Picasso and Matisse in 1935

In 1935, after his first wife, Olga Khokhlova, left him because of the affair he was having with the French Marie-Thérèse Walter and (soon after) with Dora Maar, Picasso experienced a breakdown which caused him to turn painting down for a while and go straight for poetry instead. Writing, it appears, provided him with relief. All turned quickly into a flood of creative output not unusual to Picasso. He wrote a book-load of poems, experimented with words, gave word-crafting a good try.

Picasso's poetry edited by Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris
via www.exactchange.com

On the artistic side of things, there may be another explanation for Picasso’s withdrawal. As Gertrude Stein suggests in her famous monograph, he had decided to give up painting (and drawing too) after he’d been through almost eight years of search for artistic answers to the problem of colour. This is a period when “Picasso had the tendency to console himself with Matisse’s conception of colour,” which, however, made things worse. It isn’t clear how affected Picasso was by the change, although Stein conjectures that he was never fully content, in spite of rather enjoying the two years without responsibilities, when he dedicated his time to writing poetry in a café.

The last painting work of Picasso’s that year, Jeune Famme Endormie, is almost a foresight of the state of slumber in which his painting fell between 1935 and 1937.

Matisse paintings from 1935

So while estranged from painting, the year 1935 doesn’t seem to have been entirely unproductive for the Spaniard. However, the question I found myself asking is: what was Matisse doing at that time?

It turns out he was doing a lot. Of painting, that is. 1935 is the year when he produced the famous suite known as The Pink Nude (also as Large Reclining Nude), which made the world of art go mad with the idea of recording, in visual details, the progression of a work of art.

The 22 versions painted that year are regarded as an important stage of transition between Matisse’s earlier figurative works and the cut outs that will dominate the last years of his career. As in the case of Picasso, the model for this series was a woman close to artist: Lydia Delectorskaya, the Russian assistant who featured in many other Matisse paintings. She was not his mistress, but they seem to have been emotionally very connected.

In the same year 1935, we also find Matisse painting The Dream. The figure strikes a pose patently similar to that of Picasso’s Woman with Yellow Hair (1931). Which stands to show, once again, the extent to which the two artists emulated each other.

As a side note, Picasso himself had painted his own Dream three years earlier, using as a model his French mistress (then only seventeen years of age).

Picasso, The Dream (1932)
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Picasso, Woman with Yellow Hair (1931)
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Matisse, The Dream (1935)
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What 1935 meant to others

1935 did not stand still. This is the year when René Magritte executed the second painting bearing the title Human Condition – one of the many trompe l’oeil exrecises of the Belgian surrealist who made illusion into his patent. The other painting of the same title had been made by Magritte only two years earlier. A prolific year for him too, if we also consider The Portrait, his witty play on facial compositions.

Magritte, Human Condition II (1935)
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Magritte, Human Condition I (1933)
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And speaking of illusions, M.C. Escher too produced Hand With Reflecting Sphere, in the same year.

If we turn to a different side of art, one that is both avant-garde and Spanish, like Picasso’s, there’s Joan Miro’s Man and Woman in Front of a Pile of Excrements.

Miro, Man and Woman in Front of a Pile of Excrement (1935)
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Year: 1935. Miro, who also worked on some collages between 1935 and 1936, Metamorphose.

Painters who wrote

Picasso’s turn to poetry marked a cataclysmic interruption to his painting career, no doubt. One that lasted for only two years, but which managed to welcome poetry among his creative tendencies.

But then, of course, his poetry bypass is not that surprising. Artists dipping their creative fingers into the writing of poetry did exist before Picasso. Say Michelangelo (“Great beauty spreads a firestorm / across a thousand ardent wills”), say Salvador Dali (“Narcissus, / in his immobility, / absorbed by his reflection with the digestive slowness of a carnivorous plants, / becomes invisible”), say the true hybrids, like William Blake (“Ah Sunflower, weary of time, / who countest the steps of the sun”) or Dante Gabriel Rossetti (“At length the then of my long hope was now”).

Truth is, migration to and from poetry and to and from painting happens. No blame on anyone of those who did it. Picasso least of all.