Secret sharers Glorious MoMa show explores Matisse and Picasso's unique artistic affinity by Pete Hamill, New York Daily News 02-09-2003 Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse remain in death what they were in life: rivals, friends, two unchallenged giants of 20th-century art. Once more they come to confront each other with their visions, this time on the walls of the Museum of Modern Art in Queens. The show opens on Thursday. Prepare to be astonished. For there in Queens we will see again the pure pulsing colors of Matisse. We will see him embrace the sun and the sea, flowers and women. Here before us Picasso will act out his savage contest with the visible world, displaying his angers, fears and delights. Some of the almost 140 works will seem familiar, because in their time these two men changed the way human beings looked at the world. Picasso's cubism, after all, has been appropriated for almost a century by the commercial designers of everything from advertising to fabrics. His drawings have become part of the visual vocabulary of cartoonists and illustrators and other fine artists. We have seen versions of the color-drowned rooms of Matisse in movies and stage sets and the interiors of apartments and lofts. But at MoMA we will see the originals, still as fresh as the day they were painted, as modern as the day after tomorrow. And as different as the men themselves. "Matisse was far older than Picasso," Picasso's first mistress, Fernande Olivier, would write, "and a serious and cautious man. He never saw eye-to-eye with the younger painter. As different as the North Pole is from the South Pole, he would say, when talking about the two of them." Certainly, their personal lives and work habits had that polar quality, too. Pablo Picasso Ruiz, the son of an academic painter, was born in Malaga, Spain, on Oct. 25, 1881 (Picasso was his mother's name, and he later dropped the Ruiz). There are very few prodigies in painting (as there are in music) but Picasso was one of them. During his early teens in Galicia, he was an accomplished apprentice to the formal, academic style primarily taught to him by his father; certainly his hand did what his mind told it to do, and some remarkable drawings have survived. When Picasso was 14, the family moved to sophisticated Barcelona, and he quickly became a familiar in that city's restless young bohemia. Just before his 19th birthday, he arrived in Paris, the capital of the arts, carrying with him memories of the sun of Andalusia and the swirling arabesques of Moorish Spain. For most of Picasso's life (the exception was the time of his marriage to the social-climbing ballerina Olga Kolkova in the '30s), he lived and dressed like a bohemian. Matisse - born in 1869 in the cold gray drizzle of northern France (which surely explains why he spent so much of his later life on the shore of the sun-drenched Mediterranean - was radically different in personal style: He dressed like a banker and lived like a staunch member of the middle class. He followed the advice of the great 19th-century French novelist Gustave Flaubert to live like a conventional bourgeois in order to make unconventional, even brutal art. Picasso and Matisse met in Paris in 1906. Almost certainly the meeting was in the apartment of the expatriate American brother-and-sister art collectors Leo and Gertrude Stein. Matisse was already well-known as the dominant figure among the Fauves (wild beasts), a group of painters who built on the work of the Impressionist artist Paul Cezanne to express themselves in pure color. Matisse often distorted the human form to get his effects, and like the other Fauves, he applied his paint in what appeared to be deliberately crude strokes, destroying the surface slickness of academic art, resisting the middle-class prettiness of the Impressionists. In the salon of the Steins, a painting of Matisse's wife (in an elaborate hat) hung on the wall, one that Leo Stein described as "the nastiest smear of paint I had ever seen," but definitely something new. There were two Picassos in the same rooms. When Matisse spoke about art, he was lucid and precise. Picasso kept quiet (his primary language was paint, and he had not yet mastered French). To Gertrude Stein, the Spaniard was a silent, seething presence. Only real rival After that first meeting, they circled each other warily, looking at each other's work in galleries, occasionally meeting in the streets. Matisse visited Picasso's studio to see the still-unfinished portrait he was making of Gertrude Stein. They apparently spoke little. At one point in 1906, Matisse showed Picasso a mask from the Congo, and the Spaniard examined it with great care. Within a year, Picasso had made his great breakthrough painting, "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon," drawing on African imagery to assault conventional European notions of beauty. The subject was simple: five prostitutes lounging in a brothel. The execution was not simple. The painting was clumsy, purposefully ugly, an assault on form, and Matisse hated it. But the older man must have recognized that among the many artistic talents in the big room of Paris, Picasso would be his only true rival. In a way, that rivalry - which developed into as true a friendship as can ever exist among great artists - was the art world's equivalent of Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier. Just as Ali became a greater fighter when faced by Frazier, both Matisse and Picasso were pushed to more extraordinary accomplishments by the presence of the other. Matisse was usually serene, Picasso disruptive, but neither man ever seemed satisfied. It's hard to imagine the work of either artist if his rival had not existed. At MoMA we will see this process of artistic blow and counter-blow, repeated over and over while both men lived. Here, Matisse reluctantly absorbs some of the language of cubism and makes it his own. There, Picasso gazes at a Matisse and makes his own variation, sometimes soaring into pure color (see "The Dream"), sometimes into elegantly simple line drawings. Over and over, across the decades, they produced personal visions of the same themes: dancers, artists and their models, Odalisques from imaginary harems, the studio of the artist. Both rejected pure abstraction. Both made sculpture and prints. Both preferred women as subjects of their imaginations, with Matisse usually presenting them as beautiful and desirable, while many of Picasso's visions (particularly at the end of a relationship) were threatening and repellent. Matisse's version of the erotic was about desire and the sinuous possibilities of the human body. Picasso's erotic drive often seemed to take the form of vengeance. After his first great breakthrough, in 1907, Picasso came to view his art as a form of autobiography, and he sometimes recorded his emotional shifts with the exactitude of a seismograph. He tells us that the departing mistress was ugly or voracious, and presents the new arrival as an idealized presence. In 1939-40, when Matisse and his wife broke up after almost 40 years of marriage, and his model-secretary Lydia Delectorskaya moved into his bedroom to stay, his art revealed nothing. Picasso was the great narcissist, absorbed by the shifting terrain of himself. Matisse was the splendid visual poet of a world that delighted his eye. Matisse worked through the day. Picasso painted at night. For years both men were apolitical. That changed with the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. Picasso was a fervent supporter of the liberal republic that was being assaulted by the fascist forces of Francisco Franco, with help from the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and the Nazis. He persuaded Matisse to donate some work to help the Republican cause, to sign protest telegrams. Then Picasso painted his famous mural about the Nazi bombing of the town of Guernica (the painting lived in exile at MoMA until the death of Franco in 1975). A few years after the end of the Spanish war, when Picasso was living in occupied Paris, some visiting German officers came to his studio, to meet the great celebrity. One had a postcard reproduction of "Guernica." "Did you do this?" the German asked. "No," Picasso said. "You did." There would be no "Guernica" from Matisse, and some ideological fools later condemned him for the omission. But his answer can also be seen on the walls of MoMA. Here is the world that the Nazis hated: filled with a voluptuous Mediterranean light, the bodies of desirable women, red rooms pulsing with intimacy, lemons in a bowl, goldfish in a tank. That is, the world we think about when we use the word "civilized." Go find a book on Nazi art, with its Nordic imbeciles, male and female, pumped with the steroids of hate, and you will see its opposite. It is no accident that the works of both Matisse and Picasso were among those labeled "degenerate" by the Nazis. Sacred monster After the war, of course, Picasso enrolled in the French Communist Party, which was then a Stalinist branch office of Moscow. His motives are still discussed, including guilt over his failure to save his longtime Jewish friend, the poet Max Jacob, from the concentration camps, and his strict neutrality during the war. He made a few dreadful postwar propaganda paintings, and designed the dove which the Stalinists used in their "peace" movement (his daughter is named Paloma, which means "dove" in Spanish). But for the most part, he remained the sacred monster, the great artistic destroyer of form, and a worldwide celebrity. At the same time, his respect for Matisse grew even stronger. "All things considered," Picasso said in those late years, "there is only Matisse." And Matisse would say, "Only one person has the right to criticize me ... it's Picasso." Picasso owned seven Matisses, some purchased from dealers, a few the bounty of gifts from - or exchanges with - his rival. In Matisse's final years, when his hands were crippled, his body ruined by age and disease, and he was making the cutouts that created still another visual language, he slept with a Picasso beside his bed. Matisse died in November 1954. Picasso did not go to the funeral, neither would he speak to anyone in the Matisse family. He had a very powerful Andalusian dread of death and would resist it until April 1973 when he died at 91. But almost immediately after the passing of Matisse, he began a series of paintings of Odalisques, claiming that the genre was now a legacy from his vanished friend. And the following October, he made one of the saddest paintings of his life: "The Studio at Le Californie." The painting is done in thin muted washes of umber. To me, it's a kind of elegy for Matisse, who so loved the artifacts of a studio: the chairs and stools and windows open to nature. Here, nature is a sketch of fading green in the garden. But it's as if Picasso is saying: Come back, Matisse. Come back, old rival, old friend, and enrich this place with waterfalls of color, with goldfish in a tank, with lemons in a bowl. "Matisse Picasso" shows at The Museum of Modern Art, Queens, from Feb. 13 through May 19.