Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, one of the twentieth century's
greatest artistic rivalry.

In a lecture this week discussing the rise of modernism in the early twentieth century, I discussed how the history of this period has been carefully constructed around the notion of artistic rivalries and the competition to see who can more successfully “evolve” and push for a revolution of form in the establishing narrative of modern art. Perhaps no bigger rivalry exists in this regard than the one forged between Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. For Matisse, the struggle to move away from a traditional painting method lead him to the experimental realm and an attack on Western traditions of painting at both the level of iconography and form. We see this worked out in his epic and radically perturbing painting Joy of Life (1906). For Picasso, the motivation was very similar, but his experiments lead him towards more of an attack on the stability of signs and the radical questioning of the rules of representation all together. The final result can be seen in his monstrous manifesto painting, and the painting perhaps best associated with modern art, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907).

And even while these two paintings, created only a year apart, signal two landmark works in the history of modern art, they also represent a contrast in approach, stakes, and sensibility in the engagement with modernism. One of my favourite discussions of this rivalry and its many points of contrast can be found in the archives of Slate.com in an article by Jacob Weisberg who breaks down the differences between Matisse and Picasso along the one philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche established in The Birth of Tragedy between Apollonian and Dionysian Art. As Weisberg argues,

“The Apollonian comes from the Greek god Apollo, the god of light, who was associated with rationality and its subspecialties law, medicine, and philosophy. The Dionysian comes from Dionysius, the god of wine and fertility, who was worshipped with drunken orgies in the woods at which nonparticipants were ripped to pieces. The Apollonian spirit is one of measure, reason, and control; the Dionysian is one of abandon, irrationality, and ecstatic release. The clash between the two principles was what produced Greek tragedy, according to Nietzsche. That Matisse is essentially an Apollonian artist and Picasso a Dionysian is evident even from the backhanded compliments they paid each other. Matisse called Picasso "capricious and unpredictable." Picasso described Matisse's paintings as "beautiful and elegant."

Weisberg goes on to produce a tongue in cheek list that I have pasted below to affirm these differences as an essential competitive struggle still being waged in contemporary culture. Where do you fit into this rivalry? Are you more of a Matisse or a Picasso?

Matisse's Joy of Life (1906) vs. Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907)

Matisse	Picasso
Jane Austen	Charlotte Brontë
Eliot	Yeats
Freud	Jung
Superman	Batman
Left brain	Right brain
New York City	Los Angeles
Pope	Swift
Puccini	Verdi
Johns	Rauschenberg
Bush	Reagan
Ego	Id
Stravinsky	Schoenberg
Windows	Macintosh
Hillary	Bill
Wordsworth	Shelley
David Remnick	Tina Brown
England	France
Madison	Jefferson
Mort Zuckerman	Donald Trump
Hetero	Homo
Army	Navy
Heaven	Hell
Shaw	Wilde
White wine	Red wine
Aristotle	Plato
Slate	Salon
Bonds	Stocks
Leviticus	Genesis
Felix	Oscar
North Korea	South Korea
Classical	Romantic
Cocaine	Heroin
Mies	Le Corbusier
The Clash	The Sex Pistols
Irving Kristol	Norman Podhoretz
Protestantism	Catholicism
Kant	Rousseau
Mozart	Haydn
Empire State Building	Chrysler Building
Magritte	Dalí
Mickey Mouse	Donald Duck

To further this conversation, I have selected two clips of Matisse and Picasso in action-- it is always great to look back to these archival films to see the two "heavies" of modern art in action.