. Picasso enjoyed sartorial flourishes but was very much a creature of bohemian Paris. Temperamental and charismatic, he drew people to him and dispensed charm and hurt alike. Golding points out that this temperamental difference extends to their work. Matisse's paintings offer few clues to his emotional life. And although he treated erotic subjects, the eroticism is cool, sensuous and detached.
Picasso's work, by contrast, is ferociously sexual and intensely autobiographical, reflecting, if often covertly, the tumultuous events of his personal life, the cyclical birth and demise of a series of grand passions.
On one level there is the suggestion of the two artists as rival admirals, exchanging broadsides. But the relationship was more complicated than that: never the clear collaboration that Picasso enjoyed with Braque, perhaps, more a wary but not antagonistic rivalry. They met frequently, whenever circumstances permitted, maintained a lively artistic dialogue and exchanged many works.
During the second World War, with Picasso remaining stubbornly in Paris, forbidden from exhibiting his work, and Matisse at home in Nice, their erstwhile rivalry seemed to subside into a profound mutual respect. As though each realised he had enough in terms of autonomous achievement not to regard the other as a threat. But, true grumpy old men, in private they kept sniping at each other.
Inevitably Matisse Picasso will be viewed as Matisse v Picasso but, even given their undoubted rivalry, their evident mutual influence, and Matisse's well-founded suspicions of Picasso the artistic pirate, they are complementary rather than exclusive talents. That is in all likelihood what both came to realise in the 1940s - that they were exemplars of a common tradition. While Matisse has risen in stature, notably with the wonderful retrospective about ten years ago, so, as it happens, has Picasso, as the sheer quality of his sculptural work, for example, has come to be appreciated.
Picasso's observation, "All things considered, there is only Matisse," sounds uncharacteristically generous. Yet when Matisse died in 1954, Picasso, notoriously terrified of any brush with mortality, offered no condolences to the painter's family and did not go to his funeral. He preferred to pay his respects in terms of his work.
Matisse Picasso is at Tate Modern, Bankside, London, until August 18th