Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. They were the finest artists of their time. But the story that underlies their friendship is the story of modern art.
The brushes that brought us Le Bonheur de Vivre and Les Desmoiselles D'Avignon, "show two painters drawing the highest levels of inpiration from each other, but the subtext was a duel, two collosi of the avant garde, two spite-filled cadres of art lovers, two banks of the Seine, the Frenchman and the Spaniard.
What one man once called "the gentle rivalry" may have been more or less than that, but every opportunity for retrospective shows us that as art lovers, we are the ones who benefit by the tangled friedship of the two. Potters, painters, printmakers, and pals. Two lovers of the women of Algiers, Matisse and Picasso.
