Matisse-Picasso rivalry exhibition

NEW YORK, March 12 (UPI) -- Artists have been bouncing ideas off each other since they worked in caves in pre-historic France and Spain, but none have enjoyed the game of one-upmanship more than Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, the 20th century's most famous artistic rivals.

This wonderfully productive competition has been documented in an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art titled "Matisse Picasso," to run through May 19. It attracted record crowds in London and Paris prior to coming to New York where it is the "must see" event of the current season, drawing droves of art lovers to MOMA's temporary headquarters in a former factory in Queens, a bridge away from Manhattan.

Matisse and Picasso were introduced by Gertrude Stein in 1906 and remained friends, seeing each other frequently and corresponding when they were separated, until Matisse's death in 1954. The French Matisse was a well-established Fauvist artist 12 years older than the upstart Spanish Picasso when they met, but they became instant rivals, so much so that Matisse referred to Picasso as "a bandit waiting in ambush."

Later, Matisse admitted that despite a certain peevish jealousy he and Picasso were "strangely in agreement" although Matisse preferred harmonious images and Picasso often chose anguish over serenity. Picasso agreed that they found inspiration in one another's work, saying, "No one has looked at Matisse's painting more carefully than I, and no one has looked at mine more carefully than he."

Picasso was so distraught when Matisse died that he was unable to attend the funeral but he paid his old friend a tribute by observing that "Matisse left me his odalisques as a legacy." This was a reference to the many paintings of reclining harem women painted first by Matisse and then by Picasso. Ironically, Matisse had borrowed the exotic odalisque image from older French artists, J.A.D. Ingres and Eugene Delacroix.

The exhibition shows Matisse odalisques and Picasso odalisques side by side to point up the rich visual dialogue between the two artists and their imagery, a display technique followed throughout the show of 78 paintings, 23 sculptures, and 32 works on paper.

Documentation of this competition begins with Picasso's famous "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" of 1907, inspired by Matisse's 1906 masterwork, "Bonheur de Vivre," which is not in the show but has "Bathers With a Turtle" as a stand-in. It ends with Picasso's bent mental sculptures of the early 1960s that have striking affinities to Matisse's last works, his popular colored paper cutouts created when he was too ill to get out of bed. Matisse used large flat shapes in painting as early as 1914 in response to Picasso's cubistic paper collages.

Cubism was the main theme of the dialogue between Matisse and Picasso for the first 20 years of their rivalry. The exhibition traces the integration of curving elements with the sharp geometry of Cubism and the influence of African art, particularly masks, on their portrait work. Picasso's austere cubistic style gradually became more playfully ornate as a result of Matisse's dramatic response to cubism.

"Over a lifetime of rivalry, each man discovered aspects of himself through the work of the other, and reinvented aspects of the other in his own work," former MOMA curator Kirk Varnedoe, a co-organizers of the show, told United Press International.

"Influence seems a narrow, inadequate word for their rich exchanges. Neither would have achieved his true originality or greatness without the other."

Only when they were separated by World War I -- Matisse living in Nice on the French Riviera and Picasso remaining in Paris -- did their interests diverge.

Picasso experimented with Surrealism and his paintings, especially his female nudes, became brutally distorted in contrast to Matisse's sensuous nudes of the 1920s epitomized by "Decorative Figure on an Ornamental Background."

Picasso's style softened after he fell in love with Marie-Therese Walter in the early 1930s and his nudes became more "Matissean" in their lush eroticism, a progression illustrated by a number of works in the show, particularly "Nude in Black Armchair" dated 1932.

Seeing gallery after gallery filled with paintings of breathtaking originality in their imagery and color, on loan from collections in eight countries including the Russia's State Hermitage Museum and many never before exhibited in the United States, is an experience of a lifetime. The joy of artistic expression pervades this exhibition with an intensity rarely felt in any museum show.

The show's final statement is the juxtaposition of Matisse's inspired "Violinist at the Window," painted in 1918, and Picasso's inferior "The Shadow," dated 1953. They are years apart but still related in their haunting depiction of loss. The Matisse was painted during the artist's lonely wartime exile in Nice and the Picasso was paint just after his young wife, Francoise Gilot, had walked out on him.

The almost musical overtones of these two wistful, elegiac works are mesmerizing. MOMA curator John Elderfield, the other co-curator of the show, reports that he has found people crying in front of these paintings. Are there any artists working today whose paintings could evoke such a response?

The show's catalog includes 34 scholarly essays on the two artists and the interplay between them. ("Matisse Picasso," Distributed Art Publishers, 356 pages, $60, softcover $35).