Comparing Picasso And Matisse's Paintings

To say the least, Modern art was born ugly. Even Ambroise Vollard blurted out: "it's the world of a madman". The relationship between Picasso and Matisse could be described in many different ways. Although they didn't appreciate each other's paintings, they sensed that a way to bring out each other's best abilities, was to challenge and stimulate each other. They provoked each other with the same titles, painting the same subjects etc. For example, Cezanne's The Bathers, Matisse's Bathers by the River, and Picasso's Three Bathers. In fact, they became like friends at a chess game. Challenging each other, daring one another, while still trusting the opponent to make a move. In such a way, that they became brothers in creating a style we today call modernism. Their choices though, really depended mostly "on their personalities, their

It is an idyllic scene of reclining nudes, embracing lovers and carefree dancers. The colors are flat, the figures sketched in, some drawn as sensuously as Ingres' nudes, others as boldly as Cézanne's bathers. Nothing like it had ever been painted, even by Matisse. Picasso understood this at once and took it as a challenge." (Picasso and Henri Matisse. (n.d.)) Cezanne also "painted brush stroke by brush stroke, integrating each mark, each color, with the marks and colors around it." (Smee, S. (2009, March 8)) Thus converting impressions into emotions through strokes, colors, etc. Of course this affected how Matisse looked for calm and clarity in a sort of way, with his own boldly colored fauvistic paintings. Cezanne's paintings were quite abstract for those periods that when Picasso mentioned and said: Cezanne's uncertainty is what interest us". He really meant it. it was how the patchwork composition of fragments seemed to lace together on a canvas before