Matisse Picasso, Tate Modern (original) (raw)

No artist works entirely alone. Artists need conversations, rivalries, complications. The mythic male artist (and maleness has a lot to do with the myth) as cantankerous, misanthropic, self-invented solitary genius cuts a tragic figure. If not a myth, this figure is almost certainly a very bad, not to say very lonely, artist.

Matisse Picasso dispels the illusion of the great artist as self-invented, Protean giant. It is also - I'll say it from the first - a momentous, tremendous exhibition. There are paintings and sculptures and draw ings here - some I've never seen before, by both artists, as well as a greatest hits anthology - that really rattle me. But the point of Matisse Picasso is not so much the individual masterpieces, however rewarding it is to see them, as the echoing and mirroring and sparring, sometimes across decades, that show the two artists' engagement with each other's art, and how fruitful, and at times fruitfully antagonistic, this engagement was for them both.

Although Picasso and Matisse have often been twinned as the presiding geniuses of 20th-century art, their relationship has not been examined as closely as it might until recently. That Matisse introduced Picasso to African tribal art, that the two had intermittent contact throughout their lives, that they made gifts of their works to one another, and that they defended and derided each other in equal measure - all this is well known. Yet their relationship is mostly seen as an occasion for the parlour game of deciding who was the greater and more influential artist. When the two showed together in London in 1946, critics made the comparison - as did the artists. Matisse and Picasso may have discussed the details of the show, even down to whether or not to frame their works, but Matisse confided to a friend even before the event that he felt that he was about to cohabit with an epileptic, and that "next to him, I always look like a little girl". Poor Henri, effete and bourgeois behind his little pebble glasses, next to the macho Spanish bull.

Such are the cliches. Temperamentally I have always preferred Picasso. It was the middle-class props of Matisse's paintings, the affected untroubled calm, the analgesic side to him I rejected. But there's nothing wrong with pleasure, so long as one recognises there's no innocence in it either. Perhaps what I really resisted was what I saw as Matisse's avoidance of psychological complication in his art, the supremacy of what he called the decorative. Picasso gave us Cubism, which in turn led to the ready-made and full-on abstraction (both of which he rejected); he gave us Guernica (or as he would have had it, Franco and the Germans gave us the bombing); he gave us sexual monsters, and himself as a grinning, raddled skull. Matisse gave us goldfish, piano lessons, a comfortable armchair for the tired businessman. The unworthy comparison persists.

It is worth remembering that one object Matisse kept beside him into his old age was a dark and troubled Picasso portrait of Dora Maar, painted in wartime Paris. And how Matisse coveted a strangulated, bitter landscape Picasso lent him during the Occupation. He sent Picasso a box of oranges once a year. Picasso never ate them, but had them on display - as Matisse's oranges, only to be looked at. He also kept Matisse's paintings about him, prominently hung among his own.

Picasso could never be regarded as a blameless soul, even by his fondest admirers. He has been at least as much studied as his art, and in almost every respect the man has been found wanting, especially of loyalty. His personal infidelities and his roving, acquisitive eye are of a piece with his attitude towards art and other artists. Everything, as well as everyone, is there to be used - including other people's art, and other men's mistresses.

Matisse called Picasso a bandit, and Picasso enjoyed the sobriquet. Yet to Matisse - northern, chilly, fastidious, reserved - Picasso did in his way remain a true, if somewhat ambivalent friend. And if we see Picasso taking from Matisse's art, Matisse also took from Picasso. Such was this symbiotic relationship, with its to-and-fro of ideas, forms, pictorial innovations. Their differences in personality and outlook were great, but just as great were their affinities. What they shared, perhaps most of all, was their understanding of each other, their common road.

Nearly all Picasso's art can be read as a diary of his affections and private preoccupations. Matisse's art, on the other hand, kept the artist's private life at bay. We do not find the man's lovers passing through the paintings. In a Matisse, fruit stayed fruit, oysters oysters. Whatever else we may want them to be - the orange as breast, the oyster as sexual symbol - Matisse insisted that they only constituted the motif. In fact, the fruit and flowers, the model on the bed- all are disconcertingly less, not more, than they seem. Walking into a Matisse on the lookout for hanky-panky, one encounters instead one of those dreadful misunderstandings of French farce, where everything has an implausible but entirely innocent explanation. Or almost so. We find no personal jealousy erupting in a Matisse, except perhaps in regard to his relationship with Picasso. Perhaps jealousy was something else they shared.

Understanding one another, borrowing from one another, they attempted to outdo each other, to trump the other's innovations, both on canvas and in sculpture. Their dialogue may not always have been conscious, nor was it exclusive. Artists always borrow; they are always on the lookout for a solution to a problem, or a twist in someone else's art they can make use of themselves. This is legitimate, and is part of art's complicated dialogue with itself.

Elizabeth Cowling and John Golding, the curators of Tate Modern's exhibition, have made a good job of following the artistic relationship between Matisse and Picasso. They, and a platoon of fellow scholars, add much to Yves-Alain Bois's own recent close reading of the relationship for an exhibition at the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas. But there is no such thing as a definitive account, any more than a definitive exhibition. No institution can always get what it wants, and some works, such as Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, Picasso's 1907 time-bomb and arguably the single most important painting of the 20th century, are too fragile to travel. Nor does London have Matisse's Bathers With a Turtle, his response to Les Demoiselles. There are tranches of works that will not make the journey between all three venues of this touring exhibition.

We begin with two self-portraits. It is 1906. Matisse in choppy brushstrokes, green shadows on his face, meeting our gaze; Picasso with a palette, round-eyed, looking somewhat down and to the side. Matisse, 12 years older, bearded, super-serious even though he wears a brightly striped sailor's jumper. The Picasso is more linear, the forms less painted than drawn, the colour reduced, not yet ready to fix us with his fierce gaze. The two already know each other. Here, already, one distinguishes the colourist and the draughtsman.

Then come two large paintings of comparable size: a Picasso horse being led by a boy across an empty brown land, and Matisse's Le Luxe, a loose drawing of bright figures beside a bay, a kind of Arcadia. The paintings share more than the fag-end of symbolism: they share an open-ended question about form and figuration, and about light and how to render it.

And then two remarkably different paintings: Matisse's daughter Marguerite and a Picasso still life. In very different ways both paintings have a flattened space, with the pitcher, bowl and lemon tilted up towards the picture plane. Marguerite is in a flatly painted viridian dress; a flat black choker encircles her neck and her name is written above her. She is on the painting's surface as much as in it, like a girl on a poster. Picasso's objects too are pushing forward, as though to break through the surface and drag the surrounding space with it.

One might see the show so far in terms of ripostes, counterings, dissimilarities, and of responses less to one another than to changes that were already in the air. The deformation of the figures and the flattening of space go hand in hand with a recognition of the painting as an object as much as it is a window on to the painted world. Matisse's Blue Nude - big-bummed, hand on her head as though she just woke up with a fright - and a monumentally difficult, monstrous Picasso woman from 1908, again wiping her brow (as well she might). What, you ask yourself, is happening to our images of ourselves?

One subtext of the exhibition is the question of the figure - as psychic being as well as form. It is also, mostly, a question of women, models, beings whose otherness Matisse and Picasso both, in very different ways, stood transfixed by, uncomprehending.

Cézanne, whose influence is everywhere on the earlier work of both artists, returns in a group of landscapes - Matisses from 1907 and 1917, a Picasso from 1908 - but in the London version of the show the next key moment is the juxtaposition of Picasso's 1905-6 portrait of Gertrude Stein with Matisse's 1917 portrait of Auguste Pellerin, both with their mask-like faces. It would be wrong, however, to see the relationship as one-way. Painting himself out of trouble (and out of Cubism) in 1915, Picasso created his Harlequin, which contains clear references to Matisse's Goldfish and Palette from the previous year (just as the palette reminds us of the one in the Picasso self-portrait at the beginning of the show, which itself honours Cézanne. Some things keep returning). The Harlequin is funny and scary in a way Matisse never is, but both paintings have similar formal structures and devices, and both foreground elements against blackness in a similar way. Goldfish and Palette, like The Moroccans, his Piano Lesson and a big, cluttered still life - ostensibly after de Heems's La Desserte - are Matisse's own, belated response to Cubism, and, in the case of The Moroccans, also borrow from both early Renaissance space and Persian miniatures. The references keep on tumbling in.

Sometimes, formal concordances and subjects make clear what might have only ever been somewhat distant coincidences. It is great to pair a 1917 Matisse of a violin in its open case in a shuttered room with Picasso's 1924 sheet-metal construction of a guitar. There seem to be all kinds of links, both formal and iconographic, and the two works play off one another. But this seems to be one of those moments when a curator has put together works because it has always been a fantasy to do so, just to see what would happen. Something does happen, and that's the point, just as something happens between Matisse's bronze relief Backs and certain heavy, big-footed female figures by Picasso. Both artists' works recall clay; both have a certain, slow-motion kind of solidity and formal simplification. They share, as it were, the same air and matter. This is also true of Picasso and Matisse's modelled figure sculptures and heads. It is more than a matter of scale and material, but of tempo. Although, of course, Picasso was to take sculpture to far greater extremes than Matisse ever would.

There are also times when Picasso brutally caricatures his friend and rival. A Matisse woman in a chair or a dancer may be wonkily drawn, hugely simplified, but her expressiveness never denigrates her. Picasso makes of similar poses shrieking, wilfully distorted freaks and curiously pneumatic, bulbous beings. Colour in Matisse may be intense and electric, but in certain Picassos it is raving. The dog chasing the cat under a table in Matisse's Large Red Interior (1948) may not respect animal anatomy (they are subservient to other formal concerns), but the mutt in the foreground of one of Picasso's takes on Velasquez's Las Meninas is hilarious.

Both, however, know moments of quietness, and how to paint human solitude: a man at a window playing the violin, a shadow falling across a memory of sex. Here, both artists are great. A Matisse wartime still life may want to remind us of plenitude, or the simple pleasure of a magnolia in a vase, a shell, but a Picasso of the same period, painted in occupied Paris, gives us a coiled, intestinal sausage, hungry knives and forks jangling out of a drawer. Who is to say which is better, more real? Both speak of a kind of hunger.

Picasso, with Cubism, invented the use of paper collage, and his use of cut and folded paper informed his sheet-metal constructions and later sculpture. Matisse used cut paper in place of paint , especially when he was too infirm to do much else. A simple technical expedient was handed on. Both did different things with it, of equal but different value. The one saw in the other things only he could use. They turned each other's art inside out in a private game. As old men they argued and grumbled behind one another's backs; I see them as being like Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon. Maybe art and life are sometimes almost as simple as that, and as unfathomable.

· Matisse Picasso is at Tate Modern, London SE1 (020-7887 8000), from Saturday until August 18.