In December 2009 Banksy painted over a piece King Robbo had left on a Camden canal wall in 1985. Days later Robbo waded out and painted it back. That went on for two years — and it kept reminding me of an older quarrel, conducted more slowly and with better manners, between Matisse and Picasso.
When they met in the spring of 1906, at Gertrude and Leo Stein’s Saturday evenings at 27 rue de Fleurus, the two men could hardly have been less alike. Matisse was thirty-six, bearded, bespectacled and gravely courteous — the bande à Picasso nicknamed him “the Professor” — a trained lawyer with a wife, three children and the manner of a provincial notary. He was also, at that moment, the most talked-about painter in France: the ringleader of the fauves since the scandal of the 1905 Salon d’Automne, and fresh from Le Bonheur de vivre, which Leo Stein had just bought off the walls of the Indépendants.
Picasso was twenty-four and living in the Bateau-Lavoir, a warren of studios on the Butte Montmartre with one tap, no heat, and a smell of cats and paraffin. He spoke bad French with a heavy Spanish accent, kept a revolver given to him by Alfred Jarry, and surrounded himself with a loyal gang of poets and hangers-on. He was intensely superstitious, hoarded everything he touched, and worked in secret — visitors were shown what he wanted them to see and no more. And he was watching Matisse very carefully indeed.
The Steins, who hung both painters side by side in the same crowded rooms, effectively staged the rivalry they then enjoyed observing. Gertrude put it with her usual flatness: introduced to each other by her and her brother, the two became friends — and enemies. They exchanged paintings in 1907, each choosing, it was said, the other’s weakest work. Picasso took the portrait of Matisse’s daughter Marguerite; his friends are supposed to have used it as a target for toy darts, shouting “one in the eye for Marguerite!” — though Picasso kept the picture, and refused to sell it, for the rest of his life.
What Picasso really made of Le Bonheur de vivre came the following year, in the shape of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Matisse is reported to have been furious, taking it as a deliberate mockery of everything the modern movement was trying to do, and swearing he would “sink” Picasso. He never did. Half a century later, when Matisse died in 1954, Picasso refused to take the condolence calls, and then began painting variations on Matisse’s odalisques. “All things considered,” he said, “there is only Matisse.” He had said it more precisely years before: no one had ever looked at Matisse’s paintings as closely as he had — and no one had looked at his as closely as Matisse.
The two different ways they grow old vis-a-vis their artistic vision of life
In January 1941, at the age of seventy-one, Matisse was operated on in Lyon for cancer of the duodenum. The surgery nearly killed him — there were complications, a second operation, weeks in which the nuns nursing him did not expect him to live — and it left him with an abdominal wall so weakened that he had to wear a belt to sit upright. He was told he might have a few months. He got thirteen years.
He always afterwards called it his seconde vie, and treated it with the seriousness of a man who has been handed something he did not earn. The reprieve reorganised everything. He could no longer stand at an easel for a full day; he could no longer walk out into the light he had spent fifty years chasing. So he brought the world into the room. The apartment at the Hôtel Régina in Cimiez, and later the Villa Le Rêve at Vence, filled up with pot plants, Chinese vases, Moroccan hangings, a philodendron trained along the wall, an aviary of birds whose noise visitors found hard to talk over. He worked in bed, in pyjamas, with a board across his knees. To draw on the walls and the high ceiling he had charcoal lashed to the end of a bamboo pole, and made his line from six feet away, half-lying, like a man fishing.
And then the scissors. He had used cut paper since the thirties as a way of testing compositions, but from about 1943 it stopped being a method and became the work itself. Lydia Delectorskaya and the studio assistants painted sheets of paper with gouache in the colours he specified; he cut into them freehand, no drawing, no preparation, and directed the pinning-up on the walls. He described it as “drawing with scissors” — cutting directly into colour, he said, reminded him of the direct carving of sculptors. It was an old man’s technique in the best sense: it needed no strength, no standing, no travel, and it required a lifetime of accumulated judgement to be worth anything at all. “I have needed all that time”, he said, “to reach the stage where I can say what I want to say.”
What he wanted to say turned out to be swimmers, birds, seaweed, dancers, a woman falling through blue. Jazz. The Parakeet and the Mermaid. The blue nudes of 1952, which are among the most physically confident images of the human body ever made by a man who could not stand unaided. And the chapel at Vence, built between 1948 and 1951 for the Dominican sisters — one of whom, Monique Bourgeois, had nursed him after the operation and afterwards taken vows. White tiles, black line, three colours of glass, the whole building conceived as a single instrument for turning Mediterranean light into an interior weather. He called it the flowering of his entire working life. He was an unbeliever making a house for other people’s belief, and he considered it his masterpiece.
He died on 3 November 1954, aged eighty-four, of a heart attack. He had been drawing a few days before.
Picasso outlived him by nineteen years and never once made peace with the arrangement.
He was the healthier of the two, and by far the more frightened. He would not go to funerals. He would not have wills or notaries or the word death in the room; his refusal to make any provision for his estate would eventually cost his family six years of litigation. When Matisse died he did not, at first, take the telephone calls of condolence, and did not attend the funeral. Then he went into the studio at La Californie and began painting the Women of Algiers, fifteen variations on Delacroix in two months, and told friends that when Matisse died he had left him his odalisques as a legacy. He mourned the way he did everything, by competing.
The last decade is a strange, roaring performance. After abdominal surgery in 1965 — biographers connect it, plausibly, to what followed — the erotic subject matter came flooding out: the 347 Suite of 1968, three hundred and forty-seven prints in seven months; the 156 Suite; canvas after canvas of the old painter and the young model, the voyeur behind the curtain, the musketeer with his enormous hat and his useless sword. It is a body of work obsessed with looking at what one can no longer touch. The brushwork gets faster and cruder, the dating gets obsessive — day, month, year, sometimes a Roman numeral to distinguish the third picture of that Tuesday from the second. The dates are a logbook. They are also a man counting.
“I have less and less time”, he said, “and more and more to say.”
Nobody wanted it. The Avignon exhibition of 1970 was received as an embarrassment; Douglas Cooper, who had been a friend, called the late paintings the incoherent scribbles of a frenetic old man in the anteroom of death. The judgement stood for a decade and then collapsed completely — by the 1980s the same pictures looked like the founding documents of neo-expressionism, and now they are among the most admired things he did. He did not live to see the rescue.
There is a drawing of 30 June 1972, crayon on paper, a head reduced almost to a skull: green and mauve, the hair a few stiff bristles, the eyes enormous and fixed on the viewer without any of the usual bravado. Pierre Daix, who saw it, wrote that Picasso held it up beside his own face. He had made hundreds of self-portraits in seventy years and never that one.
He died at Mougins on 8 April 1973, aged ninety-one, having worked the day before. He is said to have raised a glass at dinner the previous evening and told his guests to drink to him, since he could no longer drink himself.
Two men on the same coast, twenty miles apart, doing the same thing: refusing to stop. But the shapes their last work took are almost exactly opposed, and the opposition is not a matter of temperament alone. Matisse was given a deadline and then reprieved, and the reprieve produced serenity — not the serenity of a man who has stopped wanting things, but the hard-won serenity of someone who has been told the number of his remaining days and has decided to spend them well. Illness stripped his means down to paper, gouache and a pair of shears, and the stripping turned out to be the last and greatest simplification of a career built on simplifying.
Picasso was never given a deadline. He had only the open-ended terror, which is worse, and no illness severe enough to force a reduction. So instead of subtracting he multiplied: more canvases, more prints, more musketeers, more hours, faster. Matisse answered mortality with distillation. Picasso answered it with volume — with the sheer noise of production, as though death were something you could outrun by leaving too much behind to bury.
One of them turned his sickroom into a garden. The other turned his house into a fortress, and kept painting inside it with the shutters closed.
Bibliography
– Jack Flam, Matisse and Picasso: The Story of Their Rivalry and Friendship (2003).
– Yve-Alain Bois, Matisse and Picasso (1998).
– Elizabeth Cowling et al., Matisse Picasso (Tate/MoMA/Grand Palais, 2002) — the exhibition catalogue, the most rigorous single volume.
Site Title 