When Henri Met Pablo

By Richard Lacayo

Whatever you may think of the new Broadway version of La Boheme, there's a better story of art-world devotion and backstabbing just across the river in Queens, N.Y. That's where the Museum of Modern Art is squeezed temporarily into a remodeled warehouse in a neighborhood where the sport-utility vehicle of choice is a dump truck. While its Manhattan headquarters is being reconstructed, MOMA is still managing to play host to the kind of exhibition that will bring hundreds of thousands of people to a place with no hot restaurant and no cabs. At a time when the museum blockbuster is threatened by high insurance rates and topic fatigue--there are Monet haystacks I see more often than I see my mother--"Matisse Picasso," which comes to the U.S. after hugely successful runs at the Tate Modern in London and the Grand Palais in Paris, is proof that the blockbuster can still be a public service, not to mention a supreme pleasure. It's only February, but it's safe to say that this is the show of the year.

From the first, critical and popular thinking positioned the two artists as the heads of opposing camps. The critic Andre Salmon summed it up in 1910. "There are lovers of art capable of admiring both Picasso and Matisse," he wrote. "These are happy folks whom we must pity." We all know the terms of their face-off. Matisse the color-infatuated voluptuary, Picasso the spiky engineer of Cubist space. Matisse the consoler, Picasso the bomb thrower. Matisse the man who once called for "an art of balance, of purity and serenity," Picasso the one who said, "In my case, a picture is a sum of destructions."

It 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 assert themselves as smears of pigment on the surface of the canvas. Matisse was the first to grasp its implications. But Picasso would drive further into them.

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 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.

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 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.

In the 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 brought him three years later to his Large Reclining Nude.

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, he made the canvas a defensive perimeter. His genius was to trim the battlements in the camouflage of paradise.

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 who can't get in.