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| Rivals or Friends? |
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Yve-Alain Bois: So, you can imagine, Matisse is in isolation in Nice; he doesn’t want to speak to anyone; he can’t paint. And here you are, with Picasso churning out one work after another that alludes to Matisse’s early work. Can you imagine how irritating that must be? It seems to me that you have to overcome your misery by fighting back, which I think is exactly what Matisse did. KERA: Why did Picasso pick on Matisse? Rick Brettell: Who else is there to pick on? Why pick on Matisse? A little bit because he’s down and out. A little bit because he really is greater than anybody else anyway. I mean you can’t pick on Braque anymore. You can’t pick on Leger. I mean the surrealists are a bunch of young punks who aren’t doing much of anything anyway. I mean, can you imagine taking Salvador Dali seriously if you’re Picasso, a painter like Picasso? I mean, who do you engage? And you know, when you engage somebody else in that way, it means that you need it too. You need that engagement. And clearly Picasso felt as if he himself had gone through a kind of eclectic and formless decade. And so, the two of them did need each other. Each of them thought that the other was a giant. So what’s wrong with sparring with a giant? It makes you stronger. Yve-Alain Bois: In some ways, Picasso was bored, and he wanted Matisse back in the ring, and he wanted to find a way to get the old man out of his den. That’s what he did. He did it in various ways, and one of them was by caricaturing some of Matisse’s previous work. And he would always quote Matisse’s style from let’s say 1906-1914. I mean, he was telling Matisse, “Why don’t you do the same thing that you’re doing now, but the way you used to do it, in the style you used to use before? It would be much more interesting.”
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