Picasso, Matisse, and Rivera: Three Modern Art Masters

Introduction: Three Artists, Three Worlds

Life placed Picasso, Matisse, and Rivera at three very different starting points. Of the three, Picasso is the most renowned. His full name was a remarkable litany: Pablo — or more formally, Pablo Diego José Santiago Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno Crispín Crispiniano de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz Blasco y Picasso López. He was born in 1881 in Málaga, Spain, and is considered, along with Georges Braque, one of the fathers of Cubism.

One particular incident, an earthquake in Málaga in 1884 when Picasso was three years old, left a profound emotional impression. His family fled their home and took shelter in a cave, where his sister was subsequently born. Yet this chaotic experience did not produce lasting psychological damage; his parents provided him with empathy, compassion, protection, and a sense of safety throughout (Miller, Childhood Trauma).

That feeling of security allowed Picasso to channel his early fears creatively. His monumental painting Guernica is widely regarded as a reflection of what the child Picasso may have witnessed during that earthquake — dying people, dying horses, and the screams of small children heard as his family walked the long distance to shelter. The painting is formally described as a depiction of the German bombing of Guernica, Spain, and for most viewers it stands as an indictment of the inhumanity, brutality, and hopelessness of war. It was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and returned to Spain only in 1981, in accordance with Picasso's own stipulation that it should not be sent to Spain until democracy was restored there. Since 1992 it has been displayed at the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid (Pablo Picasso: Wikipedia).

Picasso attended numerous art schools during his childhood, partly because his father taught at several of them. He never completed a full course of study at any institution, leaving the Royal Academy of San Fernando in Madrid in under a year (Pablo Picasso: Wikipedia).

Education and Early Development

Henri Matisse was born in France in 1869 at Cateau-Cambrésis. His father was a seed merchant, and Matisse had no early exposure to art. He initially pursued law and only turned to painting when illness forced him to rest at home. After recovering, he changed course entirely and eventually enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts, though he was unable to complete his studies there either, owing to conflicts with his teachers (Henri Matisse).

The third artist, Diego Rivera, was Mexican, and his art reflects events he knew intimately — the Mexican Civil War, World War I, and World War II. His specialty was mural painting, which distinguished him from the other two. He began drawing at the age of two and enrolled at the San Carlos Academy of Fine Arts in Mexico City when he was ten. By 1907, he had been awarded a grant to travel to France and Spain to study art. He returned briefly to Mexico in 1910, then went back to France, where he remained for fourteen years. During this extended stay, he immersed himself in the work of Henri Matisse, Paul Gauguin, Paul Cézanne, and other artists, searching for a new approach to painting (Diego Rivera: harcourtschool.com).

All three artists were alive during the World Wars, yet their political responses differed considerably. Picasso maintained a position of neutrality during both World Wars and the Spanish Civil War, declining to fight for any side. Many of his contemporaries, including Braque, attributed this to cowardice. Nevertheless, Picasso expressed his opposition to Franco and fascism through his art and through the decision to withhold Guernica from Spain. He did not, however, take up arms (Pablo Picasso: Wikipedia).

Political Views and the World Wars

For a brief period, Picasso joined the French Communist Party and attended an international peace conference in Poland. His enthusiasm for the party cooled, however, after a portrait he painted of Stalin was judged by party officials to be insufficiently realistic (Pablo Picasso).

Rivera, by contrast, wore his political convictions overtly in his murals. His large-scale public paintings depicted the struggles of Mexican farmers and workers and engaged directly with the political history of Mexico, including the Mexican Revolution and its aftermath.

Picasso believed that painting was fundamental to being an artist. He also produced sculptures in ceramic and bronze and wrote poetry, but painting remained his central medium (Pablo Picasso: Wikipedia). The most significant visual style he created was Cubism, developed between 1907 and 1914. This style concentrated on the two-dimensional surface of a picture and deliberately rejected the traditional techniques of perspective, foreshortening, modeling, and chiaroscuro. It also rejected the theory that art should imitate nature. Rather than copying form, texture, color, and space, Cubist painters proposed new pictorial realities. The name itself arose from remarks by Henri Matisse and the critic Louis Vauxcelles, who in 1908 described a painting by Braque as consisting only of cubes (Cubism, cubists: Picasso and Braque).

Picasso and Cubism: Style and Evolution

A second phase, known as Synthetic Cubism, began after 1912. Work from this period emphasizes the combination — or synthesis — of pictorial elements. Common subjects include newspapers and tobacco wrappers, as well as musical instruments such as the guitar and violin.

Toward the end of his career, from 1968 through 1971, Picasso's output became markedly more colorful, producing a large number of paintings and copperplate engravings. After his death, this late body of work was recognized as a precursor to Neo-Expressionism (Pablo Picasso: Wikipedia).

Matisse also worked within a Cubist idiom between 1906 and 1917, though he is more closely associated with Fauvism, a style related to Impressionism but distinguished by the use of vivid, non-naturalistic color. He joined Picasso in an exhibition at the Paul Guillaume Gallery in Paris in 1918 and won first prize at the Carnegie International Exhibition in 1927 (Henri Matisse). Although Matisse admired Picasso's work and the two ultimately became friends, their styles were never the same (Diego Rivera: pbs.org).