Pablo Matisse, A servant of two masters.

Pablo Picasso famously said, “Good artists copy. Great artists steal.”

Not wishing to disappoint, I have taken the name Pablo Matisse.

As an artist who takes the style and composition of recognizable work, and makes them in my own hand, I want you to recognize the artists I am appropriating. And who is more recognizable than Matisse and Picasso? While the motifs of each artist seem familiar, something doesn’t quite add up when you look at my paintings. Are they copies of Matisse and Picasso, or are they original Pablo Matisse’s? It poses the question, what is the experience of a work of art? Am I changing the meaning of the work by juxtaposing elements in a new context?

My motivation is less about challenging our notion of originality and more about my nostalgia for modernism on a personal level. Ironic, since the modernists sought to free themselves from artistic tradition, and here I am paying an homage to traditional favorites, whom some may argue, are so familiar as to have become cliches in the cultural lexicon, consequences of having created masterpiece after masterpiece, thereby dominating the the world of 20th century art.

If Picasso and Matisse perpetuated a "Cult of the New" by deconstructing art and breaking with realist tradition, they were dramatically different in how their personalities influenced the way they wished people to perceive their art. Whereas Matisse wanted his art to be a calming influence “like a good armchair”, Picasso insisted that art should never be polite.

Picasso, the atheist, revolutionary and consummate self-promoter, did not think art should be explained, and preferred to make short, pithy statements about his art and process. He derived his inspiration from the internal –abstracting form as if to mirror his tortuous thought processes ignited by the flames of his many love interests.

While Picasso re-ordered reality, Matisse simplified it. Matisse was gentle, mature, academic, apolitical, conservative in habit and appearance, and found his inspiration in natural forms and working directly with models. 

Both their styles changed at pivotal times, pushing the boundaries of art, and calling into question the way we see the world. Matisse was leader of the Fauves, a movement that was characterized by bold, flat uses of color and expressive brushwork which welcomed the viewer to reconnect with a primitive state of innocence. Picasso was leader of the Cubists, pushing the viewer away with figural distortion of primitive forms. As seen through Picasso’s eyes it was what he considered an accurate depiction of a mental image, or what the ordinary viewer considers looking at an object from several different angles.

Picasso stole from Matisse every chance he got, who remarked that Picasso was “like a bandit lurking in the ambush”. Picasso invented Collage but Matisse galvanized it with his cut-outs. Both stole from Cezanne who used planes of color and small brushstrokes to form complex spaces. And both Picasso and Matisse were said to have remarked “Cezanne is the father of us all.”

Parroting the many styles of each artist, I found a way to blend them in a style of my own. Am I creating something of artistic merit by aping the stylistic genius of arguably two of the 20th Century's greatest artists? Clearly, it is a difference of intention. My intention is to pay homage to Matisse and Picasso by mashing up their styles and forcing their aesthetic choices to converge on the picture plane. Simple meets complex, organic meets geometric, vibrant meets subdued, decorative meets distorted, Matisse meets Picasso.

Nice to meet you. - Pablo Matisse.