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Tuesday, 14 May, 2002, 12:07 GMT 13:07 UK
Picasso and Matisse exhibition
Picasso and Matisse exhibition
(Edited highlights of the panel's review)
KIRSTY WARK:
ALKARIM JIVANI: My heart usually sinks at the idea of these blockbuster shows, because usually they're triumphs of marketing over material, but this is a real treat of a show. It's scrupulously balanced. The problem with it is that it's much more than the sum of its parts. It invites comparative assessment, and Picasso emerges much better out of the comparative assessment.
KIRSTY WARK:
ALKARIM JIVANI: He has double, triple and quadruple meanings in his canvas, whereas Matisse is much flatter literally and figuratively.
KIRSTY WARK:
GERMAINE GREER: I was seeing pictures I knew very well, and whose power I didn't doubt, although some of them haven't worn that well. Some are actually bad paintings. But we were meant to see the way these artists communicated with each other, and I came away with a blinding sense of enormous contrast. A man came up to me and said, "If you had to choose one picture, which would it be?" And I said, "You are asking me to choose between beauty and power." I would rather live with beauty than power. I could not live with Picasso. Every single painting is about himself. The ego is there all the time, whereas what does Matisse do? He has a much less challenging approach to the picture space, but he is very interested in the space between the picture and the viewer.
KIRSTY WARK:
GERMAINE GREER: He is an amazing artist. Also, people built on what Matisse did. They couldn't build on what Picasso did.
KIRSTY WARK: Particularly, he envied his use of colour. What about you, Mark? Did you know these works?
MARK KERMODE: I thought they had created this Lennon and McCartney thing, with Picasso being the spiky Lennon, while Matisse was doing the slightly softer... There are the children's images and the fact it's much more childish work. All the way through, I thought that that tension - whether or not it was created by the gallery, it was beautifully put together. You have the comparison of the three dancers. This thing you said about you couldn't live with Picasso, but you could have the Matisse, and there's this lovely text on the wall which explains the surrealists thought Picasso was wonderful and Matisse was just a total load of old bunk. I felt the same way as I do about the Beatles. I own three Paul McCartney albums and no John Lennon albums. At the end of the day I'd like to go home with the Matisses. At the end of the day, the juxtaposition worked beautifully. The pop tunes were the Matisse's that I liked.
ALKARIM JIVANI:
KIRSTY WARK:
ALKARIM JIVANI: If you look at the painting, the life and colour is drained out of it, the sausage is coiled like viscera, we've got artichokes that look like severed hands, cutlery like armoury. If you compare it with Still Life With Oysters, painted by Matisse within months of Still Life With Sausages, it's a bright, buoyant painting about oysters. It's about the privations, not about the horror of war.
KIRSTY WARK:
ALKARIM JIVANI:
KIRSTY WARK:
ALKARIM JIVANI:
GERMAINE GREER: It's not really about them or the situation in which they stood with regard to their mistresses or their penises or the Nazis. It's actually about what painting is for, and they had a completely different notion about what painting was for. Matisse thought painting was consolation, it was harmony. It was like music, like bird song. He is, if you like, Mozart and Picasso is Beethoven. That's the extraordinary thing. Some of the connections in the exhibition are pretty forced. The pictures are actually from different periods, and in some cases the obvious parallels aren't there. You have the artist drawing the nude from Matisse, and none of Picassos etchings of the artist and his model, which are clearly attempts to do something like what Matisse was doing. I think Picasso was too smart not to know that he couldn't sing the song that Matisse was singing.
KIRSTY WARK: The idea that they disliked each other was just a confection, it didn't exist. They actually had great respect for each other's work.
GERMAINE GREER:
ALKARIM JIVANI:
MARK KERMODE: |
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See also:
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