20th century AD

ArtForum, Feb, 1999 by Linda Nochlin

As final preparations were underway for "Matisse and Picasso: A Gentle Rivalry," which opens this month at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, art historian LINDA NOCHLIN met with the exhibition's curator, YVE-ALAIN BOIS, and talked with him about his revisionist approach to the relationship between these two central modernist figures. By turns parodic, agonistic, even elegiac, the conversation Bois details unfolds as a series of nuanced moves and countermoves within the artworks themselves. Often seen as antipodal forces, the two artists emerge as necessary partners and foils, twin protagonists engaged in a mutually enabling dialogue that helped shape the narrative of modern painting.

As the end of the twentieth century approaches, those grand old lions Picasso and Matisse, once seen as polar opposites within the narrative of modernist innovation, seem more and more like congenial creative companions. Perhaps it is today's art - video, object, or installation oriented - that makes the two look sympathetically old-masterish, mythic remnants of a pre-abstract, painting-and-sculpture-centered tradition inherited from the nineteenth century. In short, Picasso and Matisse today seem more similar than either of them is to Robert Gober, or Janine Antoni, or Mona Hatoum, or for that matter Andy Warhol or even Jackson Pollock. For all the differences in their lives and careers - even their national origins - both have shown their mettle equally as survivors on the historical scale.

It is said that the artist-hero is dead, as are painting and sculpture, the expressive media par excellence of the heroic creator. Attempts to revive the myth in exhibitions like the current traveling Pollock retrospective or the recent Bonnard survey may result in invigorating shows, but they reveal how firmly the artists in question belong to history rather than the present. I must admit I approached the idea of a Picasso-Matisse exhibition with a measure of skepticism. Another celebration of those doughty chers maitres who binged on the female nude and denigrated actual women; more connection between sexual prowess and pictorial inventiveness; more models lying down, more Big Boys, erect and alert, horns locked in agonistic struggle? If Yve-Alain Bois's conception of the Picasso-Matisse relationship cannot avoid the inevitable stereotypes, it goes a long way toward usefully complicating them. Bois, the Joseph Pulitzer, Jr., Professor of Modern Art at Harvard University, is really interested in the connections and the processes of connectedness between the two, the "gentle rivalry," in all its subtlety and variability. It is not that he attempts to extricate the "real" Picasso from the man of myth or the "actual" Matisse from his various legends (as though such a project were even plausible). Indeed, although Bois may resort to biography at times, it is really the relationship among the works - specific works at specific times - that interests him, not the relationship between the individuals. I found myself deeply captivated by the unfolding of a process informed by modalities of relation that seem unexpectedly multiple in l'affaire Picasso/Matisse. The two artists, both powerful figures, emerge from the encounter hauntingly aware of the other's presence, seductive or threatening, in the genesis of their own work.

LINDA NOCHLIN: Why do we need another exhibition featuring Picasso and Matisse at this moment in history? Haven't there been an incredible number of shows about these masters in recent years?

YVE-ALAIN BOIS: Yes, that's true. But there's never been a show about the relationship between the two. It's true that the first part of their relationship has been studied - that is, up until World War I. There's a kind of tradition of speaking about the tit-for-tat connection between say, Matisse's Joy of Life and Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon (followed by Matisse's Bathers with a Turtle). But the literature on Picasso after 1930 doesn't really take Matisse into consideration. It's as if he weren't part of the picture. And I became more and more convinced that he was. I think the images, in a way, speak for themselves.

But what I really hadn't considered was how much the elder Matisse was involved with Picasso during these later years - in a very different way, of course, because Matisse didn't have an Oedipal relation to Picasso. But by looking at the works very hard, and studying them in detail, I did find that, in fact, Matisse was quite receptive to considering Picasso a partner when he reentered the ring of modernity in the early '30s.

LN: That would certainly be a good reason for the exhibition. But what is the purpose of using such a dramatic analogy, the "gentle rivalry" of your title, to frame the show?

YAB: Well, the rivalry is one aspect of the equation. But I wanted to tackle a more complicated theoretical issue, which is the whole problem of "influence." I don't think it would be intelligent to say that Picasso was "influenced" by Matisse, nor do I think the reverse is true; it just doesn't work that way. I think, rather, that at certain key moments, both felt they were in a kind of boxing ring. Or that they were players/partners in a sort of game. And the stake of that game was, for both of them, the very practice of painting.