107-054 Matisse and Picasso

Usually 12.5 points of first year art history, see Prerequisites, or first year European studies, see Prerequisites.

This subject forms an investigation of the two key figures of 20th century French art through the rich recent scholarship. Emerging as artists around 1900 and each active into old age, Matisse and Picasso between them instigated or participated in Fauvism, Cubism, collage, new Classicism, Surrealism and papier découpé; both made sculpture, ceramics and artists' books as well as painting and graphics. Comparisons of the artists' personae and repeated visual interactions will accompany broader issues such as the academic sources of radical art, the notion of the avant-garde, expression and the body, and the significations of abstraction.