Henri Matisse, Still life with sleeping woman [Nature morte à la dormeuse] 1940, oil on canvas. Collection of Mr and Mrs Paul Mellon National Gallery of Art, Washington DC © Succession H. Matisse/Copyright Agency.
Gisèle Freund, No title (Matisse dans son studio, Boulevarde de Montparnasse) [Matisse in his studio, Boulevarde de Montparnasse], 1948, photographs, colour photographs, chromogenic photograph, 30.0 h x 20.2 w cm. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Purchased 1981.
Yousuf Karsh, Pablo Picasso 1954, photographs, gelatin silver photograph, 73.6 h x 99.0 w cm. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Purchased 1973.
Henri Matisse, Nature morte aux oranges 1912, oil on canvas, 94 x 83 cm, Musée Picasso, Paris, Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée national Picasso-Paris) / Mathieu Rabeau, © Succession H. Matisse/Copyright Agency.
Pablo Picasso, Reading [La lecture] 1932, oil on canvas, 130 x 97.5 cm, Musée Picasso, Paris, Photo © RMN-Grand Palais, (Musée national Picasso-Paris) / Mathieu Rabeau, © Succession Picasso/Copyright Agency.
Henri Matisse, Seated odalisque [Odalisque assis] 1926, oil on canvas, 73 x 60 cm, Gift of Adele R Levy Fund Inc, 1962, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, © Succession H. Matisse/Copyright Agency.
The notion of a worthy adversary is an ancient tradition. In Classical Greece, kleos (glory) could only be achieved with an audacious death, battling a formidable enemy. In fiction, the feats of 007 and Sherlock Holmes are induced by contests against arch-enemies. Rivalry burnishes innovation and triumph on both sides.
Early 20th-century Paris was an arena for the forging of ‘Modern Art’. Here in 1906, Henri Matisse, the newly-crowned prince of French radicalism, and Pablo Picasso, a fresh, brash Spanish talent, first met and vied for success. “There was an immediate tension,” explains curator Dr Jane Kinsman. “Matisse was known for his brilliant colour and Fauvist vision. Picasso kept popping up with cubism or the infamy of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon [1907]. He was a nuisance.” Both worked in the shadow of Paul Cézanne, who died the year they met, leaving room for the next big thing.
Matisse & Picasso narrates the artists’ intense mutual scrutiny, public disagreement and praise-via-appropriation. “They’re always borrowing: texture, colour, layering and cubist ideas of space pass between them.” Matisse and Picasso’s symbiosis ensured the longevity and posterity of their art. “They needed each other,” reflects Kinsman. In 1912, Matisse painted a bowl of blushing, almost luminous oranges gently lit through a window. Nature morte aux oranges [Still life with oranges] arrives on loan from Musée Picasso. “Picasso acquired it himself: he saw it as the ultimate Matisse painting, though he didn’t say so publicly.”
Half a century of competition ended with Matisse’s death in 1954. The exhibition’s final chapter is eulogistic: “Picasso didn’t go to the funeral, but his painting immediately changed,” says Kinsman. The studio [L’atelier], 1955, on loan from the Tate Collection, shows Picasso’s studio in the south of France, windows thrown open toward a glowing tropical garden. “The bright colour and exotic motifs are a mournful homage to his absent friend and rival.”
Matisse & Picasso
National Gallery of Australia
13 December–13 April 2020
This article was originally published in the November/December 2019 print edition of Art Guide Australia.
In their debut solo exhibition Extinguishing Hope, now showing at UTS Gallery, Akil Ahamat uses darkness—both literal and metaphorical—to examine what can be gained when everything is lost.
Existing in the space between ritual, performance and ceremony, the body-centred work of Latai Taumoepeau rewrites the stories that shape our perception of Oceania—while using ancient traditions to tackle our most urgent modern concerns. Taumoepeau is now participating in Re-Stor(y)ing Oceania at Artspace.
Congratulations to Aisha Sherman-Noth, who has won the 2025 Glover Prize for Weeping birches on the avenue. The Tasmanian-based artist wins $80,000 for the painting, which depicts weeping birch and poplar trees along the Brooker Highway into Hobart.
The quietly evocative new paintings of Gregory Hodge, now showing at Sullivan+Strumpf Sydney, are a lesson in the places where abstraction and figuration intersect.
The Koori Mail Indigenous Art Award returns to Lismore Regional Gallery for its second iteration following the gallery’s restoration after the 2022 floods. The award celebrates the vibrancy of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art across Australia.
Queenslander Glen O’Malley stands as a key figure among a generation of photographers who depicted the domestic lives of Australians in the 1970s and 1980s. In an interview with Barnaby Smith, he discusses the landmark 1988 show Journeys North, and QAGOMA’s current exhibition Suburban Sublime: Australian Photography.
