Matisse and Picasso on Jackson Pollock

Here’s my other favorite passage just read on the flight from Gilot’s book (though I’m annoyed to discover that 8 pages from late in the book are missing from my copy, and will have to write to Anchor for a replacement).

Matisse and Picasso met at Matisse’s home and looked at one of the first catalogs of Jackson Pollock’s paintings to come from New York. Gilot was present and recorded the highlights of their conversation.

For those who didn’t know it already, Picasso’s respect for Matisse was profound. He viewed him with admiration, and the 12-year age gap softened Picasso’s usual tendency to be hyper-competitive with all of his friends, including Braque. (Though despite the 12-year age gap, Matisse and Picasso oddly seem to have begun painting in exactly the same year: Picasso at age 8, Matisse as a late bloomer at age 20.)

Matisse on Jackson Pollock: “I have the impression that I’m incapable of judging painting like that, for the simple reason that one is always unable to judge fairly what follows one’s own work. One can judge what has happened before and what comes along at the same time. And even among those who follow, when a painter hasn’t completely forgotten me I understand him a little bit, even though he goes beyond me. But when he gets to the point where he no longer makes any reference to what for me is painting, I can no longer understand him. I can’t judge him either. It’s completely over my head.”

Picasso in response: “I don’t agree with you at all. And I don’t care whether I’m in a good position to judge what comes after me. I’m against that sort of stuff. As far as these new painters are concerned, I think it is a mistake to let oneself go completely and lose oneself in the gesture. Giving oneself up entirely to the action of painting [i.e., Pollock]– there’s something in that which displeases me enormously. It’s not at all that I hold to a rational conception of painting –I have nothing in common, for example, with a man like Poussin– but in any case the unconscious is so strong in us that it expresses itself in one fashion or another… Whatever we may do, it expresses itself in spite of us. So why should we deliberately hand ourselves over to it? During the surrealist period, everyone was doing automatic writing. That was a bit of a joke, at least in part, because when you want to be completely automatic, you never can be. There’s always a moment when you ‘arrange’ things just a little. Even the surrealists’ automatic texts were sometimes corrected. Therefore, since there’s no such thing as complete automatism, why not admit frankly that one is making use of all that substratum of the unconscious but keeping one’s hand on it?”