Matisse and Picasso: Equals?

Matisse and Picasso were never equals.  Matisse was taking arrows for the avante- garde for many years before Picasso began to establish his reputation in Paris.  Matisse was the pioneer of Modern painting, the Davy Crockett, the mountain man of the early twentieth century generation of innovators in painting.  Given Picasso’s innate skittishness manifest in his abandonment of Cubism during the first world war due to its connection to things German (Kahnweiler-Picasso’s dealer was German) Picasso had included German signs in his work (KUB - bullion cubes),  it is unlikely that he would have ever transcended his Lautrec bravura  and soulful narrative tendencies. It was due to the bold innovations of Matisse’s Fauves that Picasso was pressured to conceive a commensurate response to Cezanne manifest as Cubism.  Remember, it was Gertrude Stein, who did not like Matisse because he would not kiss her ass at her little soirees which he avoided , who recorded and promulgated Matisse’s unfortunate remark about his only ambition being to create paintings that make hardworking bourgeoisie comfortable;  "Paintings like an easy chair".  Matisse made this off-hand remark in jest after being the wild child of Paris for a decade and at a time that his reputation as a leader of Parisian art circles was secure.    Picasso was one of a generation of  followers of Matisse not an equal.