Matisse Picasso

6 Pages 1477 Words

The world Matisse and Picasso existed in was one of intense competition. Each strived to maintain their own personal style while simultaneously adapting to their surroundings. “To take possession is also to confess to indebtedness(Bois).” Their group and personal exhibitions were a vehicle to expose themselves to the rest of the art world and to eachother. However, they also felt the need to reciprocate ideas and attain a further understanding in studies of space, divisions of composition, and their differing views of models back and forth between themselves. They accomplish the unification of these divergent elements in Matisse’s Woman With a Veil, completed in 1927, and Picasso’s Girl Before a Mirror, resolved in 1932.

Matisse was thought of as an old man, done with his career at this point, a dinosaur. His conception of his work differed. “I nowadays want a certain formal perfection, and I work by concentrating my means in order to give my painting the quality of a well-executed, finished object-which is perhaps external, but that isn’t necessary to mess up some canvas when you are young, that one shouldn’t start at the beginning(Bois).” Matisse strived for the completed painting, executed in a finished manner. This was everything he had previously rejected earlier in his career. Matisse strived for order as well as beauty in his work. There is also a certain serene aspect to his paintings. Matisse’s early style was partly a product of Picasso’s,”(me) Matisse could not have taken his free and high-handed approach toward realism if cubism had not been around while he was stylizing(Bois).” In order to break out of this crisis he was faced with, Matisse reinvented the manner in which he presented the model, space, and design(Matisse Picasso)(Ederfield).

In Matisse’s Woman With a Veil, Henriette, Matisse’s principal model throughout the 1920’s, rarely appears fully clothed. This painting, ...