Synopsis
Matisse & Picasso achieved extraordinary prominence during their lifetimes. They stand not only for different kinds of art, but also for different ways of living. Matisse, known for his restraint & intense sense of privacy, for his decorum & discretion, created an art that transcended daily life & conveyed a sensuality that inhabited an abstract & ethereal realm of being. In contrast, Picasso became the exemplar of intense emotionality, of art as a kind of autobiographical confession that was often charged with violence & explosive eroticism. This vol. explores the compelling, competitive, parallel lives of these two artists & their very different attitudes toward the idea of artistic greatness, toward the women they loved, & ultimately toward their confrontations with death. Illustrated.
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About the Author
Jack Flam is Distinguished Professor of Art and Art History at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He has written extensively on nineteenth- and twentieth-century European and American art and his books include Matisse on Art , Matisse: the Man and His Art, 1869-1918 , and Les peintures de Picasso: Un théâtre mental . He lectures internationally and has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Senior Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
From Publishers Weekly
Timed to coincide roughly with the opening of the blockbuster Matisse-Picasso exhibition's third and final stop, at New York's MoMA QNS (February-May), this volume examines the enmity and amity between the 20th century's two greatest painters, mostly as evidenced by their art. Despite the subtitle, Flam, who brilliantly edited Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, is much less interested in the endlessly chronicled lives of his subjects than in the work; sentences like "When Matisse returned from Morocco that spring, he was full of turbulent emotions, and he created some of his most memorable and original works" simply serve as transitions to the next phase of work-on which Flam is terrific. In one passage, he finds the word "NON" ("a symmetrical word that asserts its negation in both directions") painted into the window grillwork between the husband-and-wife of Matisse's 1912 Conversation-a word that had been showing up in Picasso's work for the previous year. Flam locates similarly productive appropriations and reappropriations between the two painters over the years, so that anyone standing in line for the exhibition in Queens will profit from at least flipping through this direct, jargon-free study.
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