Word: picasso
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...would be too much to call these understandings false. There were times, especially in the Cubist years, when Picasso did rush in to places where Matisse feared to tread. And when it comes to color, Picasso, so given to dull greens and nougat browns, is no match for Matisse's vermilions and aquamarines. But the great lesson of the Matisse exhibitions of the past decade or so--the lesson this show carries forward--is that Matisse was every bit as much the trailblazer...
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...
...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 and Andre Derain, onetime Fauvists, defected to Picasso's camp. In time Picasso would even usurp Matisse's position in the affections--and worse, in the collection--of Matisse's once devoted patron Gertrude Stein...
Matisse and Picasso played a game of diagonal leapfrog, each using the other's work as a springboard to a new direction. So it was partly the young Picasso's confrontation with Matisse's Fauve canvases that pushed him toward Cubism. Matisse looked over Picasso's explosive venture, recoiled, then replied with pictures that exploded old notions of space without violating his profound compliance with the ideal of beauty...
...from about this time lies in the sweeping "background" that occupies most of the canvas. In this one, broad areas of blue, white and black dissolve deep space into allover optical force fields, a gesture that opened the way to the color-field abstraction of a half-century later. Picasso replied with Harlequin, a self-portrait as clown, painted in a moment of marital despair, in which he adopts Matisse's flat stretches of color. Partly in homage to Matisse, the clown also holds out a painter's palette, this one bearing the ghostly silhouette of a man's face...