An unusual relationship: the final encounter of Picasso and Matisse

Picasso and Matisse renewed their relationship in 1946 as the aging Matisse approached death. Picasso, ordinarily contemptuous of others and indifferent to their needs, revealed a markedly different attitude toward Matisse, whom he admired and whose affection and approbation he sought. The roots of Picasso's attitude are traced to his morbid concern about bodily deterioration and fear of death. Matisse, apparently serene in his confrontation with approaching death, represented an ideal to Picasso, a hoped-for remedy for anxiety, a confident paternal representation so unlike his father. Freud's view of death, poetically expressed in his paper, "On Transience," is a model for contrasting Picasso's "revolt . . . against mourning" with Matisse's sense of symbolic immortality.