[Illustration: PICASSO (_Collection Paul Rosenberg_)]

The names go together, as do those of Shelley and Keats or Fortnum and
Mason. Even to people who seldom or never look seriously at a picture
they have stood, these ten years, as symbols of modernity. They are
pre-eminent; and for this there is reason. Matisse and Picasso are the
two immediate heirs to Cézanne. They are in the direct line; and through
one of them a great part of the younger generation comes at its share of
the patrimony. To their contemporaries they owe nothing: they came into
the legacy and had to make what they could of it. They are the elder
brothers of the movement, a fact which the movement occasionally resents
by treating them as though they were its elder sisters.

Even to each other they owe nothing. Matisse, to be sure, swept for one
moment out of his course by the overwhelming significance of Picasso's
early abstract work, himself made a move in that direction. But this
adventure he quickly, and wisely, abandoned; the problems of Cubism
could have helped him nothing to materialize his peculiar sensibility.
And this sensibility--this peculiar emotional reaction to what he
sees--is his great gift. No one ever felt for the visible universe just
what Matisse feels; or, if one did, he could not create an equivalent.
Because, in addition to this magic power of creation, Matisse has been
blest with extraordinary sensibility both of reaction and touch, he is
a great artist; because he trusts to it entirely he is not what for a
moment apparently he wished to be--a _chef d'école_.

Picasso, on the other hand, who never tried to be anything of the sort,
is the paramount influence in modern painting--subject, of course, to
the supreme influence of Cézanne. All the world over are students and