Matisse & Picasso

Summer is blockbuster season for our biggest art galleries, but even by these high standards, Canberra's National Gallery of Australia is on to a winner. Matisse & Picasso traces one of the most compelling and turbulent friendships in modern art history. Both artists felt the other was their only true competition, and throughout their lives, each used the other to spur them on to greater creative heights. Bringing together more than 200 paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, books and costumes from 40 international collections including the Musée Picasso, Tate London and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the exhibition begins with Picasso’s arrival in Paris and his first meeting with the older and respected Matisse, and traces their relationship from curiosity to competition and finally, respect. “Nobody ever looked at Matisse’s work as thoroughly as I did. And he at mine,” Picasso said upon his friend’s death in 1954.