Modern art was born ugly. Had a new era of art begun? According to his biographer Hilary Spurling, "His own paintings filled him with perturbation. At some point in or he slashed one of them with a palette knife.
When Picasso finished his form shattering masterpiece Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in , portraying five prostitutes with primal masklike faces, their nudity more geometric than erotic, even his early dealer Ambroise Vollard blurted out, "It's the work of a madman. For the rest of their lives each would keep a keen eye on the other's new work, provoking each other to paint the same subjects, sometimes even with the same title. There are many ways to describe their relationship.
It could be called a rivalry, a dialogue, a chess game - Matisse himself once compared it to a boxing match. But it also became the abiding friendship of two titans who, daring to paint the ugly, transformed our sense of beauty in art. You have got to be able to picture side by side everything Matisse and I were doing at that time.
No one has ever looked at Matisse's painting more carefully than I; and no one has looked at mine more carefully than he. Wassily Kandinsky , whose book On the Spiritual in Art , published in , constitutes the fundamental theory of abstract art and contrasted the two artists: "Matisse: colour, Picasso: form. Two great tendencies, one great goal".
The relationship of Matisse and Picasso reflects on the whole history of modern art. Seeing Matisse and Picasso through each other's eyes allows the us to look at modern art in a fresh way, with the same sense of discovery that electrified the artists and their friends, and shocked their critics, nearly a century ago. Picasso once said, "If I were not making the paintings I make, I would paint like Matisse," and Matisse said much the same about Picasso.
