Picasso and Matisse, to the rescue | Culture | EUROtoday

Picasso mentioned: “I do not search, I find.” That’s why Matisse, when he knew that Picasso was going to go to his studio, hid his greatest work and solely confirmed him these through which he had failed. One look was sufficient for Picasso to retain the miracle of an unprecedented brushstroke, the way in which Matisse had solved a composition drawback, the substantive use of shade, and he might copy it with full impudence. Indeed, he had discovered it, though Matisse tried to set a lure for him. The identical factor occurred with Juan Gris on the Bateau Lavoir in Montmartre.

Both had been obsessed and immersed in Cubism, one analytical, the opposite artificial, besides that Picasso was starting to promote work and develop into wealthy, and Juan Gris at the moment generally ate a soup of crushed olive pits. Picasso watched for a number of seconds over his buddy’s shoulder his tenacious work with the bevel and for his half he restricted himself to including a contact of genius. With deep eyes like two black olives of a chestnut bull, he absorbed all the sweetness he discovered round him and it was sufficient for him to place his hand on it to show it into the vanguard. I discovered it within the maternity wards of the tanagers within the Athens museum, with their disproportionate hips, within the determine referred to as The Parisiana stuccoed head of a girl from the ruins of Heraklion that already seems with an eye fixed within the occipital, behind the ear; within the minotaur of the labyrinth of Crete, in Ariadne’s thread, in Theseus dressed as a bullfighter.

When it got here to a bunch exhibition, Picasso averted disputes. “Wherever my painting is, it will be the best wall,” he mentioned. However, with Matisse he maintained a latent rivalry, an admiration not with out mutual jealousy that hardly got here to the floor. This secret feud had Madame Stein as its arbitrator, whose judgment and admiration swung from one to the opposite and saved these two nice artists in suspense who opened the doorways of twentieth century aesthetics, Picasso because the creator of recent kinds, Matisse because the introducer of untamed shade to show it into a sense.

Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo had been two American Jews, very rich collectors who lived in Paris in a mansion at 27 rue Fleurus, behind the Luxembourg Gardens, within the Latin Quarter. At the tip of the backyard they’d constructed a pavilion the place they exhibited, as in an artwork gallery, all the most recent avant-garde work they acquired. There had been many artists, poets and writers who handed by there to implore and deserve their favors, Picasso, Matisse, Man Ray, Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce and Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson, amongst others.

At one level, a portray by Matisse was imposed in that pavilion, The pleasure of residing, measuring 174 by 238 centimeters, which just about totally occupied one of many partitions. Matisse had painted it in 1906 in Paris, had exhibited it on the Salon d’Automne and had been acquired by Madame Stein. It represented a bucolic scene in the course of a pastoral panorama the place some bare younger males and women stretch, play the pipe, hug one another and dance. This idyllic portray through which the small pleasures of life had been represented unnerved Picasso, who didn’t cease preventing it till he managed to get Gertrude to promote it to hold on the identical wall. The girls of Avignonwhich Picasso had simply painted in 1907. Over time, the Matisse oil portray ended up on the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, and the portray of the younger girls from the brothel on Avinyó Street in Barcelona is saved within the Museum of Modern Art in New York. With the nostril of one in all these prostitutes drawn within the method of a black masks that Matisse had proven him, Picasso created cubism.

For my half, one of many figures in Matisse’s portray, that bare teenager who’s stretching, served as a mannequin for me to jot down a novel, Matisse’s girlfriend, in regards to the passions of the artwork world. Painters, sellers, collectors and portray thieves transfer in a labyrinth ruled by the facility of magnificence that may prevent or destroy you, since aesthetics additionally carries curses, particularly when it forces you to reside as much as its seduction. They referred to as Matisse the Doctor. I imagined that this was as a result of his artwork was healing and in reality it was sufficient for the terminally ailing protagonist of the story to be proven a portray by Matisse for her to out of the blue heal.

A miracle that might be repeated at the moment in a sure means if the viewer stops by Caixa-Fórum in Madrid to see the Matisse exhibition or visits the exhibition on the Thyssen museum the place this time Picasso and Paul Klee face one another. It is plain that we live within the worst moments of a morally rotten society. But artwork at all times involves the rescue. Which deal with ought to we maintain on to? After taking a shower in Matisse and Picasso, one stops feeling soiled and leaves the exhibition purified.