Article: Two for the road: the prolonged and productive rivalry between Matisse and Picasso fills a major chapter in the history of 20th-century modernism. As a dual exhibition arrives in New York, Matisse's biographer speculates on his perpetual runner-up status in the popular ranking of the two avant-garde titans.

The last great confrontation of their lifetime between Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso took place in 1945 on the walls of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Matisse was 75 years old, Picasso 64. "I can just imagine the gallery with my pictures down one side and his on the other," Matisse wrote gloomily beforehand. "It'll be like being shut up with an epileptic. How solemn (if not stuffy--at any rate to some) I'm going to look alongside his pyrotechnics. Which is just what Rodin said of my work. Still, I'll have to go through with it.... I've always told myself justice will be done some day." (1)

Matisse was used to being wrong-footed in encounters with ...

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