From left to right: Henri Matisse, Self-Portrait, 1906. © 2003 Succession H. Matisse/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Pablo Picasso, Self-Portrait with Palette, 1906. © 2003 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art)

On February 13, 2003, the celebrated Matisse/Picasso exhibition opened to sold-out audiences at the Museum of Modern Art’s temporary residence in Long Island City. I was one of the lucky ones to make it through the doors of this converted storage space on opening day, after purchasing my timed ticket on Ticketmaster weeks before. Crowds lined the streets waiting to take their place beside the art of two modern masters, Henri Matisse (1869-1954) and Pablo Picasso (1881-1973). While the new MoMA is just a few subway stops from midtown Manhattan, the industrial area of Long Island City and the warehouse made me anticipate a freshness about the exhibition. The 133 works on display–many of which have never before been shown to the public–show the well-documented rivalry and surprising collaboration between Matisse and Picasso. The arrangement of the art works reveals more about each of their maker’s preoccupations–Matisse’s experiments with color, for instance, and Picasso’s experiments with shapes and forms.

On a wall of the exhibition, the curators have printed a quote attributed to Picasso in old age:
You have got to be able to picture side by side everything Matisse and I were doing at that time. No one has ever looked at Matisse’s painting more carefully than I; and no one has looked at mine more carefully than he.

The curators place the viewer in the center of this dialogue, and we are given the unique opportunity to do exactly what Picasso wishes we could do. But the exhibition curators didn’t leave room for some questions I wanted to discuss with the artists. While analyzing how Matisse and Picasso used color, forms, and perspective, the curators never address how Matisse and Picasso challenged or failed to challenge traditional representations of women.

While each challenged artistic conventions in different ways, Matisse, despite his novel use of color and space, emerges as the traditionalist by consistently depicting women as passive creatures. Picasso experiments with his women, whereas Matisse’s women simply lie waiting to be looked at.

The MOMA’s mission statement says: “The Museum of Modern Art seeks to create a dialogue between the established and the experimental, the past and the present, in an environment that is responsive to the issues of modern and contemporary art.” While the paintings can speak for themselves, neither the audio guide (which features two of the exhibition’s curators, John Elderfield and Kirk Varnedoe, discussing the works) nor the exhibition catalog allow feminism to enter into this dialogue.

Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907. © 2002 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. (courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art)

Brothel broads vs. bathers

The pairing of Picasso’s “Demoiselles d’Avignon,” (1907) and Matisse’s “Bathers With A Turtle” (1908) most vividly illustrates the differences in how the artists depict women. In the exhibition catalog, the painter and art historian, John Golding, calls “Demoiselles” “one of those rare individual works of art that changed its very course.” Art historians have called “Bathers with a Turtle” Matisse’s response to “Demoiselles.” The “Demoiselles” shocks, and, juxtaposed with such boldness, Matisse’s “Bathers” is overshadowed.
  
“Demoiselles” breaks with traditional composition, perspective, and Western images of beauty. The painting depicts five standing nude women surrounded by drapery and geometric figures and pieces of fruit at the bottom center of the canvas. Rejecting three-point perspective that creates the illusion of painting as a window on the world, Picasso uses a combination of geometric forms and angular features to show women projecting from the canvas toward the viewer. Three of the five women, who are said to be prostitutes in a brothel in Avignon, Spain, stare directly at the viewer, while the other two look sideways. Two of the women’s faces resemble African masks.

In 1935, Picasso is quoted as saying: “Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon.” In “Demoiselles,” Picasso rejects the Western canon of beauty–cherubic porcelain-skinned women with generous curves–and paints women with androgynous features. Picasso horrified his contemporaries, particularly Matisse, with this painting that mocks the traditional passive female nude. The demoiselles may be playing one of the most humiliating female roles– the prostitute–but they gaze directly at the viewer. They dare the viewer to objectify them.

“Bathers With A Turtle,” rivals “Demoiselles” in size, but despite the boldness of color, the painting seems lifeless next to it. While the demoiselles seem to jump off the canvas toward the viewer, Matisse flattens out the three-point perspective without trying to invert it like Picasso. Instead, the viewer enters the bathers’ world, watching the women stand timidly, peering at the turtle. Perhaps taking a cue from “Demoiselles,” Matisse does not objectify the women in a typical manner. The three women are engaged in examining the turtle and their nudity is a response to the act of bathing rather than for the enjoyment of the viewer. Like the women in “Demoiselles,” the women do not interact with one another and seem to occupy their own worlds within the painting.

Come hither

Each artist’s treatment of women follows from his generalized artistic methods. As Matisse seeks to find beauty through spatial and color relations, he uses women as one of his primary props. In painting after painting, women sit in his studio beside fruit, goldfish, and some of his other trademark motifs. In Matisse’s “Goldfish and Sculpture” of 1912, a reclining nude female lies at the right side of the picture and a large bowl of red goldfish are placed to the left of this woman. The entire painting is hazily depicted and in typical Matisse style, the colors stand out. In this picture, presumably a studio, one cannot make out the face of the model or sculpture but her breasts are visible as she lies with one arm resting against her head, possibly a provocative pose. Her body blends into a vase with flowers, which rests next to a fish. With my feminist eye, I am sometimes awed, sometimes horrified. There’s beauty in the way he arranges his objects and the colors he chooses even if they are nude women. But I am horrified when the female nude occupies a lower position than a compositional object, in this case, a goldfish.
  
Another Matisse painting, “The Studio, quai Saint-Michel” of 1916-17, features a reclining nude model lying on a red floral couch atop a red floral sheet in Matisse’s studio. Unlike many of his other images of nude models, Matisse depicts her facial features. It is difficult to discern whether the model is simply posing for the painter or is resting between poses. The artist’s chair is empty and the canvas shows a half-drawn painting. The studio, which is a depiction of Matisse’s actual studio at the time in Paris, overlooks water and buildings. Viewing this painting like “Goldfish and Sculpture,” and almost every still life displayed in this exhibit, I come up against the same conflicting responses: My eye jumps toward the bold and unique pairing of colors, and I grapple with Matisse’s unusual use of space. But the image of a woman, devoid of life, is intensely disconcerting. In the other paintings in the exhibition, Matisse depicts nude women in different scenes, colors and the perspective, but still places them in the same role–that of a powerless but sexual object.

Near the end of the exhibition, the curators juxtapose Matisse and Picasso’s depictions of odalisques, which are female slaves or concubines in a harem. Matisse was intrigued by the “Orient” and often incorporated Asian styles of ornamentation in his paintings. Nineteenth-century French artists who had visited the Arab world, such as Eugene Delacroix and Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, helped to popularize these “exotic” women.

Despite the sharp contrasts between Picasso’s and Matisse’s representations of women, Picasso ultimately chooses the odalisque, one of the most overtly degrading historical images of women and calls it his primary inheritance from Matisse. Picasso told the English surrealist painter and modern art collector, Roland Penrose: “When Matisse died, he left me his odalisques as a legacy, and this is my idea of the Orient, though I have never been there.” Two months after Matisse’s death in 1954, Picasso began a 15 painting cycle on variations of Eugene Delacroix’s “Women of Algiers.” The three paintings displayed in this cycle: “Women of Algiers, After Delacroix, Canvas M,” “Women of Algiers, After Delacroix, Canvas N” and “Women of Algiers, After Delacroix, Canvas O.” In each of these canvases, Picasso breaks the odalisques into unusual forms, but remains true to traditional odalisque image by making the women’s bare breasts a prominent feature in the paintings.

The curators draw specific attention to the image of the odalisque as another major proof that Matisse and Picasso borrowed and learned from each other. The curators compare the use of the odalisque but never probe why Picasso specifically chose the odalisque, the female slave, as his “primary inheritance” from Matisse. Perhaps, this would reveal much more about what the artists sought to learn from one another. Was Picasso’s use of the odalisque simply an homage to Matisse? Or, was Picasso making a larger statement by choosing more traditional female imagery? “Demoiselles” challenged the idea of the female nude and in turn challenged art historical conventions. Could this use of traditional female imagery in the traditional sense signify that Picasso has chosen to backpedal away from the modern? Both Picasso and Matisse’s use of the female imagery speak beyond their ideas of women. They could help the viewer understand more about their broader ideas on painting, what conventions they challenged, and where they were content to reiterate certain long-held Western art practices. By failing to probe how each artist depicts women, the curators leave out a large part of the story.

Pablo Picasso, Girl Before a Mirror, 1932. © 2001 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art)

Going beyond the stereotype

I keep gazing at a print of Picasso’s “Girl Before A Mirror” (1932) that hangs on my wall, trying to divine what it is saying. This woman seems to be grappling with her femininity as she reaches her hand into the mirror almost through the image of herself. In the region of her abdomen, Picasso paints circular figures that resemble a womb. The woman’s face resembles a mask split in half, half yellow, half purple. Her image in the mirror shows only half of a mask with red around the eyes. From the mirror image’s eyes hangs a small semi-circle of red, possibly a tear.

While the intensity of color here rivals Matisse’s showiest work, I am drawn to “Girl” by Picasso’s depth of perception. Rather than telling you about the girl’s experiences before a mirror, Picasso lets the viewer watch the girl connect to herself in the mirror. He writes an open-ended sentence. This painting rejects the idea of art as escapism and instead offers this picture as an invitation into the mind of the woman or perhaps even the idea of womanhood.

I also hang Matisse prints on my walls. While Picasso’s works make me seek to understand the objects, I become absorbed by Matisse’s use of color–his reds and yellows warm the entire room. I display his still lifes, though, not his nudes. Looking at Matisse’s works, I continually feel a range of positive emotions. His colors evoke a sense of calm and happiness.

But works by both Matisse and Picasso can simultaneously offend and inspire me. As Matisse and Picasso opened the doors to modern art, they brought with them an inheritance of disempowering female imagery. On my two trips to this exhibit, I found myself standing in an awkward place. To begin to understand what has happened in twentieth century art, I must study and understand these masters, but their depictions upset my vision of the world and a woman’s role in it.

While Matisse and Picasso put me in an uncomfortable position, the curators working in 2003 surprise me with their implicit acceptance of the idea of women as art subjects. Why didn’t they address this issue in their catalog or audio guide? The place of Matisse and Picasso in art history is secure, so why not start questioning some of the other forces at work in their paintings?

While exposing new ideas about Matisse and Picasso and their important contributions to each other’s art and the idea of the modern in art, the exhibit also showed that modern art does not by necessity incorporate modern feminist ideals. As the suffragette movement gained momentum in the early 1900s in the United States and similar feminist movements arose in Europe, these artists continue to use primitive images of sexualized women. Changes in iconography seem to happen much slower than political change. To this day, contemporary art struggles with the inherent conflict between women as art object and women as artist.

The Guerilla Girls, an anonymous group of female artists who protest the marginalization of women in the art world, organized themselves after the MoMA’s 1984 exhibition, “An International Survey of Painting and Sculpture” had only 13 female artists out of 169 contemporary artists exhibited. Since then, the women have crashed major art exhibitions wearing gorilla masks to highlight how female artists are ignored in the mainstream art world. Their provocative posters put art in the wider perspective: “Do women have to be naked to get into the Metropolitan Museum of Art?” one of their posters asks. “Less than five percent of artists in the Modern Arts section are women, but 85 percent of the nudes are female.” These posters and protests serve an important purpose. The highest forms of art that stand in the Metropolitan Museum of Art should be celebrated, and also questioned. By questioning the patriarchal ideals around which Western art developed, women can begin to find a space from which they stand as art viewers and creators.

The Guerilla Girls’ protests kept flashing through my head as I left the exhibit. Maybe we need to shake up the modern art world and remind it that women are not just objects. We can appreciate the beauty of forms and color, but there is also beauty in remembering that women paint, stand, and argue.

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Written by: Maureen Farrell, Inthefray.com Special Features Editor

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Matisse/Picasso
Reunion des Musees Nationaux and the Museum of Modern Art | Tate Publishing | 2002
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Art in Theory: 1900-1990
Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, editors | Blackwell Publishers | Oxford | 1999
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