Word: picassos
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...Schneider in Paris, to mark the artist's centenary. It contained 250 works, and its catalog weighed 2 lbs. It seemed, at the time, exhaustive. This one has rather more than 400 works, and its catalog tips the kitchen scales at 5 lbs. 7 oz., outweighing even MOMA's Picasso catalog by 11 oz. It isn't a show to approach casually, even if the coming box-office jam allowed it. But Elderfield's panorama of Matisse's achievement is so exhilarating, so full of rapturous encounters with one of the grandest pictorial sensibilities ever to pick up a brush...
Matisse, paladin of modernism, is a long way from us now. Almost a generation older than Picasso, his counterpart, he was born in 1869, the year the Suez Canal opened and Gustave Flaubert published L'Education Sentimentale. Everything that looked modern in Matisse's environment is now ancient, from the gas buggies that were just coming onto the streets of Paris when he was a student in Gustave Moreau's atelier to the Vichy politicians who ran France during the Nazi occupation as he painted in Vence...
...idea that Matisse and Picasso, like Gog and Magog, are the founding opposites of modern art has left us a partisan scheme for looking at their work -- and for thinking about it. Picasso drawings, Matisse color; Picasso anxiety, Matisse luxury; Picasso the restless inventor, Matisse the calm unifier; Picasso in conflict, Matisse rhyming with peace; Picasso the bohemian Spaniard, Matisse the detached French bourgeois. There is something to these oppositions, but the closer you look at them the more tenuous they get. Matisse was just as challengingly inventive in his Fauve paintings in 1905 as Picasso became, with Cubism, around...
...view that Matisse was as avant-garde an artist as Picasso hardly took general hold in America until the 1960s, and came from his late work. For some years before his death in 1954, Matisse had been working to solve the split he had always experienced between drawing and painting. By cutting shapes out of precolored paper -- cutting, as he saw it, directly into the color -- and then pasting them on the surface, he closed the gap between outline drawing and color patch. As in Memory of Oceania, 1952-53, he gave the art of collage a brilliance, size...
...problem lies in the disembodiment. Matisse was no more an abstract artist than Picasso. No abstract painter can claim descent from their work without acknowledging that fact. The worldly motif, especially the human body, and in particular the female body, was as basic to Matisse's art as it had been to Delacroix's or Titian's. His paintings vividly communicate a tension between what he called "the sign" and the reality it pointed...