In the tradition of artistic rivals

Painting or sculpture, narrative or symbolism, yin or yang: this exhibition explores an age-old and ongoing debate.

Henri Matisse’s Reclining Odalisque (1926). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, © Succession H Matisse

Rivalries in art are as old as the history of art itself. Pliny recalls stories about Zeuxis and Parrhasius — of painted grapes that deceived birds or painted curtains that deceived even an artist — that later became staples of renaissance art theoretical and biographical writing.

The Renaissance itself was a period particularly rich in artistic rivalry; indeed Vasari attributed the pre-eminence of Florence to the fact everyone there wanted to be better at what they did than anyone else. The stories he recounts of Brunelleschi and Ghiberti, first in the contest for the Baptistery doors and then in the building of Brunelleschi’s dome at Santa Maria del Fiori, epitomise the spirit of emulation and fierce individualism that is perhaps the most quintessentially Greek quality the Renaissance revived.

Pablo Picasso’s Large nude on a red chair (1929), Musée Picasso, Paris, © Succession Picasso

The rivalries between the giants of the High Renaissance are not of merely biographical interest, but had a significant effect on early modern art theory and, in turn, on practice.

That of Leonardo and Michelangelo, for example, which can be sensed in Leonardo’s many assertions of the superiority of painting — his medium — over sculpture, gave rise to the debate over the respective merits of the two art forms that became known as the paragone.

Arguing if painting or sculpture is superior may seem pointless, and some of the writings at the time are tiresome, but the practical consequences of the controversy turn out to be important: Rubens’s emphasis on the lifelikeness of flesh and hair and the moist crystalline form of the eye are all related directly to the things that painting does better than sculpture; while Bernini’s concern to make his statues breathe and almost speak is a response to the argument that white marble is inherently lifeless.

Henri Matisse’s Seated odalisque (1926) Metropolitan Museum, New York © Succession H. Matisse

After the death of Leonardo, and by the middle of the 16th century, the two greatest living artists in Europe — both called “divine” in their lifetimes — were Michelangelo and Titian, and this prompted another debate that, as we shall see, has resonated down to our own time. Initially it was an argument about two completely different approaches to painting, one based on grand narrative and symbolic figures, and the other on mood, feeling and the quest to unify colour and tone. In the following century, and in the context of the theoretical debates of the new French Academy of Painting, the debate was distilled into the opposition of line and colour. Michelangelo, grand but too extreme and eccentric, was replaced by Raphael, whose manner was reasonable and harmonious. And then, as the argument heated up in the 1670s, the champions of the two sides were updated from Raphael and Titian to Poussin and Rubens.

Curiously, although the paragone is rarely a subject of explicit debate at the Academy, some of its terms and arguments can be discerned in the line and colour controversies: thus drawing is associated, like sculpture, with the real and tangible qualities of form and thus with ultimate integrity, while colour is associated with charm and seduction, with illusion rather than reality, and is criticised by its detractors as meretricious.

A century and a half later the querelle du coloris, as it became known, was revived again in France in the opposition between Ingres and Delacroix, the first standing for the primacy of drawing, the latter for the claims of colour and light. And arguably the rivalry between Picasso and Matisse a century later was the latest embodiment of a surprisingly durable dichotomy.

The contrast is clear at the very beginning of the exhibition proper, in the pairing of two early heads. On the left is a portrait of a girl by Matisse, on the right the head of a boy by Picasso. The former is conceived entirely as a pattern of flat colours bounded by decorative contours. The latter is drawn with a searching, powerful, decisive line, seeking an uncompromising definition of volumes and solidity. Picasso’s drawing even looks like a carving, recalling what we said about the affinities between “line” and the claims of sculpture in the paragone, and the point is emphasised by the way the bust ends, not in any attempt at a rendering of shoulders, but in a deliberately block-like form that suggests the stone from which a figure is cut.

Le torse de plâtre, bouquet de fleurs (1919). Sao Paulo Museum of Art © Succession H. Matisse

The next room has a tiny still life from 1909, again a minor work in itself but in which the simple objects are drawn with a tremendous graphic determination and an almost glyptic sense of their solidity. Next to this is a less impressive example of the transitional works that both he and Braque painted in the years after Cezanne’s death, when they were fascinated with his cubic houses, like geometric keynotes in the landscape. There is no really outstanding example of the climax of the analytical cubist movement; the appealing but minor L’Ecritoire, and a couple of works on paper, have to stand in for this vital moment in the story.

In contrast to Picasso’s work, based on drawing, graphic apprehension of the world, and a post-perspectival analysis of space, Matisse is represented by a couple of pieces that rely on flat patterns of colour, as for example in The Plaster Torso, where pink and yellow flowers are set against a wall painted in aqua green.

The next room sets a suite of prints from Picasso’s illustrations to Balzac’s Le chef-d’oeuvre inconnu against another set of prints made by Matisse to illustrate an edition of Mallarme’s poems. There is no doubt of the superiority of Picasso’s etchings, with their endless inventiveness and their meditation on the art of the painter, over Matisse’s charming but rather vague decorative designs. In these graphic works the line-colour distinction that is so salient in the paintings turns into something rather different and yet analogous: on the one hand analytical and narrative drawing, and on the other decorative contour.

This room also contains a number of rather weak pictures by each of the artists, among which Matisse’s delightful Nu couche (1919) from the NGV stands out, and two strong classical nudes by Picasso, which remind us again that he was forever meditating on the heritage of Antiquity and of Mediterranean civilisation.

These two pictures epitomise the different attitudes of the two artists to the subject of the female. Both were fascinated by the phenomenon of woman but Matisse is more attuned to female experience, to the sense of female corporeality, the weight of the female body, and is drawn to a certain mysterious passive, patient, even inert quality, like the stillness of potential energy. His women have nothing going on in their heads at all, but they have a silent presence, which can be impressive and suggestive.

Picasso’s women are more active, almost androgynous, but they are above all sources from which the male draws energy, as the Hindu gods drew energy from their female consorts or shaktis. This is clear in the role played by the muses and models in the plates of Le chef-d’oeuvre inconnu, and it becomes even more striking in the Vollard Suite, which ponders the erotic connection between artist and muse.

Reflecting on what these works are really about may be a little disturbing when the NGA is on a high-minded crusade to equalise its representation of women in the collection but, as I have observed before, the point is really that male and female are general categories, like yang and yin, and that real individuals, whatever their biological sex, are of necessity composed of both in varying degrees.

The yin dimension of receptivity is vital for us to understand the world but it is the yang that makes and achieves things. On the whole most men probably have a preponderance of yang and need to develop yin to achieve equilibrium; for women it is the opposite. But in the end, the male and female figures in these works can be understood as personifications, almost as allegories of the play of forces within each of us.

The attitude of each artist towards his female subjects is interesting in this regard as well. Matisse takes pleasure in their beauty but is detached and enjoys contemplating them in their undisturbed passivity. Picasso, however, engages with them intensely, as we can see in the various plates of the Vollard series, as though his driving masculine energy needed their inertia as ballast. But the connection is so intense that he consumes them, as indeed he seems to have consumed lovers in life too, leaving them distorted and shrivelled husks of figures like the one we see in Grand nu (1929). For these pictures are not merely some formalistic experiment with the limits of figuration, they are expressions of a kind of violence, a relationship so overwhelming that the lover is left a ruin.

The contrast is marked by Matisse’s Odalisque (1926), which hangs nearby: the woman sits on the ground, wearing oriental pantaloons and a sheer white blouse, her gaze vacant, for she is not looking at anything but is simply existing in her own self-containment.

The exhibition is interesting but rather uneven. There are some interesting loans but the show is filled out with indifferent works, the worst of which is the Picasso that has unaccountably been put on the cover of the catalogue. This picture at once reminded me of the famous anecdote reported by Arthur Koestler in The Act of Creation (1964): a dealer bought a painting signed “Picasso” and travelled to Cannes to show it to Picasso, whereupon the artist flatly declared it to be a fake.

“But cher maitre,” expostulated the dealer, “it so happens that I saw you with my own eyes working on this very picture several years ago.”

Picasso shrugged: “I often paint fakes.”

The last couple of rooms contain a few things of interest, including some pictures painted by Picasso after Matisse’s death, but too much that is slight or repetitious. The best things at the end are some of the book illustrations, including a charmingly erotic design by Matisse accompanying a rather naughty sonnet by Pierre de Ronsard, the most famous French poet of the 16th century. The poem is addressed to the navel — nombril — of his mistress, and those who paid attention during French at school may be able to understand the final line, although it is in fact the slightly more discreet version of the verse that was published in the 1578 edition of the poet’s work. The original was ton paradis, ou mon plaisir se niche.

Matisse & Picasso. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, until April 13