"Matisse/Diebenkorn" At the Baltimore Museum of Art

As Pablo Picasso supposedly said, "Good artists copy; great artists steal." Whether he said it or not, the observation seems to account for his complex relationship with the painters he revered or felt threatened by, a list that includes Eugène Delacroix, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, and Diego Velázquez, among others, artists whose most celebrated images served Picasso as a springboard for reinvention, improvisation, and even parody. These days, it's probably necessary to say that Picasso's neat phrase has nothing to do with postmodernism's irony-laced appropriation, which treats the entire history of art as a grab bag from which things can be claimed randomly, to be replicated at will. Instead, the aphorism is a shorthand reminder that art is usually about—among many other things—other art. (The polymath critic/art historian/novelist André Malraux even maintained that artists become artists because they are more impressed, at a formative age, by works of art than by the actuality those works refer to.) For centuries, the efforts of even the most original, inventive painters and sculptors, including Picasso himself, signaled, deliberately or in spite of themselves, their admiration for other artists or revealed how much they had learned from their chosen ancestors. Sometimes the connection is easily recognizable; think of Edouard Manet's repeated versions of the execution of Maximilian I—intensely personal paintings, utterly characteristic of their author, but obviously filtered through his reverence for Francisco Goya's The Third of May, 1808. Sometimes, the work that served as a trigger persists as an overtone, evidence of a fruitful affinity that provides testimony to how artists look at art not of their own making. The hovering, transparent planes of Picasso's and Georges Braque's Cubist still lifes, for example, have their origins in Paul Cézanne's translation of his perceptions into disjunctive touches of paint, just as Helen Frankenthaler's fluid pools and stains of radiant color are departures from Jackson Pollock's pours. Both the unstable planes and the spreading floods offer hints of what Picasso and Braque gleaned from Cézanne and what Frankenthaler saw in Pollock. If we pay attention to these revelations, we can end up considering the work of both the generating artists and the painters or sculptors they influenced in new ways.

Case in point: the recent exhibition "Matisse/Diebenkorn," seen at the Baltimore Museum of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which focused on the varied responses, from the early 1950s through 1980, of an aesthetically ambitious American artist to the work of the French modernist master of eloquent, space-evoking shape and color. After seeing the show, we might forever think differently about both of its protagonists. An impressive selection of paintings and works on paper allowed us to discover similarities, connections, and differences between the works of the two men. The conversation was, of necessity, one sided. Henri Matisse (1869–1954) was almost certainly unaware of the work of the San Francisco-based Richard Diebenkorn (1922–1993), so the exhibition was essentially an attempt to see Matisse through Diebenkorn's eyes. We were encouraged to speculate about the possible sources of compositions and color relationships that, in another context, would have seemed wholly characteristic of Diebenkorn, which raised interesting questions. Were the connections we noted conscious homage or straightforward efforts to understand Matisse's achievement through emulation? Were they inadvertent signs of deep affinity and admiration? Did Matisse's example simply give his American "disciple" permission to explore a particular direction? Or was it all of the above?

That Diebenkorn found Matisse's art especially stimulating has always been evident to anyone who looked attentively at his work, but the relationship was made explicit by the exhibition's thoughtful selection of both artists' paintings and works on paper. In the installation at the Baltimore Museum of Art, Diebenkorn's scrupulous attention to Matisse was manifest, but so was his individuality. Seen together with a group of Matisse's searching, layered charcoal drawings of the figure, the generous, incisive strokes and pools of wash with...