When Henri Met Pablo

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Visitors check out Matisse's 'Three Bathers With Turtle'

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Both men made art as a defense against anxiety. Picasso believed that by painting his demons he could subjugate them. Matisse took pains to project the image of an imperturbable bourgeois, but the realities of his life were more complicated. In a mid-life crisis solved the French way, he left his wife and family in Paris in 1917 for a new life in Nice with a personal harem of models. But Matisse dreaded the anarchic power of his desires. His sunlit rooms and elastic nudes are a bulwark against his fears of love and death. No less than Picasso, he made the canvas a defensive perimeter. His genius was to trim the battlements in the camouflage of paradise.

That's how this show works. In the dialogue between these two great artists, in their reciprocal affection, mutual treacheries and grudge matches on stretched canvas, lies a good part of the history of Modernism. So was Salmon right? Is it nearly impossible to admire both Picasso and Matisse? Don't believe it. No one will leave this show without loving them both. And the only people to be pitied are the ones who can't get in.