MoMA'S 'Matisse Picasso'

...Picasso's Painter and Model (1928), by contrast, is almost wholly schematic...

...Fascinated also by the tribal art he found in the Trocadero Museum, he would now become more radical...

...Contrasting sharply with the Arcadian lyricism of his late Fauve works, Bathers points forward into the coming century as surely as its harsher neighbor...

...Picasso's Boy Leading a Horse (1905-06) is as mysterious and grand as ever, but it looks somehow confined and conventional next to Matisse's Le Luxe I, a year later, with three flatly painted women by a lake in a brilliantly hued landscape...

...It blends naturalism and abstraction...

...Knowing he must respond, Matisse turned to the more traditional "primitives" of the early Renaissance and painted Bathers with a Turtle (1908), a puzzling, unforgettable picture of a small turtle at the feet of three large nude women who seem lost in an empty, unfriendly world...

...The result, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), is arguably the most significant painting of the twentieth century...

...The one invents, with color serving form, whereas the other discloses, with form revealed by color...

...However, with 132 paintings, drawings, and sculptures flexibly arranged in thirty-four groupings that reveal the direct or indirect influence of one artist on the other, it is good to remember Picasso's words, late in his life: "No one has ever looked at Matisse's painting more carefully than I; and no one has looked at mine more carefully than he...

...Artist, model, and studio are depicted in angular forms...

...In the Vence interiors of this period, Matisse achieved a consummate summation of his views on line and color, as well as a new way to bring the plane of the canvas forward toward the viewer through dazzling color itself...

...When Matisse and Picasso met at the apartment of Gertrude and Leo Stein in Paris in March 1906, the dignified older Frenchman had just exhibited his Fauve masterwork Le Bonheur de vivre at the Salon des Independants...

...the palette is a harsh blend of black, white, and blaring primary colors...

...Nowhere," wrote Andre Breton, "has Matisse put so much of himself as in this picture...

...For the religiously searching viewer who stands before the final two canvases (Matisse's Violinist at the Window of 1918 and Picasso's The Shadow of 1953), the exhibition's absence of any signal of transcendence is striking...

...Leo J. O'Donovan NOVEL JUXTAPOSITIONS MoMA's 'Matisse Picasso' No one has done more than New York's Museum of Modern Art to secure the reputations of Henri Matisse (1869-1954) and Pablo Picasso (1881-1973...

...It remains on view until May 19, and for those who can't make the trip, there is a resplendent catalogue...

...You meet them first in two assertive self-portraits of 1906 and next in a series of nudes...

...Seeing it at the Salon des Independants, Picasso realized that a large canvas he had been working on should be more savage...

...A year later, when Matisse first saw Picasso's synthetic Cubist Harlequin at the Rosenberg gallery, he thought it his rival's best work to date-and that "his goldfish" had prepared the way for it...

...Matisse's The Studio, quai Saint-Michel (1916-17), featuring the artist's small studio overlooking the Seine, shows his model Lorette lying on a red bed in a room of restrained color illumined by pale sunshine streaming through the window...

...Much has been made of the current exhibition as a contest for supremacy, with distinguished artists and critics declaring that Picasso is slighted or that, all in all, Matisse "shows better...

...Yet today, after a century of reflection on sexual exploitation and the struggle for women's equality, the painting seems to speak more powerfully than ever...

...The Creole Dancer and Zulma (both 1950), are banner examples...

...Through World War I and "the return to order" of the next decade, both artists remained in Paris, producing one masterpiece after another in painting, sculpture, and drawing...

...Whereas Matisse's Woman with a Veil (1927) is a song of farewell, his typically sinuous curves and the checkered hatching of his model Henriette Darricerrere's dress reappear in a number of Picasso's exultant paeans to Marie-Therese's voluptuous beauty...

...Yet what we do have, again and again, is a response to the perplexity and barbarity of modern life that either tears it apart (Picasso) or reconfigures it with intoxicating color (Matisse...

...Three pairings stand out here, each with a different theme...

...only the model's profile on the canvas and a Matissean piece of yellow fabric on the painter's chair soften its sharp linear quality...

...Thus began a jealous, rivalrous, legendary friendship of artistic competition...

...It is a confrontational and deliberately shocking study of five women in a brothel, their figures cut and slashed into jarring planes against an equally dismembered background...

...In each case, Picasso constructs an image based on an idea, while Matisse reimagines a sensuous experience...

...Now, at the Modern's temporary building in Queens, the long-awaited "Matisse Picasso" show has arrived from the Tate Modern in London and the Grand Palais in Paris...

...In 1931, Picasso celebrated his love for Marie-Therese Walter with a monumental plaster head that echoed earlier sculpture exhibited by Matisse at the Galerie Pierre in 1930...

...Soon they exchanged canvases...

...In the late 1920s their rivalry intensified...

...He insisted that they had always been on the same path, while Matisse once commented that for all their differences they were strangely in agreement...

...Often bedridden/ Matisse also perfected his technique of cutting forms from painted paper-"cutting straight into color," he called it- and having his assistants arrange them in often very large compositions...

...This is all the more true since none of Matisse's designs for the Chapel of the Rosary in Vence is included (although a maquette for Nuit de Noel hangs elsewhere in the museum), nor is any of Picasso's anguished protest in Guernica and the Weeping Women series represented...

...He showed the passionate young Spaniard a piece of tribal art from the Congo...

...The third, and central, gallery of the show is breathtaking...

...Three years later, the curves and hatching are more radical still in Matisse's Large Reclining Nude (The Pink Nude), a boldly calculated work that recognizes what was Matissean in Picasso and then points further forward...

...The more one looks, the more one sees-and appreciates how these two very different men gave to and took from one another over almost fifty years...

...There is a contrast between Picasso's Three Musicians (1921), showing a harlequin, a monk, and a pierrot in a severely planar presentation of a melancholic carnival, and Matisse's The Moroccans (1915-16), luxuriating in the memory of sun-drenched mosques, gardens, and indolent cafe habitues...

...The same year, Matisse was bolder still in The Blue Nude: Memory of Biskra from the Cone Collection in the Baltimore Museum of Art, a twisted, muscular figure of explosive sexuality...

...In 1992, its Matisse counterpart again drew almost a million visitors...

...As Picasso, along with Georges Braque, advanced toward Cubism, he painted his Africanizing Woman in a Yellow Dress (1907), a frontally severe, mannish figure with broad shoulders and a mask-like face against a crumpled drapery background in blue and brown...

...Finally, and most striking perhaps, Picasso's The Three Dancers (1925) from the Tate is paired with Matisse's Nasturtiums with Dance II (1912) from the Pushkin Museum, the former fierce and frenzied, the latter harmonious and idyllic...

...And surely we need not one more than the other, but both...

...For some, these de-coupages may overwhelm the accompanying Picassos, but I found the juxtapositions deeply moving, especially in the show's last gallery, which features Matisse's cut-out blue nudes of 1952 and Picasso's sheet-metal cut-out sculptures of a decade later...

...What appalled the public at the time, Matisse included, appalls us still: the blatant advertisement, without the least concession to beauty or decorum, of primitive sex for sale...

...In 1980, every inch of the Modern's former home on 53rd Street in Manhattan was given over to its Picasso retrospective...

...Cubism came into its own during the years immediately before World War I. Matisse transformed its pictorial Ianguage, with larger scale and deceptively simple but monumental effect, in Goldfish and Palette (1914), a painting both elegant and intimate...

...Six years later, in a portrait of his wife which Guil-laume Apollinaire called "the most voluptuous painting that has been done in a long time," Matisse reprised the sharp abstraction-and the mask for a face- while enlivening it with an elegant palette of blue, green, and orange...

...In The Dream and Girl before a Mirror (both 1932), Picasso's typical sexual anxiety yields to the kind of delight more often associated with Matisse...

...Separated by the German occupation of France during World War II (Picasso remained in Paris, Matisse in the south), and by the older man's fragile health, the two became neighbors when Picasso moved to Vallauris in 1948...