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| The Modernist Mission |
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Yve-Alain Bois: Of course, every artist responds to other artists and also to their particular situation. No artist works in a vacuum. Both Picasso and Matisse inherited from the masters of Post-Impressionism—Cezanne, Van Gogh, Gaugin, Seurat-- a legacy characterized by a strong emphasis on the constructive nature of everything: color, brush stroke and so forth. Picasso was an extraordinary draftsman, basically imitating all kinds of traditional painting by the age of 14. He had an incredible facility, and it took him a while to realize that he had a kind of historical mission, so to speak. And that happened, I think, around 1906, around the time he got acquainted with the work of Matisse. That very quickly developed into what would become a big splash in the history of art, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. You don’t have to reproduce the object, you can totally reconstruct it. You don’t have to be homogenous in terms of style—you can use different stylistic features within a painting in a strange, discontinuous way. It’s the recognition that painting is a language based on arbitrary elements that you can combine at will to create whatever you want. That’s what I think is Modernist for Picasso: the notion that painting is a language. For Matisse, I think it was more directly in terms of color. The idea that you can create in the mind of a beholder a visual impression, a mood or feeling, by combining colors that have nothing to do with the object you are representing. That was his great early invention, and once again, it emphasized the arbitrariness of the code of painting.
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