the wonderful book I’m reading on this trip

Jack Flam, Matisse and Picasso: The Story of Their Rivalry and Friendship.

Great work is not generated in a vacuum, but is usually provoked by other great work. When two people producing great work happen to know each other personally, the relationship is bound to be especially dynamic and ambiguous. So it was with Matisse and Picasso; the subtitle is right to speak of both “friendship and rivalry.” There were occasionally some catty remarks from one of them about the other, but at the end of the day, each recognized the other as his primary rival.

Flam is primarily a Matisse specialist. He does an excellent job of speaking not only in general terms, but also of showing how specific paintings by Matisse or Picasso provoked the next specific painting by the other a few months later. In such cases a photograph of the paintings in question is included in the book, and the evidence is overwhelming.

They were a strange pair of rivals. Matisse was 12 years older. But since Matisse started painting very late after an abortive attempt to study law, while Picasso was a boy wonder of art, they actually started painting at right around the same time despite the 12-year age difference. And even though Matisse was the late bloomer of the two, at the time of their meeting it was Matisse who was much the more avant garde. For several decades Picasso then eclipsed Matisse, who was viewed by many as pretty but superficial, or at best as a great artist out of step with the main currents of his time. But by the 1940’s and 1950’s, shortly before Matisse’s death, he seems to have eclipsed Picasso again. It’s a remarkable tale of back-and-forth competition, response, and innovation.

There’s an interesting note here for American intellectual history as well– the Matisse/Picasso friendship and rivalry was mediated by none other than Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo. Their home in Paris is where Matisse and Picasso most often saw each other’s latest works, since the Steins bought generously in support of both painters. (The show earlier this year at the Grand Palais gathered most of these works.)

I try to imagine how things might have been if Heidegger and Whitehead had been able to read, appreciate, and understand one another. This would be an interesting parallel to the Matisse/Picasso drama. Whitehead was a lot older than Heidegger, and a late bloomer when it comes to philosophy (as opposed to Whitehead’s talents in other fields). Whitehead like Matisse was more bourgeois and reserved; Heidegger like Picasso was a fiery and scabrous womanizer. Heidegger and Whitehead were both also peaking philosophically in the late 1920’s.

What if they had been able to recognize the quality of each other’s work and respond to it with a series of one-upping masterpieces, just like Matisse and Picasso? No such case comes to mind from the history of philosophy.

One of these days I want to get around to making a systematic case for counterfactual history of philosophy, and this would be one of the cases I would try: imagine Heidegger and Whitehead meeting in about 1922 and really being fascinated by each other, then triggering a series of modifications in each other’s positions over the course of 12-15 years. It’s unlikely, but not impossible. The reality is, they probably wouldn’t have understood each other all that well.

In popular music, the great case is surely the Beach Boys and the Beatles. The Beatles’ “Rubber Soul” left a huge impression on the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson (a troubled genius, but still a genius). That led to their album Pet Sounds, which devastated Paul McCartney until he was able to one-up it with Sgt. Pepper. The Beach Boys might have been able to counter-strike (plans were afoot) if not for Wilson’s deeper descent into mental illness.