Word: picassos
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...slightly unsteady without his cane and hindered by a hearing problem that is at times severe. In conversation, he often looks to his wife for assistance, but he remains as feisty as ever. He hasn't lost his enthusiasm for painting, and is happy to talk about Picasso ("He was good until about 1905, then he squandered his talent") or contemporary artists he admires (Balthus, Sam Szafran, Avigdor Arikha). But turn to the subject of photography, and the man who defined "the decisive moment" - the instant when an image should be captured - professes his famous indifference. Truth be told, Cartier...
...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...
...late 1920s Picasso met the teenage Marie-Therese Walter, a pillowy blond who would shortly become his lover and eventually bear their daughter Maya. Within a few years he was seeking a way to paint rapture, and where better to find an answer than in the canvases of Matisse? For Nude in a Black Armchair, 1932, he borrowed Matisse's voluptuous curves as a sign for pleasure and his use of black to intensify pink. And on seeing work like that--pictures that amplified the innovations of his own earlier work--Matisse was inspired to the more radical flattening 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 left his wife and family in Paris in 1917 for a new life in Nice with a personal harem of models. But Matisse dreaded the anarchic power of his desires. His sunlit rooms and elastic nudes are a bulwark against his fears of love and death. No less than Picasso...
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't believe it. No one will leave this show without loving them both. And the only people to be pitied are the ones...