Matisse-Picasso

        22 September 2002 - 6 January 2003

        Exhibition organised by the Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Musée National Picasso, and the Centre Pompidou, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris, Tate, London, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Also shown at Tate Modern, London, from 6 May to 18 August 2002 and at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, from 12 February to 27 May 2003.

        The Paris exhibition has been sponsored by LVMH / Moët Hennessy.Louis Vuitton and Christian Dior.

         “Everything that Matisse and I did at that time will have to be put side by side some day. Never has anybody looked more closely at Matisse’s painting than I did then. And he looked just as closely at mine.”

        Pablo Picasso in Pierre Daix, Picasso Créateur, Paris, 1987, p.74

        "Someone has just had the rare and startling idea of bringing together in a single exhibition the two most famous artists, who represent the two main, opposing trends in contemporary art. They are obviously Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. The brilliant work of the first opens new vistas for impressionism and this vein in great French painting seems far from spent. The other, on the contrary, shows that this fertile prospect is not the only one opening before the artist and art lover and that the concentrated art which has produced Cubism, that eminently contemporary aesthetic, is linked through Degas, and Ingres to the highest artistic traditions […]."

        These lines by Guillaume Apollinaire introduced the press release in January 1918 announcing the opening of the first ever joint exhibition on Matisse and Picasso, mounted at the Paul Guillaume gallery.

        When the two artists met at the home of their patrons and friends, the Steins, in winter 1905-06, Matisse (1869-1954) and Picasso (1881-1973) were already involved in the research that led to the Fauvist and Cubist revolutions. From then on, they worked in a fruitful face-to-face relationship throughout their artistic careers, in Paris, Catalonia and the French Riviera, as they explored the great genres of the nude, the portrait and the still life. Wavering between friendship and competition, their relationship was based, as Matisse put it, on a true "artistic brotherhood".

        Press reports and art critiques show that Matisse and Picasso were regarded as the two main inventors of modern art from the first decade of the twentieth century. Drawing on a balanced summary of nearly a century of critical revaluation and research, this exhibition reconstructs the highlights in their dialogue between 1906 and 1954, through a set of key works taken from the most prestigious public and private collections: 76 paintings, 28 sculptures, 47 drawings, 10 collages and gouache cut-outs.

        Through a broadly chronological installation, the exhibition reveals the exchanges and stylistic or thematic interplay between their works throughout their artistic careers, especially apparent in their common redefinition of the figure in 1906-1908, Matisse’s Cubist-like compositions in 1913-1917, Picasso’s references to Matisse’s favourite odalisque theme from the 1930s on, and their gouache and metal cut-outs which, between 1930 and 1950, sought to rethink painting and sculpture as "signs in space".

        The exhibition thus offers an opportunity make fresh comparisons between contemporary works, such as Matisse’s Blue Nude, Memory of Biskra, 1907 (Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore), and Picasso’s Woman with Raised Arms, 1907, (private collection), presented in Paris for the first time, but it also permits daring parallels between works using different techniques, especially in the last section which brings together gouache and metal cut-outs, and puts side by side works produced at widely separate periods such as Picasso’s Still Life with a Green Background, 1914 (The Museum of Modern Art, New York) and Matisse’s Still Life with a Magnolia, 1941 (Centre Pompidou, Musée National d’Art Moderne), – exhibited in Paris only.

Galeries nationales du Grand Palais
Jean Perrin entrance, Paris VIII^e

Opening hours
Daily except on Tuesdays, from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. (last tickets sold at 7.15 p.m.)
Late night on Wednesdays until 10 p.m. (last tickets sold at 9.15 p.m.). Closed on Christmas Day.

Admission
• With bookings from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m.; full price, euros 11.1; concession euros 9.1
• Without bookings from 1 p.m.; full price euros 10, concession euros 8.
Concession price, in addition to Mondays, on presentation of Centre Pompidou pass and for 13-25 year olds.
Free for children under 13.

Access
Metro Champs-Elysées-Clemenceau/Franklin-Roosevelt
Bus 28-32-42-49-72-73-80-83-93