Animated brawl between Picasso and Matisse debuts at Annecy festival

Students from the animation department of Gobelins L'École de L'Image in Paris have created a video animation imagining a physical fight between Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. The short film is set at the Lapin Agile, a Montmartre bar frequented by artists and immortalized by Picasso in a 1905 painting. It debuted at the International Animated Film Festival in Annecy (June 13–18, 2016) and has since circulated widely online. The animation dramatizes the famous rivalry between the two modern masters, who were introduced by Gertrude Stein in 1909. Matisse once told Stein that he and Picasso were "as different as the South Pole and the North Pole." Their competitive relationship, marked by mutual observation and aesthetic warfare, has been explored in exhibitions such as "Matisse and Picasso: A Gentle Rivalry" at the Kimbell Art Museum in Texas (1999) and "Matisse Picasso" at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (2003). The new animation offers a humorous, fictionalized take on their dynamic.