The Return of the Modern

...At the Museum of Modern Art's temporary home, a converted factory in Queens just across the East River from its 53rd Street headquarters, the Matisse/Picasso exhibition arranges the paintings in some thirty groups that are said to show a link between the two painters' work...

...The exhibition seeks throughout to demonstrate parallels and interconnections in the work of "the twin giants of modern art"—the influence the one had on the other and their challenges to each other—reflecting the contemporary revised view of Matisse...

...They depict Matisse at thirty-seven years old and Picasso at twenty-five, both painted in 1906...

...The same goes for form...

...he could draw anything in any style from the beginning...

...Picasso concentrates on form, perhaps partly because he was an imperfect colorist...

...What, then, were painters to do...

...He is fashionably bearded and dressed in a fisherman's jersey (the radical chic at the turn of the century, when painters dressed in suits to work their canvases...

...BY MARGARET BOERNER The Matisse/Picasso exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art reminds us that modern art is already more than one hundred years old...

...More likely, these painters were simply aware of each other, the way all workers in a particular field are aware of the interesting things done by others in the field...

...The same holds for the pairing of Matisse's Nasturtiums with 'Dance' II (1912) and Picasso's The Three Dancers (1925...

...One is glad to see Picasso's titillating Nude in a Black Armchair (1932) and the disemboweled roundness of his beautiful new wife in Girl Before a Mirror (1932), next to the lyrical and harmonious depiction of women in Matisse's Music (1939) and Asia (1946...

...Picasso and Matisse create an image of our "seeing" the underside of a chair at the same time that we see its seat because the flow of experience reminds us, at each look, of all the other examinations we have made of the chair...

...they paint their parents' faces in vivid color...

...One feels Picasso is abrasively telling Matisse that nakedness is not merely decorative...

...Modern art attempts to reflect our experience of the chair...

...Putting these pictures next to each other is one of the most illuminating couplings in the show...

...and departures, that had been the mainstay of painting throughout the centuries...

...The exhibition is arranged chronologically, and entering it, one is immediately faced with a pair of self-portraits...

...Thus five-year-olds draw a human figure as all head, with stick legs and arms...

...By the time Matisse and Picasso came along, much of the traditional work of painting had been ceded to photography...

...Other pairings are more apt...

...One could spend a whole day looking at these paintings, perhaps wondering why Demoiselles seems an exercise in factitious emotion and why Bathers seems insubstantial, notwithstanding all its references to the monumental frescos of Giotto...

...Those who carp at modern art as "something my kid could do" are not entirely wrong: Children typically represent in paint what the object feels like to them and ignore the colors and shapes it really has...

...Sometimes the connection is one which the curators make up out of whole cloth...

...Picasso's self-portrait looks inward with a hieratic mask for a face, a face made famous when he used it to depict Gertrude Stein in the same year...

...The sobriquet "post-impressionist" was coined by the English critic Roger Fry to describe an exhibition of paintings, mostly by Cezanne, Gauguin, Matisse, and Picasso, in London in 1910...

...Picasso's women are pure objects...

...Picasso—twelve years younger than Matisse—was throughout the twentieth century the archetype of the hip modern artist...

...Bathers is thus said to be a reaffirmation of the classical nude, an answer to the ferocious whores who glare out of Demoiselles...

...The curators claim that Matisse and Picasso, living in the same era in the same country and often in the same town, were always conscious of each other and needed to answer each other's innovations...

...He was capable of unkindness, even cruelty, but such was his magnetism that almost all those he had wounded were irresistibly attracted back to him...

...Still, he had an honest eye for his own sexuality, even going so far as to depict his waning sexual powers in his old age: In The Shadow (1953), Picasso sees himself as an impotent shadow looming over a canvas that doubles as the nude model's bed...

...Early on, his cubist collaboration with Braque resulted in art so startlingly modern that, as Gertrude Stein remarked in 1933, looking back on her first encounter with Picasso, "It is very difficult, now that everybody is accustomed to everything, to give some idea of the uneasiness one felt when one first looked at these pictures on these walls...

...Matisse's welcoming subjects...

...For most modernists, it is representational to show the top and the underside of a table at the same time, or for the object to be only partially inside the frame of the picture, or for goldfish to be seen both through the side and from the top of the goldfish bowl...

...Throughout this exhibition, such pairings tell us a lot about the reaches of modern art, even if one is not convinced that the two painters were directly talking to each other...

...Nearly a century after that show, we can see that the essential modernist tack makes painting not a representation of reality but rather a code composed of elements, a language of its own, which breaks down the object into its imaginative parts...

...Slowly and with difficulty, modernism came to insist that painting should represent the flow of experience...

...Although the "anxiety of influence" he feels about Velazquez and Goya is projected everywhere in Picasso's work, it is ignored here...

...It was then charged up by Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso to become the twentieth century's dominant art...

...Indeed, two of the more famous paintings here, Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) and Matisse's Bathers with a Turtle (1908), are a distraction...

...Matisse and the school of "Fauves" (the "wild ones") made coloring into a thesis, and although most of the Fauves, like Derain, retreated into conventional representation, Matisse continued their task of combining colors to represent feelings evoked by the object...

...It is almost as though the curators said to themselves that both the Matisse and Picasso studio pictures have a cartoonish dog in them and use a lot of red, so let's put them side by side and say Picasso is thinking about Matisse...

...Here, one positively needs Picasso's corrosive look at sex to counter the surfeit of Matisse's "decorative figure" in a room filled with fussy French style...

...Van Gogh's portrayals of green-faced babies and red water likewise acknowledge the emotional power of their subjects...

...The show contains few famous paintings—which is, surprisingly, to the good: We are able to look at the works without having to judge their worth...

...Although Matisse's and Picasso's self-portraits were painted in the same year and both are modern, there is scant "conversation" between them...

...Matisse's portrait is solidly a picture of an individual, emotionalized with color...

...It began as an anti-establishment movement in France in the middle of the nineteenth century, with such post-impressionist painters as Cezanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Seurat...

...Even when he imitates Matisse's color, Picasso gets it wrong...

...In the mid-twentieth century, Matisse was regarded as having petered out after his strong beginning as a Fau-vist colorist and thus having left the title of modern artist to Picasso...

...But some of the pairings are so forced, they contribute to bad art history, especially when it comes to Picasso's strong, emotional engagement with the great masters of his homeland...

...The curators have gone so far as to present one of his minor paintings, a sortie in his battle to come to terms with Velazquez's Las Meninas (1656), as in "conversation" with the great painting by Matisse of his studio, Large Red Interior (1948...

...But Picasso was a child prodigy in drawing...

...It is not clear why an art exhibit has to have a thesis, but the mutual influence of the two makes a fairly interesting thesis—if not an entirely persuasive one...

...Society no longer needed the portraits of monarchs and generals, the layouts of battles and parleys, the expression of significant encounters Margaret Boerner teaches English at Villanova University...

...Strict one-point perspective insists all this is wrong, but one-point perspective is itself merely a code for rendering three dimensions into two dimensions rather than a depiction of the three-dimensional world as it is...

...Nonetheless, Picasso did say in his old age, "You've got to be able to picture side by side everything Matisse and I were doing at the time"—and, "No one has ever looked at Matisse's paintings more carefully than I; and no one has looked at mine more carefully than he...

...Throughout his life, he constantly changed the forms he was working with, giving us his well-known "periods": mediterranean, blue, cubist, classical, surrealist, and so on...

...It would be a relief to have Demoiselles and Bathers both missing, but the museum evidently could not resist showing off Demoiselles, which it refused to send to the Tate when the Matisse/Picasso show was in London...

...Picasso's is a picture of the self—at one with cave paintings and newspaper cartoons— rather than an individual one might recognize on the street...

...Matisse's Fauve-colored green and pink face looks directly out of the picture...

...Sometimes these links are documented by remarks of Picasso or Matisse about the other's art...

...Equally illuminating but in a different way is the pairing of Picasso's Woman in an Armchair (1927) and Matisse's Decorative Figure on an Ornamental Background (1925-26...

...As the introduction to the show's catalogue puts it, Picasso's career revealed the artist as a young "tough...

...He was also a born womanizer and cad (which added to his appeal to some women...

...Still, the Matisse/Picasso exhibit is well worth seeing, hanging in a delightfully unpretentious venue and full of the energy that makes modern art, at its best, so convincing...

...Now he is presented as Picasso's equal in modernity...

...Matisse's charm, when he cared to exert it, was formidable but cultivated...

...The artist paints to raise in the mind of the viewer the experience— mental and emotional—of viewing the subject of the painter's art...

...Witness Picasso's dreary use of color in the 1924 Mandolin and Guitar (which the Museum of Modern Art catalogue fecklessly claims uses "many quotations" of Matisse's color and line...

...Picasso's charisma was from the start magical and unforced...