"Matisse Picasso" at MOMA QNS. (Art).

When the great Matisse retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art ended, in January 1993, it was followed for one amazing week by an unpublicized epilogue--a small show that could only be described as modernist heaven. Improvised at the last minute by the retrospective's curator, John Elderfield, the two-room installation set a nearly ideal selection of iconic Matisses among equally iconic Picassos. The Matisses included the Baltimore Museum of Art's Blue Nude (Souvenir of Biskra) (1907) with her wrenched hip, the Pompidou's sketchily brushed trio of nude bathers, Le Luxe I (1907), the monumental Bathers with a Turtle (1908) from St. Louis, and their austere, near-abstract sisters, Bathers by a River (1909-1910, 1913, 1916) from the Art Institute of Chicago, plus three of MOMA's bronze Backs. The Picassos, all from MOMA's own holdings, included the hefty Two Nudes (1906), against a red curtain, and Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907). If you cared at all about the complex history of twentieth-century art, the show was near-perfection, an eye-testing demonstration of how potent ideas are stated, absorbed, and transformed by artists' practice and, at the same time, an uplifting tribute to the power of sheer visual inventiveness. But if spending time with this astonishing assembly was exhilarating, it was also exhausting. The rare, perhaps never to be repeated, opportunity to see, side by side, widely dispersed pivotal works that had often been made in response to one another demanded that you look hard and think hard. You were forced to call upon all your accumulated knowledge of the early years of twentieth-century art history, weigh some of your most cherished assumptions against first-hand experience of seminal paintings, and ponder difficult questions about the characteristics of Matisse's and Picasso's efforts, about each one's strengths and weaknesses, and about what each one thought of the other.

I suspect that I learned more from my daily visits to MOMA that unforgettable week than I had in years of graduate school. Certainly the show forced me to consider even familiar paintings freshly and helped me to enlarge and clarify ideas that I had formulated over years of looking at the work of both artists. It compelled me to sharpen my sense of the similarities and differences between these two idiosyncratic giants. It was plain that each was alert to what the other was doing, early on. It was plain, too, that both had been hit hard by the 1907 Cezanne exhibition at the Salon d'Autumne, organized as a tribute following the painter's death the previous year. Cezanne's tense bathers and pulsing landscapes, his monumental forms and meticulously placed touches of tone, reverberated, in different ways, in every one of Matisse's and Picasso's works in the epilogue. The 1907 exhibition was not the ambitious young artists' first confrontation with Cezanne, but it was probably the most concentrated group of his works they had come across. It seems as if the encounter impelled them to spend the next ten years or so exploring the implications of what they had seen.

Yet if the two were united by a common admiration for Cezanne, they learned different lessons from him and applied them in very different ways. Both took as their point of departure the inherent contradiction of Cezanne's paintings--their dependence on two simultaneous but apparently irreconcilable kinds of perception; the carefully adjusted tonal relationships of Cezanne's pictures evoked mass and volume, while their deliberately placed patches of pigment asserted that the canvas was a flat surface of particular dimensions, covered with touches of a particular substance. For Matisse, Cezanne's work became an endless source of inspiration and confirmation for his own effort to reconcile his acute perceptions of the three-dimensionality of the perceivable world with his equally acute awareness of the two-dimensionality of his media. Matisse eventually achieved this with expanses of unmodulated color and eloquent shapes, an approach apparently very unlike Cezanne's pursuit of nuance, but one that nonetheless embodies and expands the most radical notions implicit in the Aix master's work. Picasso, however, seems to have assimilated the appearance of Cezanne's paintings rather than their essence. He exaggerated their inherent planar articulations, along with their (perhaps inadvertent) wrenched forms and tipped spaces, and exploited the resulting prismatic structure neither to suggest bulk nor to create tension between allusion and the fact of paint, but rather to evoke shattered form and the penetration of mass by space.

Illuminating as MOMA'S brief, telling combination of masterworks was, it ultimately raised more questions than it answered. So when I learned, about five years later, that an exhibition entitled "Matisse and Picasso: A Gentle Rivalry" examining the links between the two artists from the 1930s until Matisse's death, was at the Kimbell Art Museum, I made plans to go to Fort Worth, despite my reservations about its curator, the extremely fashionable Harvard professor of art history, Yve-Alain Bois. On balance, I'm glad I went, since the show brought together a good many first-rate works ranging from the familiar to the little known. But the underlying premise was what is called in academic circles "over-determined" Bois's metaphor for the relationship of the two artists was a chess match--a one-on-one struggle to defeat the opponent completely, based on a set of prescribed moves and countermoves. It was, to put it politely, a remarkably reductive description of a multivalent, fluid conversation between colleagues who fundamentally admired and respected each other, however strong their rivalry--not to mention their happening to be among the most alert, inventive, and iconoclastic human beings of modern times.

Fort Worth's "Matisse and Picasso" made some illuminating comparisons, but much of it was based on crude similarities and simplistic notions of direct cause and effect. Bois insisted, for example, that whenever Matisse drew or painted a woman resting her head on her folded arms on a table, it was an homage to Picasso, while whenever Picasso included a window with a wrought iron grille, it was a tribute to Matisse. Maybe. The news, however, wasn't all bad. I kept hearing that MOMA was planning a flail-scale examination of the still provocative question of the relationship of Matisse and Picasso, with John Elderfield and the perceptive British art historian John Golding at the helm. Something to look forward to and await impatiently.

Now the wait is over. After showings in London and Paris, "Matisse Picasso" organized by an international team of curators consisting of Elderfield and Golding, with Kirk Varnadoe, Elizabeth Cowling, Anne Baldassari, and Isabelle Monod-Fontaine, has been elegantly installed at MOMA QNS. (1) The show is essentially an expansion of that tantalizing epilogue to the Matisse retrospective--the core of the exhibition is once again the pairing of Les Demoiselles and Bathers with a Turtle--extended to span the period between the two young artists' initial awareness of each other's work, in the first years of the twentieth century, and 1954, the year of Matisse's death. The most striking thing about the show is its intelligence. It's a subtle, thoughtful exhibition that refuses to dwell on obvious similarities of theme or tidy chronological overlaps, but instead attempts to reveal something of the half-century long, wordless conversation conducted by a pair of extraordinary artists who were variously and sometimes simultaneously colleagues, peers, friends, fans, and rivals. It's possible to revel in the show simply as an assembly of perfectly splendid works by both artists, but if you're willing to make a little more effort, "Matisse Picasso" hints at deep-rooted studio relationships--the way artists, even extraordinarily original and inventive artists, mine each other's work. It's possible to follow Matisse and Picasso as they treat each other's efforts as provocations, stimuli, or triggers. You watch them assimilating and transforming each other's declarations, sometimes "correcting" the initial proposition, at other times swallowing it whole, and at still others (as when Picasso flirted with Surrealism while Matisse ignored the whole thing) rejecting it. Minor events in one artist's work turn up as major ones in his colleague's and vice versa; small implications are turned into entire campaigns. And so on.

"Matisse Picasso" begins by introducing the protagonists through a pair of self-portraits painted in 1906, the year they were introduced by the Steins. (Matisse was thirty-six, Picasso a little more than a decade younger.) The Spaniard looks uncharacteristically introspective, eyes downcast, holding a palette--but no brushes--his stocky figure and dark eyes accounted for through fluent drawing and simplified forms. Matisse looks at once bold and a little nervous in his striped sailor's shirt, gazing past the viewer at an unseen mirror, envisioning himself, it appears, through the filter of his awe of Cezanne. Already, the differences are apparent. Picasso, who rarely worked from life, presents a highly conceptualized idea of the artist; touch and surface seem secondary to narrative; color is purely expedient. Matisse offers a scrupulously observed but far from literal accounting of his perceptions and emotions translated into the language of paint; form is implied by unexpected chromatic shifts. This dichotomy is made even more explicit by one of the show's many inspired pairings: Matisse's The Studio, Quai Saint-Michel (1916-1917, The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.) and Picasso's Painter and Model (1928, Museum of Modern Art, New York). Matisse's light-suffused, brushy picture is at once immediate, intensely specific, deeply rooted in real experience, and all about invention. You recognize the view of the Seine and the Ile de la Cite out the window, note the zig-zag of the parquet, the flowered red cloth, and the turned legs of the chairs, all familiar characters in Matisse's repertory, at the same time that you are riveted by the rigorous, almost independent, geometry of the painting's structure, its exquisitely modulated surfaces, and its surprising palette, keyed off of a range of gray-browns. Picasso's densely loaded canvas is no less inventively constructed, but it is once again highly conceptualized. Where Matisse makes you aware of his constant measuring of his "sensations" against the pictorial demands of the painting, Picasso asserts his will, imperiously tracing a kind of emblem of the studio and then separating zone from zone or amalgamating them with bright colors that seem more theoretical than observed; blue rectangles signal "window" for example. (This isn't a value judgment--just an observation.)

Some groupings demonstrate documented historical links between works. Others, like the pairing of the Phillips and MOMA studio pictures, embody difference, while still others suggest how artists experience one other's work. The best sections of the show, such as an eye-opening assembly of early Matisse and Picasso nudes that includes canvases and Matisse's 1909 sculpture La Serpentine, or a stunning array of portraits from the Teens and a little before, do all this at once. It is a crash-course in the evolution of modernist painting to be confronted by Picasso's portrait of Gertrude Stein and his implacable, bare-breasted Woman with a Fan (1908, Hermitage, St. Petersburg) in the company of Matisse's icily beautiful portrait of his wife from the Hermitage with its mysterious blue-greens, his fierce characterization of the margarine tycoon/Cezanne collector Auguste Pellerin in his velvety black suit, and his delicious portrait of the actress Greta Prozor, at once fashion plate and tour de force of how unstable flat planes can invoke the figure. Geometric simplification vies with inflected paint handling; suggested volume and assertive drawing wrestle each other to the ground. You watch as ideas are thrown, caught, altered, and flung back, only to be altered once again.

Nowhere is this more elegantly manifest than a section devoted to sculpture. Picasso's vigorous, angular 1909 bronze Head of a Woman (Fernande) states the theme in terms of staccato, syncopated rhythms. A couple of Matisse's series of bronze heads of Jeannette (made between 1911 and 1916) announce his response: female features, a neck, and piles of hair transformed into swelling, interlocking forms with articulate profiles. Some years later, Picasso apparently saw an exhibition of the Jeannette series. His response? A group of heads composed of bulging, biomorphic forms that seem equally triggered by the sensual classical features of his mistress of the period, Marie-Therese Walter, and the sculptural ideas posited by Matisse's bronzes. In between, Matisse appears to have explored still other implications of both his own and Picasso's sculpture in his heads of Henriette.

Sometimes, this kind of exchange appears to have been direct and almost immediate, but sometimes it seems to have taken years, as if the artist had been unable to free himself of an idea or an image posited by a painting or sculpture. The thought-provoking association of Picasso's angular, planar sculpture Woman in a Garden (1931-1932, Reina Sofia, Madrid) with Matisse's radiant gouaches coupes, Zulma (1950, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen) and Creole Dancer (1950, Musee Matisse, Nice) reveals surprising likenesses of shape and form in these otherwise tenuously related works, despite their disparate mediums. These similarities, then, elicit thoughts about the relationship of linear, open-constructed sculptures, such as the exuberant Woman in a Garden, to the tradition of paper collage--from which constructed sculpture traces its origins, via Picasso and Julio Gonzalez--and by extension, consideration of the connections between Matisse's painted and pasted papers and "traditional" Cubist collage. The point is eloquently enlarged upon by the brilliant association of a selection of Matisse's most seductive and economical gouaches coupes, the blue nudes of 1952, with some of Picasso's similarly economical, ingeniously folded, painted sheet metal sculptures of about a decade later.

All of this is amply and illuminatingly discussed in the exhibition's handsome, lavishly illustrated catalogue. The only caveat is that the reproductions hint, frustratingly, at works seen at one or another of "Matisse Picasso"'s other locations, absent from the New York showing. Not that you are shortchanged by what is on view at MOMA. Quite the opposite. It is, in fact, hard to single out high points among the consistent riches of this sharply focused, clear-headed show. Aesthetically, its strength may be its examination of the artists' connections in the mid to late Teens, the years when Matisse's highly selective assimilation of Cubist notions stimulated him to paint a disproportionate number of what are arguably his most powerful and most inventive paintings. It's impossible to deny the impact or the enlightening effect of seeing Matisse's Piano Lesson (1916, Museum of Modern Art, New York) beside Picasso's Man Leaning on a Table (1915-1916, Pinacoteca del Lingotto, Giovanni and Marella Agnelli), since, together, the brittle, densely loaded, squeezed rectangles of the Picasso and the generous, thinly painted, luminous planes of the Matisse seem like opposite sides of the same coin. But everything counts. A terrific selection of drawings by both artists easily competes with such stellar comparisons of celebrated pictures. A series of drawings of heads holds some real surprises, including a pair of portraits of the dancer Leonid Massine by both Picasso and Matisse. The liquid-eyed premier danseur looks downright pretty in Picasso's delicately shaded, rather saccharine drawing, while Matisse's more angular, frontal head seems more dispassionate and less flattering. Another fine group of drawings, mostly from the early 1930s, reprises the artist and model theme. Here, Matisse toys with visual possibilities of multiplicity, conflating images of the model, her reflection, and the drawing that emerges under his pen--fictions of fictions, firmly based on observation--while Picasso puts the motif through a series of stylistic variations, from a hypersensitive neoclassicism to a near-Baroque play of light and dark.

Each series of related--or disparate--works adds another layer of complexity to your sense of the complicated relationship between the two painters. It's obvious that each took the other's measure early on and remained alert to what he was doing for the rest of his life. At times, there seems to have been simply a heightened state of awareness; at other, there was a real dialogue. But as you move through the installation at MOMA, you are conscious of other voices that keep trying to break in--not only Cezanne, but Ingres, Poussin, Delacroix, Braque, and Bonnard, among others--although it's also clear that Picasso and Matisse put pressure on each other in a different way than any of their peers or ancestors. Yet each remained utterly individual.

In a sense, each artist is defined entirely by the hanging of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon next to Bathers with a Turtle. At first, Picasso looks like the radical, because of angularity and the stylistic disjunctions of his great picture. Almost a century after it was painted, Les Demoiselles still looks daring, still disturbs. And yet, longer acquaintance reveals it to be, after all, a rather traditional composition of large-scale flesh-colored nudes, with a rather traditional narrative. It is, in fact, became of that underlying scaffolding of convention that Les Demoiselles retains its power to shock. You measure Picasso's sharp-edged anatomy and spiky forms, his faceted background and mask-like heads, against your knowledge of traditional statements of his motif and conclude that violence has been done. Matisse's monumental bathers, by comparison, seem calm, classical, Italianate; it comes as no surprise to learn that he had visited Italy around the time that they were painted. Yet another paean to the Golden Age, you may conclude, given the stylized outdoor setting and the opulent flesh. But spend time with these magnificent nymphs and anxiety begins to creep in. Just what is going on? In the end, it doesn't matter. The picture is all about painting, about how passionately perceived form and mass can be conjured up without compromising the continuity or the materiality of the expanse of paint on canvas. It's about the eloquence and emotional potency of color, about the history of its own making, perhaps even about the history of painting itself, made new and unexpected. No shock value, just a profound meditation on the most fundamental aspects of picture-making. Les Demoiselles may clamor more loudly, but Bathers with a Turtle has the staying power. But don't take my word for it. Take the 7 Local to Queens and see for yourself.

(1) "Matisse Picasso" opened at the Museum of Modern Art, Queens, New York, on February 13 and remains on view until May 19, 2003. The exhibition was previously on view at Tate Modern, London, from May 11 to August 18, 2002, and Les Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, Paris, from September 25, 2002 to January 9, 2003. A catalogue of the exhibition has been published by the Museum of Modern Art (368 pages, $60).

Karen Wilkin is the editor of Ascending Peculiarity: Edward Gorey on Edward Gorey (Harcourt Brace).