The Tate Modern exhibition which runs until 18 August will rank as the exhibition of the year if not the decade and is a "Must See". 60,000 have already booked and 5000 a day are booking to see the 131 masterpieces by the two artists arranged in close juxtaposition to show the intensely close artistic relationship they had to each other's work over half a century; a relationship that deeply influenced the artists themselves and provided the inspirational direction for 20th century Modernism.
The artists have appeared together just once before; a smaller exhibition mounted by the Victoria and Albert Museum in the immediate postwar days of 1945. It was an exhibition that was to have a deep impact on British artists returning to their easels after the war and upon those who taught art. This immeasurably bigger exhibition will surely have a similar impact upon the art world and upon our appreciation of these two artistic titans.
I do not profess to appreciate the literary work of Gertrude Stein. For me her more important place in history is as the person who introduced Matisse and Picasso to each other. We are told that on that occasion they swapped paintings and from that moment on worked in an almost symbiotic union masked under the guise of rivalry to push forward the outer limits of their artistic vision.
Matisse himself described this ying yang relationship and polarity. "I believe that the personality of the artist develops and asserts itself through the struggles it has to go through when it is pitted against another person," he said.
This exhibition of canvases and sculptures has been put together to highlight this artistic relationship, drawing on canvases loaned from French, Scandinavian, Russian and American museums. For Tate Modern's curator Elizabeth Cowling the opening of this exhibition valued at some $1.5 billion in insurance money is the culmination of eight years negotiation and planning and collaboration. It was not easy to persuade museums to relinquish such star exhibits for a 12 month absence from their walls.
Of the artists Ms Cowling says: "Nobody looked more carefully at Matisse's work than Picasso and no one looked more carefully at Picasso's work than Matisse.
