Museo Picasso Málaga — www.museopicassomalaga.org

The North Pole and the South Pole: Matisse, Picasso, and the Greatest Rivalry in Art

Henri Matisse once tried to explain his relationship with Pablo Picasso to Gertrude Stein, the American art patron whose Paris salon gathered the century’s geniuses like moths to a lamp. He chose a geographical metaphor. “We are as different,” he said, “as the North Pole is from the South Pole.” He was right about the difference. He was wrong to imply the distance. For nearly half a century, these two men orbited each other with such intensity — watching, stealing, provoking, admiring, infuriating — that their dialogue essentially became the story of modern art.

Matisse was born in 1869 in the grey, northern French town of Le Cateau-Cambrésis, the son of a grain merchant. He came to painting late and by accident, given a box of paints during a long recovery from appendicitis at the age of twenty. The revelation was total. He described the experience as a kind of paradise, a freedom from everything that had come before. He trained methodically, rigorously, and with great patience, working his way through the finest institutions of Paris. He was careful, ordered, domestic. He said, famously and with complete sincerity, that he wanted his art to be like a good armchair — something a tired businessman could sink into at the end of the day and find nothing but comfort and peace.

Picasso never forgot that remark. He mocked it for years.

The Spaniard, twelve years younger, had arrived from Málaga and then Barcelona with the confidence of someone who had never once doubted himself. Where Matisse was methodical, Picasso was volcanic. Where Matisse observed and refined, Picasso attacked and destroyed. Where Matisse sought harmony, Picasso sought rupture. Picasso had been drawing bulls and horses from memory since he was four years old, raised in the sun and dust of Andalusia, steeped in flamenco and bullfighting and the dark theatrical Catholicism of southern Spain — the same Spain that had produced Velázquez, Goya, and El Greco, painters he had gone to study at the Prado as a teenager, finding in their shadows and their grimness something no French painter had ever quite reached.

The bull was never far away. Picasso’s father had taken him to the bullring in Málaga as a small child, and the image never left him. He once told the writer André Malraux: “The life of the Spanish consists of Mass in the morning, the bullfight in the afternoon, and the whorehouse at night. What do they have in common? Sadness.” He was not complaining. He was describing his own imaginative inheritance — the raw violence, the eroticism, the death, the color, the heat of it. This was a world Matisse, with his carefully arranged Moroccan interiors and decorative patterns and bourgeois French sensibility, could not have invented. When Picasso painted a bull, it was not decoration. It was a self-portrait.

They met around 1906, at Gertrude Stein’s salon on the rue de Fleurus. Matisse was already established, already scandalous, already the leader of the Fauves — the painters critics had dismissed as “wild beasts” for their explosive, unnatural color. Picasso was twenty-five, still an upstart, still finding his way. They studied each other instantly, like two chess players sitting down at the board for the first time, each calculating the depth of the other’s game.

It began with mutual suspicion and ended with something much harder to name. Matisse later said: “Only one person has the right to criticize me. It is Picasso.” And Picasso, for his part, was equally unguarded: “All things considered, there is only Matisse.” These were not performances for an audience. They wrote them to each other, said them privately, let them stand without qualification. In a world where both men were surrounded by admirers, flatterers, and dealers, they could only be truly honest with one another.

They began exchanging paintings early, in a gesture that was equal parts generosity and competition. Gertrude Stein, watching them choose, noted with amusement that each appeared to select the worst example of the other’s new work. This was not ignorance. Both men understood perfectly that their rival never did anything for no reason. Picasso spent hours in galleries standing before Matisse’s paintings, studying his methods, trying to see what the Frenchman had seen. Matisse did the same. Picasso later told his biographer John Richardson: “You have got to be able to picture side by side everything Matisse and I were doing at the 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.”

The critical moment came in 1907. Matisse had recently produced Blue Nude: Memory of Biskra — a large, ugly, deliberately distorted female figure that shocked even his supporters. It was aggressive, raw, and structurally radical. It looked, one observer said, like something broken and reassembled by someone who had been told about the human body secondhand. Picasso saw it and felt something he rarely felt: the ground shift beneath him. The French artist, the older man, the supposed conservative — he was already there.

What followed was Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Picasso locked himself in his studio, told almost no one what he was doing, worked in a kind of controlled fury, and produced a painting of five figures — angular, masklike, shattered, terrifying — that had never existed before in the history of Western art. When he finally showed it, even his closest friends were horrified. His dealer Ambroise Vollard called it the work of a madman. Braque, who would become his closest collaborator, said it felt like drinking petrol and spitting fire. Matisse saw it and is reported to have said, bitterly but quietly: “A little boldness discovered in a friend’s work is shared by all.” The implication was clear. Picasso had absorbed what Matisse had discovered, gone further with it, and was now going to get the credit.

Matisse was not entirely wrong. But he was not entirely right either. What Picasso had done was not steal so much as detonate — he had taken the charge Matisse had laid and set it off at twice the yield. The painting now hangs at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and is considered, with good reason, the beginning of modern art. Matisse, who believed in beauty and comfort and the good armchair, had inadvertently helped light the fuse of the ugliest and most revolutionary painting of the century.

And yet — this is the remarkable part — they did not stop. The provocation continued. Matisse, stung, responded with his own radical portrait of his wife featuring a green stripe down the center of her face where no green stripe had ever been. He had clearly been looking at what Picasso was doing in that studio. Picasso acknowledged it in his own way by continuing to hang Matisse’s works in his home and study them like a student. Each man’s studio contained work by the other. Each man’s development was shaped, in ways neither could fully disentangle, by the pressure of knowing the other was watching.

There is a well-documented story from this period that says something precise about Picasso’s particular Spanish temperament. The two men had agreed to exchange paintings. They arranged to bring their gifts on the same day. Both arrived with what each considered the other’s weakest piece. The swap was made with full ceremony and complete deadpan. Neither commented. Both went home and spent weeks trying to understand why the other had made that specific choice, whether there was a message in it, whether they were being mocked or taught. With Picasso, you were usually being both.

On another occasion, Picasso gave Matisse a broken piece of painted ceramic — just a shard, offered without explanation. Matisse, not to be outdone, brought Picasso on his next visit a small Polynesian idol of almost comical ugliness. Picasso was so appalled by it that he conveniently left it behind. He then spent the following weeks, Françoise Gilot later reported, complaining to her that it was the most hideous object he had ever seen — and quietly studying it from every angle.

Gilot, who was Picasso’s companion through the late 1940s and early 1950s and knew both men intimately, left perhaps the sharpest observation of the dynamic between them: “In their meetings, the active side was Pablo; the passive, Matisse. Pablo always sought to charm Matisse, like a dancer, but in the end it was Matisse who conquered Pablo.” This is the paradox at the heart of the relationship. Picasso, who was always the aggressor, the provocateur, the one who attacked — was, by Gilot’s account, the one who came away changed. Matisse, the careful, the patient, the man who wanted to paint good armchairs, had a quality that Picasso recognized as beyond him: an absolute serenity of vision, a sense of color so instinctive and complete that even the Spaniard, who could imitate anyone, could not quite replicate it.

Late in their lives, when Matisse was confined by illness and had taken up cutting shapes from painted paper — the famous cut-outs — Picasso visited him and said nothing disparaging. He was, those who were present said, visibly moved. He understood what Matisse had done: found a new form when the old one was no longer available. The old man, unable to hold a brush, was cutting color from paper with scissors and pinning it to the walls of his bedroom in Nice, and it was extraordinary. Picasso was not generous with admiration for other painters. Here he was generous.

When Matisse died in November 1954, Picasso is said to have received the news with unusual stillness. He had told Chagall, in a characteristically Picasso way, that when Matisse died Chagall would be the only painter who understood color — adding, of course, that he could do without Chagall’s roosters and flying lovers. But that remark was made to Chagall, not about Matisse. About Matisse, to those who knew what it meant, he said only: “All things considered, there is only Matisse.” Then he went back to work, and produced in the months that followed some of the most intensely colored paintings of his life — the Women of Algiers series, directly in conversation with Matisse’s odalisques, directly continuing the argument they had been having for nearly fifty years.

Picasso himself had said it plainly: “To understand twentieth-century art, you have to see side by side everything Matisse and I were doing.” It was not modesty — Picasso was not given to modesty. It was accuracy. Two men, one from the cold north of France and one from the blazing south of Spain, different in almost every way that two painters can be different, had spent half a century watching each other across the room and producing, between them, most of what we now call modern art.

Matisse compared it to a boxing match. Picasso compared it to nothing because he didn’t bother with comparisons. He simply showed up, looked at what Matisse had done, went home, and painted something that had never existed before. Then Matisse looked at that. Then the next round began.

Matisse once said: “We must talk to each other as much as we can. When one of us dies, there will be some things the other will never be able to talk of with anyone else.” The art they could not say in words, they said on canvas, for the rest of their lives, in a conversation still unfinished.

Picasso in Málaga — Where to Visit

Museo Picasso Málaga — The main museum, housing over 285 works across eight decades, including pieces that show exactly the artistic currents that collided with Matisse’s influence. Located in the 16th-century Palacio de Buenavista, Old Town.

www.museopicassomalaga.org

Casa Natal / Fundación Picasso — Picasso’s birthplace on Plaza de la Merced, where the Andalusian child who would one day unsettle all of French painting grew up. Personal objects, family memories, original works.

fundacionpicasso.malaga.eu

La Malagueta Bullring — The arena where Picasso first saw the corrida as a boy, with his father. The annual Corrida Picassiana, held each April, stages a bullfight in tribute to the artist and the symbolic world he carried his whole life.

plazadetoroslamalagueta.com

Centre Pompidou Málaga — The French cultural presence in Picasso’s hometown, an irony he would certainly have appreciated. Regularly exhibits works placing Picasso in dialogue with the Paris world he both conquered and escaped.

www.centrepompidou-malaga.eu

Museo del Patrimonio Municipal (MUPAM) — Where Don José Ruiz, Picasso’s father, sold his dove paintings. The beginning of the story, in the most literal sense.

mupam.malaga.eu