Matisse and Picasso Quotes (2003-)

“Matisse's works collectively give very little sense of a life long lived. ...Matisse's works give a vivid sense of a life lived as an artist, but not nearly the sense that Picasso gives of a life lived as a man. ...Matisse gives almost no sense of the political or economic history of the twentieth century, or of the demonic energies it unleashed... no sense that an artist might feel to take revenge upon the world. There is no equivalent of Picasso's Guernica... or to the death-haunted still lifes or harrowing political allegories, such as The Charnel House. Nonetheless, Matisse's painting does provide a profound engagement with the spiritual uncertainties of the century, and a very personal response... in his inspired balance between observation, analysis, and the pure poetry of painting.”

“Matisse's response to Picasso's inventive reorganization of the human figure was concentrated in one of his most sublimely sensuous pictures of Lydia [Delectorskaya], the so-called Pink Nude... which was his variation on the pose of his 1907 Blue Nude. ...Returning to a practice he used with the Barnes murals, he photographed... while it was in progress... As with the murals, he also used pieces of cut paper to make quick modifications to the composition without having to wait for the paint to dry. ...[T]he painting began as a relatively naturalistic rendering... As the picture developed, Matisse radically altered not only the composition but its basic pictorial language... He also tried to augment the forcefulness of the figure by contorting it in a manner similar to Picasso's. ...But in the end, such an approach was not true to his vision, and he reverted...”

“Marie-Thérèse was... a natural or "primitive" version of the uninhibited and all-accepting woman the Surrealists were trying so hard to construct. ...Their relationship was rooted in a complex game of hiding and revealing, which soon spilled over into his art. Picasso's earliest representations of her were not paintings but geometric line drawings of musical instruments, done in pencil, in which he encodes cryptograms that use her initials: M-T. There is something charmingly adolescent about the gesture... The linear style of these works [line and charcoal drawings, plus The Dress Designer's Workshop and The Painter and His Model] is directly related to the notational systems Picasso was using in the studies for his illustrations for Balzac's Unknown Masterpiece—a story in which a seventeenth-century painter named Frenhof spends years working on what is supposed to be his masterpiece, and overworks it to such a degree that he finally produces an incomprehensible muddle.”

“[A]fter Matisse's death... he became fixed on the idea of doing variations on the masters, and these became a subgenre within his work. His variations seem to be animated by a desire both to possess a work of the master and to measure himself against it. ...Picasso is again asking the same question about the greatness of his gifts that he had posed... when he and Matisse first met. ...as if he were again struggling against doubts about whether his election as a great artist was really strong enough to defeat death. (This was something Matisse never visibly questioned, at least in his work.) ...Picasso does seem to have been profoundly concerned about the possible death of his creative gift, and perhaps about its validity early on and the degree to which his work would survive him. For a Spanish artist, the pinnacle of comparison would be with Diego Velázquez ...His variations [see Las Meninas, 1957 on Las Meninas were an escape from the present, as well as an attempt to dominate the past and affirm his standing in the future.”

“Picasso was deeply impressed by Matisse's Goldfish and Pallete, and its emotional force and resonant use of black seem to have influenced his 1915 Harlequin... Harlequin is one of Picasso's first clear images of a divided personality. ...This evocation of multiple identities is given an added dimension by the rendering of... an unfinished canvas. ...Because this rectangle is rendered in a painterly way, it also suggests... the process of painting... a reminder of the impossibility of completeness, either in painting or in life. ...[W]hen Matisse saw Harlequin... he told the dealer that his goldfish had led to it, for in this painting Picasso had picked up precisely those aspects that Matisse had taken from him, such as the conflation of the figure with its surroundings, the suggestion of different psychological viewpoints, the fractured planarity, and... the situating of the picture in a space... somewhere between the thought and the seen, the internal and the external. In Harlequin, Picasso responds with his own version of multiple realities... the strong sense of process and... use of black... to evoke both light and darkness... as lessons from Matisse's painting.”

“Although Les Demoiselles d'Avignon was the most unnerving painting Picasso had done, Three Women... was more directly challenging to Matisse. ...The early version... that Matisse saw... encroached on territory Matisse had thought was his. The subject and style... owed much to Cézanne... The underlying subject... was also one that Matisse had been working with... in which process—the coming into being of things—was emphasized over stability. ...[I]ts outward-spiraling composition of three figures that seem to emerge from the bowels of the earth ...was a more resonant evocation of primal beginnings than had been Matisse's... Le Bonheur de vivre or Le Luxe... Three Women... contained a bold imbrication of the figures within their background—a motif Matisse had employed in his Fauve paintings, such as Woman in a Japanese Robe Beside the Sea... But whereas Matisse's merging... was based on... optical sensations, Picasso was developing a... symbolic language. ...also something Matisse had been involved with... especially in his... treatment of mythological themes. Picasso's Three Women seemed to combine references to a standard mythological theme... the Three Graces [previously classically painted by Botticelli, Raphael and Rubens], with a more generalized "birth of the world" imagery that went to the heart of the primitivism that had haunted both... along with... Derain, Vlaminck, and Braque... In response to Three Women, Matisse painted Bathers with a Turtle...”