Two for the road: the prolonged and productive rivalry between Matisse and Picasso fills a major chapter in the history of 20th-century modernism. As a dual exhibition arrives in New York, Matisse's biographer speculates on his perpetual runner-up status in the popular ranking of the two avant-garde titans

The last great confrontation of their lifetime between Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso took place in 1945 on the walls of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Matisse was 75 years old, Picasso 64. "I can just imagine the gallery with my pictures down one side and his on the other," Matisse wrote gloomily beforehand. "It'll be like being shut up with an epileptic. How solemn (if not stuffy--at any rate to some) I'm going to look alongside his pyrotechnics. Which is just what Rodin said of my work. Still, I'll have to go through with it.... I've always told myself justice will be done some day." (1)

Matisse was used to being wrong-footed in encounters with Picasso. After their first two-man show, set up like a boxing match in Paris in 1918 by the enterprising young Paul Guillaume, even Matisse's admirers came to think of him as the lightweight of the two. "The painting of Matisse is pure and simple delight," wrote Clive Bell in 1933: "Picasso ... requires an intellectual effort.... Matisse, meanwhile, is painting rapturously as a bird sings." (2) Friends like Bell demoted Matisse more insidiously than did outright enemies. "He is still the typical Parisian ... with his veneer of Cote d'Azur chic," wrote Eric Newton, future Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford University, dismissing Matisse's expression in 1945 as rich, sweet and cloying, like chocolate creams, in contrast to Picasso's tragic vision, which combined the strength of a battering ram with the searing intensity of a blast furnace. (3)

This was and remained a widespread view. It took a blockbuster show organized by the Museum of Modern Art in New York 11 years ago [see A.i.A., May `93] to begin to dislodge the popular image of Matisse as relatively shallow, decorative and undemanding. From its inception, MOMA led the world in Matisse presentation and scholarship. Alfred Barr's two retrospectives in 1931 and 1951 (the last accompanied by a book that has been the basis of all serious Matisse studies ever since) laid down lines of exploration that have been substantially extended only in the last decade. Whereas Picasso's innovations were easily accessible to his contemporaries, seeping into the collective bloodstream from the 1950s onward via designers' layouts for everything from posters and record covers to coffee bars, Matisse's delayed impact means that whole areas of his work (and life) remain unexplored to this day.

Another historic shift is due this month when MOMA hosts "Matisse Picasso," the latest round in a contest that started at the beginning of the last century with a series of hammer blows. The first was Matisse's Woman with the Hat (1905), a work of ferocious daring bought from the Salon d'Automne by the American Leo Stein. It would later hang alongside Picasso's Boy with a Horse (1906) in the Paris studio Leo shared with his sister, Gertrude. The younger artist emerged from this joint showing as by far the tamer and more conventional of the two. Shortly afterward, Matisse provoked outrage at the Independents' Salon with his Joy of Life (1906), repeating the performance a year later with the Blue Nude (1907). Picasso responded with Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), which demolished the restrictive practices of traditional esthetics as efficiently as any of Matisse's explosive devices. But in 1910 Matisse's huge, and hugely disturbing, Dance and Music paintings once again staggered Picasso, who tried to retaliate on the same scale with a wildly overambitious project for 28 paintings commissioned by the American collector Hamilton Easter Field. After working on three of the canvases, Picasso abandoned the project. (4)

The younger artist reacted to the older from the start as if he had come within the range of an evil eye. The first painting Matisse ever gave him was a portrait of his daughter Marguerite, which Picasso hung in his studio in 1907 for his friends to use as a dartboard (albeit with children's suction-cup darts). It was as if he were trying to exorcise Matisse's influence by sticking pins in his work while at the same time struggling to absorb its impact on canvas in the Demoiselles. Forty years later, Picasso brought out the painting of Marguerite to "protect" his young lover, Francoise Gilot, from the band of envious male hangers-on who resented her intrusion and were frankly exasperated by her admiration for Matisse. He gave Gilot courage and confidence by hanging Marguerite's portrait above their bed ("she followed us with her gaze like a guardian angel") to ward off harm. (5) Matisse's baleful influence, long since disarmed in public, had now gone into reverse in private, too.

The main reason why Picasso's reputation as an uncompromising modernist far outstripped Matisse's from the Cubist era onward was that the greater part of the older artist's output in the revolutionary decade before World War I disappeared from view almost at once. The first major collection of Matisse's paintings was put together by Sarah Stein (wife of Michael, Leo and Gertrude's elder brother), who has received little or no credit for it from posterity. Matisse himself insisted that, of the four Steins, Sarah was the one with an unerring eye for painting. She had perfect visual pitch, and the courage to back her judgment, but no talent for PR (unlike her sister-in-law, Gertrude, whose extravagant self-promotion meant that until very recently all Matisses acquired by "the Steins" have been credited automatically to Gertrude and Leo, whereas in fact the purchasers were nearly always Sarah and Michael). (6)