Focus on Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and explain the Rivalry with Matisse.
The Salon d'Automne of 1905 brought notoriety and attention to the works of Henri Matisse and the Les Fauves group. The latter gained their name after critic Louis Vauxcelles described their work with the phrase "Donatello chez les fauves" ("Donatello among the wild beasts"), contrasting the paintings with a Renaissance-type sculpture that shared the room with them. Henri Rousseau (1844–1910), an artist whom Picasso knew and admired and who was not a Fauve, had his large jungle scene The Hungry Lion Throws Itself on the Antelope also hanging near the works by Matisse and which may have had an influence on the particular sarcastic term used in the press. Vauxcelles' comment was printed on 17 October 1905 in the daily newspaper Gil Blas, and passed into popular usage.Although the pictures were widely derided—"A pot of paint has been flung in the face of the public", declared the critic Camille Mauclair (1872–1945)—they also attracted some favorable attention. The painting that was singled out for the most attacks was Matisse's Woman with a Hat; the purchase of this work by Gertrude and Leo Stein had a very positive effect on Matisse, who was suffering demoralization from the bad reception of his work.
Matisse's notoriety and preeminence as the leader of the new movement in modern painting continued to build throughout 1906 and 1907, and Matisse attracted a following of artists including Georges Braque (1880–1963), André Derain (1880–1954), Maurice de Vlaminck (1876–1958). Picasso's work had passed through his Blue period and his Rose period and while he had a considerable following his reputation was tame in comparison to his rival Matisse. The larger theme of Matisse's influential Le bonheur de vivre, an exploration of  "The Golden Age", evokes the historic "Ages of Man" theme and the potentials of a provocative new age that the twentieth century era offered. An equally bold, similarly themed painting titled The Golden Age, completed by Derain in 1905, shows the transfer of human ages in an even more direct way.Matisse and Derain shocked the French public again at the March 1907 Société des Artistes Indépendants when Matisse exhibited his painting Blue Nude  and Derain contributed The Bathers. Both paintings evoke ideas of human origins (world beginnings,  evolution) an increasingly important theme in Paris at this time. The Blue Nude was one of the paintings that would later create an international sensation at the Armory Show of 1913 in New York City.From October 1906 when he began preparatory work for Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, until its completion in March 1907, Picasso was vying with Matisse to be perceived as the leader of Modern painting. Upon its completion the shock and the impact of the painting propelled Picasso into the center of controversy and all but knocked Matisse and Fauvism off the map, virtually ending the movement by the following year. In 1907 Picasso joined the art gallery that had recently been opened in Paris by Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (1884–1979). Kahnweiler was a German art historian and collector who became one of the premier French art dealers of the 20th century. He became prominent in Paris beginning in 1907 for being among the first champions of Picasso, and especially his painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Before 1910 Picasso was already being recognized as one of the important leaders of Modern art alongside Henri Matisse, who had been the undisputed leader of Fauvism and who was more than ten years older than he, and his contemporaries the Fauvist André Derain and the former Fauvist and fellow Cubist, Georges Braque.In his 1992 essay Reflections on Matisse, the art critic Hilton Kramer wrote,After the impact of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, however, Matisse was never again mistaken for an avant-garde incendiary. With the bizarre painting that appalled and electrified the cognoscenti, which understood the Les Demoiselles was at once a response to Matisse's Le bonheur de vivre (1905–1906) and an assault upon the tradition from which it derived, Picasso effectively appropriated the role of avant-garde wild beast—a role that, as far as public opinion was concerned, he was never to relinquish.
Kramer goes on to say,Whereas Matisse had drawn upon a long tradition of European painting—from Giorgione, Poussin, and Watteau to Ingres, Cézanne, and Gauguin—to create a modern version of a pastoral paradise in Le bonheur de vivre, Picasso had turned to an alien tradition of primitive art to create in Les Demoiselles a netherworld of strange gods and violent emotions. As between the mythological nymphs of Le bonheur de vivre and the grotesque effigies of Les Demoiselles, there was no question as to which was the more shocking or more intended to be shocking. Picasso had unleashed a vein of feeling that was to have immense consequences for the art and culture of the modern era while Matisse's ambition came to seem, as he said in his Notes of a Painter, more limited—limited that is, to the realm of aesthetic pleasure. There was thus opened up, in the very first decade of the century and in the work of its two greatest artists, the chasm that has continued to divide the art of the modern era down to our own time.
Woman with a Hat Armory Show of 1913 Poussin Donatello art dealer Camille Mauclair Cubist The Hungry Lion Throws Itself on the Antelope André Derain Société des Artistes Indépendants sarcastic Henri Rousseau Henri Matisse Watteau Les Fauves fr Picasso cognoscenti Georges Braque Louis Vauxcelles primitive art Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler Cézanne New York City Derain Leo Stein Fauvist Giorgione Braque Hilton Kramer Renaissance Leo avant-garde Fauvism Maurice de Vlaminck Salon d'Automne October Blue Nude Rose period Gauguin Gil Blas Armory Show Le bonheur de vivre The Bathers Ingres jungle Blue period Gertrude