When modern art masters Matisse and Picasso visit Long Island City, it's their mistresses who take center stage
published June 9, 2003
written by Maureen Farrell / New York
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.
The painted ladies of Queens