Word: canvasful
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Certainly that was the case when the two men first met in Paris around 1905. Henri Matisse was then leader of the Fauves--the wild beasts--whose abruptly brushed, feverishly colored canvases had taken the lessons of Van Gogh and Gauguin to the inevitable far reaches. Pablo Picasso, 12 years younger, was still little known and working--though sometimes to surprising effect--with the dwindling resources of fin-de-siecle Symbolism. Both men were coming to grips with Cezanne and the means by which he represented space--with shallow patches of pigment that create the illusion of depth but still...
The recondite mazes of Cubism, so open, so impregnable, are what followed. Very soon, with the ferocity and radical distortions of a single canvas, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, Picasso would turn every other artist into cannon fodder and take from Matisse the leadership role within the avant-garde. Georges Braque...
One of these is Goldfish and Palette, 1914. That Cubist-inspired trestle of black strokes on the right is Matisse, holding a white palette through which his phallic white thumb protrudes. But the real importance of this work and others from about this time lies in the sweeping "background" that...
Both men made art as a defense against anxiety. Picasso believed that by painting his demons he could subjugate them. Matisse took pains to project the image of an imperturbable bourgeois, but the realities of his life were more complicated. In a mid-life crisis solved the French way, he...
That's how this show works. In the dialogue between these two great artists, in their reciprocal affection, mutual treacheries and grudge matches on stretched canvas, lies a good part of the history of Modernism. So was Salmon right? Is it nearly impossible to admire both Picasso and Matisse? Don...