The Art of Rivalry by Sebastian Smee

Author:Sebastian Smee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2016-08-15T16:00:00+00:00

“ ‘Les Demoiselles’ must have come to me that day,” Picasso concluded, “but not at all because of the forms but because it was my first canvas of exorcism. Yes, absolutely.”

The visit to the Trocadéro, and Picasso’s long-delayed account of it, is given enormous importance in the literature on his oeuvre, and it’s easy to see why. If we are to believe him, it was here, at the Trocadéro, that his whole creative philosophy crystallized in an apprehension that linked the anxiety of seeing—the sexual and mortal anxiety of confronting others, and particularly women—with the magical, transformative powers that he believed inhered in art. From this central apprehension—dramatized, intensified, endlessly reiterated—Picasso would go on to forge a career of unprecedented variety and pyrotechnic brilliance.

But of course, the visit was just as important in the immediate context of his rivalry with Matisse. For someone so caught up in the struggle to become independent, to get out from under the influence of a rival and make good on his early promise, Picasso’s intuition about tribal masks could hardly have been more significant. They were weapons, he said, to help you “become independent.”

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WHEN PICASSO DID FINALLY adopt African art, it was with a precipitous intensity that was utterly characteristic of him. Throughout the spring and summer of 1907, he turned out a series of violently “Africanized” nudes. Like his Iberian-style heads, they were radically simplified, but now they had angular bodies, curving, scythe-like noses, and cheeks marked by parallel striations and cross-hatching—drawn directly from the scarification lines he had seen on African masks.

At the same time, he returned to the Demoiselles with renewed purpose. In a series of studies he made in ink on paper, striations and hatchings begin to appear in the backgrounds and around the borders of his pictures, recalling the decorative palm fronds in Matisse’s Blue Nude. Like Matisse, and even more like Cézanne (whom Picasso was now beginning to revere as much as Matisse did), Picasso was striving to establish visual rhymes that would strengthen his picture’s unity, knitting together background and foreground. But rather than the fluid, serpentine line so beloved by Matisse, Picasso’s rhymes were established with sharp angles, and with an idiom of fragmentation and splintering that may well have reflected the state of his mind.

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PICASSO SURELY TOLD HIMSELF that what he got from African art was very different from what Matisse saw in it. It was more extreme, more potent. The discovery, by his account, was not only more dramatic than Matisse’s curio shop pottering; it was fired by superstition, by magic.

Matisse, for his part, would never have dramatized his conception of art in this way. It was not in his interest to do so: People thought he was crazy enough as it was. Better to emphasize “planes and proportions” rather than magic and exorcism.

In any case, an idea of harmony, achieved through sublimation, mattered profoundly to Matisse in a way that it did not to Picasso. Matisse was always shoring himself up against chaos. Picasso meanwhile thrived on dissonance.

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