NICE.- Matisse et Picasso, la comédie du modèle is the leading exhibition in an impressive cultural line-up organized by the city of Nice in 2018, proof of the artistic dynamism put in place by Christian Estrosi, the Mayor of Nice, President of the Nice Côte d’Azur metropolitan area and Vice President of the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region. Thanks to its ambitious cultural policies, Nice offers an array of cultural activities all year round, including large-scale exhibitions, thereby establishing itself as a major arts centre, of national and international standing.
This exhibition, Matisse et Picasso, la comédie du modèle, has received the prestigious ‘National Exhibition of Interest’ label for 2018, awarded by the Minister of Culture, Françoise Nyssen. Created by the Ministry of Culture, this label showcases and supports important and/or outstanding exhibitions organized by museums in France. It rewards an innovative museum offer and a previously unexplored theme, as well as the exhibition’s scenography and educational events and activities, thereby providing a wide public with the keys to new readings or interpretations of the material and artworks on display.
The exhibition at the
Musée Matisse in Nice is part of the Picasso-Méditerranée international cultural programme whose aim is to strengthen the links between institutions on all sides of the Mediterranean. For this occasion, the Museum benefits from the exceptional loan of forty artworks from the Musée national Picasso-Paris, along with one hundred and twenty prestigious loans of artworks by both Matisse and Picasso, coming from public institutions and private collections.
These two giants of twentieth-century art have not been presented together since 2002 as part of the Matisse-Picasso exhibition that travelled to London, New York and Paris. The Musée Matisse was eager to return to the extraordinary dialogue that exists between these two artists. Moreover, it was in Nice and its surroundings, in places like Vallauris and Vence that the two men regularly rubbed shoulders from the 1940s onwards, both finding their inspiration in this Mediterranean setting.
Stemming from the notion of the «comedy of the model» referred to by Aragon in Henri Matisse, a novel, the Musée Matisse seeks to re-examine what was probably one of the most successful examples of mutual artistic rivalry and inspiration in the twentieth century. Between dialogue and competitiveness, the relationship between Matisse and Picasso was the subject of a permanent exchange. Subtle but captivating resonances exist in the work of both artists, which should be examined in light of the relationship enjoyed between each painter and his model: one of the main driving forces of the reflection carried out by both artists on the question of the representation of the body and the creative act.
The exhibition is structured around four thematic sections, presenting in addition to the Museum’s collection, one hundred and fifty odd paintings, sculptures and graphic works by Matisse and Picasso. A photographic section compares the two artists at work in their respective studios, highlighting the differences and similarities between them. The exhibition is complemented by a presentation of archival documents: letters, exhibition catalogues, reviews and films, illustrating the history of their relationship.
The exhibition Matisse et Picasso, la comédie du modèle is accompanied by an illustrated 160-page catalogue, featuring contributions by Claudine Grammont, Emmanuel Pernoud and Colline Zellal, and is published by Éditions Lienart, Paris.
Over 500 m², the exhibition unfolds in four sections, each of which shows a different mode of the artistmodel relationship.
1. TO PROJECT
Both Matisse and Picasso belong to a generation that from the outset of the twentieth century engaged itself in interrogating the nature of the act of perception. The perceiving artist was not only an eye, but a vehicle of multi-sensorial perception that implicated the whole body. This inquiry manifests itself in the two artists’ work in multiple ways. Often Matisse shows himself in the act of drawing, or more precisely in the permanent shuttling between the eye and the hand. This work of mise-en-abyme establishes a visual enigma that in turn implicates the viewer who looks on. In Autoportrait of 1918 (Musée Matisse, Nice), painted at the moment of his arrival in Nice, Matisse is not content with depicting his reflection in the mirror; he paints himself painting, and adds to this unsettling circularity a representation of the part of the painting that discreetly appears along the right border.
Inscribed within this fascinating play of mirror, the models, themselves a kind of double of the artist who is working from them, further compounds the enigma and sets its stage. In 1903, Carmelina (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) inaugurates the theme of “painter and his model” in Matisse’s oeuvre, which as this exhibition reveals goes on to recur frequently in his paintings as well as in a number of drawings. “My models, human figures, are never just ‘extras’ in an interior,” writes Matisse. “They are the principal theme of my work. . . . Their forms are not always perfect, but they are always expressive. The emotional interest they inspire in me is not particularly apparent in the representation of their bodies, but often rather by the lines or the special values distributed over the whole canvas or paper and which form its orchestration, its architecture” (“Notes of a Painter on his Drawing,” 1939). Throughout his career, Picasso, too, interrogates this theme by staging and constantly renewing the “painter and his model.” This sometimes borders on the register of the burlesque, as in the astonishing series from 1970 (Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris) that shows him in the role of painter-actor of his art.
2. TO TRANSFORM
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Matisse and Picasso take their cue from primitive arts to break free from the canon that governed representation of the body and to extricate such representation from the rule of the anatomy. The climax of this first sequence is the highly celebrated Portrait of Marguerite (1907, Musée national Picasso, Paris) that Picasso receives from Matisse in exchange for a painting of his own. The work founded the relationship of mutual emulation between the two artists. Picasso had by then already begun his work on Demoiselles d’Avignon. The study that hangs opposite Portrait of Marguerite here, a bust for the figure of the young sailor (1907, Musée national Picasso, Paris), joins Matisse’s portrait in a search of new plastic signs for expressing the human figure: “The importance of an artist is to be measured by the number of new signs he has introduced in the plastic language” (“Conversations with Louis Aragon: On Signs,” 1942).
If for his part Matisse seeks, through a work of decantation, the proper sign for his emotion, one that might be capable of expressing it as faithfully as possible, Picasso imagines the sign to transform and migrate. But beyond this fundamental difference in approach, both favor in their practice metamorphosis of the material they work from, its capacity for generating itself, sometimes pushing it to the point where the artist becomes a mere eyewitness to his own creation. “Painting is stronger than I am, it makes me do what it wants” (Picasso to Hélène Parmelin). The two artists, then, pay a particular attention to techniques that might trigger such morphogenesis, like sculpture and print, or the procedures such as serial drawing or photograph of intermediary states. This is what Matisse practices in the 1940s with his drawings series Thèmes et variations. Picasso, too, variously explores it in his series depicting Françoise Gilot, the woman-flower. Rarely would Picasso have come so close as in this series to Matisse, who long cultivated vegetal or floral metaphors in his relationship with the model.
3. TO COVET
This section opens with Picasso’s Faune découvrant une nymphe (1936, Musée national Picasso, Paris). Here the model submitting herself to the painter’s gaze may be Matisse’s languid odalisque, the lascivious figure of an oriental reverie. Picasso appropriates it with the elder artist in mind, sometimes harshly criticizing or paying homage to him. The model may also be a sleeping woman, a subject dear to both artists in the 1930s. In this period of intense aesthetic rivalry, Matisse and Picasso compete on the walls of the Galerie Paul Rosenberg.
Le Rêve of 1935 (Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris) is Matisse’s response to Picasso’s sleeping women, a reminder of Matisse’s own interest in the unconscious. However much lionized by the surrealist circle, then, his rival does not have monopoly on this realm. “I draw close to the model—within the model—eyes less than a meter away and knees within reach of the model’s knees” Matisse says to Aragon, a former surrealist, who was sitting to the artist for a series of drawings at the time (Aragon, Henri Matisse: A Novel). The model’s presence, his/her extreme proximity is necessary for the artist. It is only when this emotion, provoked by the model’s physical presence alone, is unwound like a firmly held but fragile thread that Matisse gives himself over to the creative act; he manages to “return to himself,” as he puts it, through empathy. The question here is thus not to observe the model, but get so close as to identify with him/her.
As for Picasso, he does away with the model’s presence when he works. For Picasso does not have a model; he has muses and his painting dreams of them. But for both Matisse and Picasso, this model, real or imagined, is nothing but a body physically interiorized by the artist. And Picasso is never more himself than when he does odalisque à la Matisse. In this exhibition, his Femme au tambourin of 1925 (Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris), as well as the drawings related to Les Femmes d’Alger of 1955 (Musée national Picasso, Paris), attest to this.
4. TO POSSESS
Various book illustrations that Matisse committed himself to after Poésie de Stéphane Mallarmé, published by Skira in 1933, led him to reconnect with mythological subjects that had inspired his work at the moment of fauvism. This exhibition gathers a magnificent group of works on the theme of Nymph and Faun, from the plates related to The Afternoon of a Faun from the Mallarmé book to the great Verdure (Musée Matisse, Nice), a major painting on which Matisse worked between 1935 and 1942, as well as the previously unseen 17 tracings on the theme of Embrace for Ronsard’s Florilège des amours published by Skira in 1948.
This return to mythology is also an occasion for Matisse to pick up the duel with Picasso, which had remained subdued during the odalisques years. Picasso immediately responds to him on the same ground. The Suite Vollard etchings of 1933 directly echo the Mallarmé plates: a series of embraces and struggles of love in which Picasso unleashes a violence inaccessible to Matisse. In 1946, when he stays at the Château Grimaldi in Antibes, Picasso paints on asbestos-cement Joie de vivre, an undisguised riff on Matisse’s precedence. A set of related line drawings, called Suite Antipolis (Musée Picasso, Antibes), are at once an evocation of the Mediterranean through the Arcadian myth and a homage to Matisse in their purified and smooth style.
