We can appreciate the emotional sentiment of the Picasso work, which only superficial research reveals was inspired by a brothel in Barcelona. To an extent, Picasso offers us a dark perspective on either the subject or, as one might suggest based on the confrontational stance of the painting's subjects, the experience of visiting these women. Indeed, as these women look out from the canvas, presenting themselves with stoic expressionless faces, they invoke a sense for the viewer as being one in the brothel presented with a set of distinct but equally repugnant choices. The Matisse painting, by sharp contrast, is deeply inviting but never directly confronts the viewer. The entire scene is framed by a canopy of trees that suggests the viewer to be peering into a clearing from a distance. The voyeuristic sentiment is only further reinforced by the tendency of those who appear to be facing forward not to engage...

A woman who is shown sunning herself toward the viewer, shows no sense of awareness that she is being seen, or at least establishes no connection with the viewer's gaze. Two figures to the left also appear to be facing forward, but their features are absent, suggesting the Matisse intended to impose some shadowy distance on these figures. This reinforces the sense that we are on the outside looking in. Naturally, we may draw any number of emotional abstractions from the idea that we have been excluded from a subject called the Joy of Life and yet invited into so disturbing a subject as Les Demoiselles D'Avignon.
Most essentially, we can see that the radical departures which were occurring during this period of modernist sentiment would allow not just for a growing number of expressive forms, but would also promote an expanding palette for the conveyance of emotional experience.