Although they are both credited with inventing cubism, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque spent most of their lives arguing over top billing. Henri Matisse, who gave cubism its name when he derided Braque as a painter of “little cubes”, feuded with Picasso from the day they were introduced by Gertrude Stein in 1906. For a long time, museums have mounted shows pairing Picasso with both artists, and many others, mainly because his name sells tickets, but also because of his ability to absorb new ideas and make them his own. Another of Picasso’s frenemies, Diego Rivera, shares top billing on Lacma’s winter show, Picasso and Rivera: Conversations Across Time, paralleling the European modern master with Mexico’s most revered muralist.

Co-curated by Lacma CEO Michael Govan and Diana Magaloni, deputy director and director of the museum’s program for the art of the ancient Americas, the new show features more than 100 paintings and prints by both artists, as well as Iberian, Greco-Roman and Aztec objects illustrating separate pursuits of modernism first through cubism, followed by a return to the classics.

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Born only five years apart, Picasso and Rivera demonstrated prodigious talent from an early age. After only eight months at Spain’s most prestigious San Fernando Royal Academy, Picasso protested the rigidity of instruction by dropping out and moving to Paris. Rivera enrolled at the same school in 1907 and also moved to Paris in subsequent years, but it wasn’t until early 1914 that the two artists met and formed a fast friendship based on overlapping esthetic values and a common tongue. “Rivera says, ‘Picasso was painting The Poet and I came back and painted The Sailor.’ Then the story goes around again and he says, ‘Picasso complimented my Sailor at lunch but I see he has seven paintings.’ So (it’s clear) they’re working together,” Magaloni concludes after reading Rivera’s letters.

A falling out occurred in August 1915, when Rivera accused Picasso of borrowing a technique for his composition Man Seated in Shrubbery that the former had used in his painting Zapatista Landscape. “He did steal, because he stole from everyone. Picasso had friendships and fallings out all the time, as all those artists did,” Govan says of the dispute. “The operating assumption is Rivera is five years younger, Rivera’s the follower. Picasso’s the inventor and leader. So this is just a twist on that story.”

Upon completion, Picasso’s painting was given a new title, Seated Man, after the artist painted over much of the work that used Rivera’s technique. Rivera was later ostracized by the cubists following an argument with poet Pierre Reverdy at a dinner hosted by the artist’s dealer, Leonce Rosenberg, who also represented Picasso.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Diego Rivera Creation of the Universe (La creación del universo), Illustration for Popol Vuh, 1931 Photograph: © 2016 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Correspondence between Rivera and Picasso ended, but parallels in their work persisted even after Rivera returned to Mexico in 1921. Following the turmoil of the Mexican revolution on one side of the Atlantic and the first world war on the other, artists became less concerned with forging new paths, following what Jean Cocteau called le rappel a l’ordre (a return to order).

“What holds it together when everything’s broken? Your traditions,” is how Magaloni explains the esthetic shift of the time. In the case of Picasso, he had been exploring ancient art in modernist works as early as his 1906 self-portrait referencing an Iberian bas-relief sculpture, Man Attacked by a Lion. After the war he again reverted to the classics with paintings such as 1923’s Woman in Blue Veil, a Greek figure in a typical mourning veil, commenting on the war’s destructive impact on Europe. The Minotaur became a fixture in a series of etchings made from 1930-1937 known as the Vollard Suite, and in the same period he illustrated an edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

“There’s still a lot of rhetoric about modernism and throwing away the past that we use in art history and popular culture,” says Govan. “But so much of Picasso’s career is looking at classical art and ancient themes. The idea is to burst the cliches of modernity.”

Rivera did exactly that by turning to indigenous pre-Columbian works to comment on his homeland’s emergence in the modern age, and to promote pan-Americanism inspired by leftist ideas of the era. Indigenous figures became a hallmark of paintings such as Flower Day (1925) and Frida’s Friend (1931), while the Aztec goddess of the Earth, Coatlicue, emerged as a recurring figure in his later murals. Based on a 9-foot tall, 3-ton monolith, Coatlicue turns up as part of the machinery in an auto factory in 1933’s Detroit Industry. In 1939’s Pan American Unity: The Marriage of the Artistic Expression of the North and South of this Continent, Coatlicue is surrounded by Rivera’s wife, Frida Kahlo, peasants and the Founding Fathers, as well as Hitler and Stalin.

No doubt Rivera’s murals were an inspiration for Picasso’s epic canvas, Guernica, a nightmarish response to the 1937 bombing of the Basque town by Nazis. “You know he’s looking at Mexican muralists,” offers Govan. “So when he has to do something political, he’s drawing on that notion.”

While classic Greek and Roman works have long been an influence on western art, indigenous American art was new terrain for modernism. Although the pairing of Picasso and Rivera is generally considered one of mentor and mentee, the new show demonstrates that the truth is hardly that simple. “What he did was help re-level the lopsidedness of our interest in ancient classical Greece or Rome versus ancient Meso-America,” says Govan about Rivera’s often overlooked contribution to the equation. “I think there is bias. I won’t call it racism, but it’s a strong bias.”

Lacma means to help further correct that bias next year with Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, which will focus on Latino and Latin American art in concurrent shows among more than 70 museums and art institutions throughout southern California. “We’re in California, and Latin America and Asia feel closer. It’s a flatter playing field,” Govan says about the museum’s mission. “I think part of the point of this museum is to re-level, rebalance and keep rethinking these things.”

Picasso and Rivera: Conversations Across Time – Los Angeles County Museum of Art, through 7 May 2017.