The Art of Rivalry: Four Friendships, Betrayals, and Breakthroughs in Modern Art

This book is both art criticism and literature, with an admixture of biography. I was carried away by the virtuosity of the prose. The artists and the relationships Sebastian Smee writes about come alive in these pages.The theme of challenging friendships among the greats is an inspired vehicle for discussing the new philosophies of art that emerged in the era of modernism. These artists had to think their way out of the conventions of traditional Western art. The more they strayed from the beaten path, the more they were reviled -- and the more they needed sympathy from somewhere. Only a fellow artist had a hope of understanding.Friendships between these avant-garde artists were critical to their survival, and with friendship came envy and competition. To progress, they had to learn from each other and at the same time escape dominance by the other. Uniqueness was the goal in this new era of artistic breakthroughs.Smee's theme also takes us into the realm of the passions. He chronicles Freud's amorous complications, Bacon's monumental masochism, Degas' neurotic bachelorhood, Manet's secretive marriage, Picasso's unsavory interest in very young girls, etc. This makes for juicy reading. Even Matisse's staunch respectability has some slippery psychodynamics.The reader can pick his/her favorites to read about, thanks to the organization of the book. I confess I did not read the last section on Pollock and de Kooning, but only because I don't like them. But I read everything else and found it riveting.

I am only half way through this book, and if it weren't for the fact I can't read nonstop, I would've finished it by now. This fascinating history covers the lives of four pairs of friendships in the art world, and how each friend influenced the other: Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon (not the writer Bacon); Edouard Manet and Edgar Degas; Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso; and last, Jackson Pollock and William de Kooning.The first friendship discussed is Freud and Francis Bacon. Freud's portrait disappeared in 1988, and hasn't been seen since. Both men had numerous friends, lovers, and enemies. Could one of them have taken it.The second friendship revealed is Degas and Manet. Some time after Degas painted Manet and his wife in their home--Manet seated as his wife played the piano--Manet slashed away about 20% of the right side of the painting, destroying the piece. Sometime later, Degas reclaimed it, patched it with another piece of paper, and had meant to recreate it.I know you might want me to discuss more of this tome, but I don't want to spoil the surprises hidden between the covers! I hope you find this tome as fascinating as I do!

This book was written really well, and most interesting! Right out of the gate it grabbed me. I never knew there was a Degas that Manet messed up, and I felt like I was on the train privy to Sebastian Smee's thoughts about the expectation of seeing a work of art. I never knew much about Bacon and Freud. I think I enjoyed the De Kooning/Pollack portion the best. I found the whole thing very interesting though, the angst involved in trying to push the envelope, and the crushing criticism over the new. To me, you either like it or you don't. You can have a DeKooing that's a woman big and crazy, but then the colors might make you want to eat it, they are so sumptuous. Pollack more interests me from his bad boy brawler personality more than his drip paintings. I found it interesting to read about his family background. Picasso, there is much of his work that gets me. I never ever cared for Les Demoiselles, but then when I stood in front of Seated Bather at MOMA it took my breath away. I LOVE Matisse's work. Degas isn't necessarily my thing, but you can't get away from how great he was. It was interesting his relationship with Manet since he seemed to have a large personality and Degas, he seemed like a real curmudgeon, a drag to be around almost. I thought the writing was fluid, and I enjoyed Smee's opinions, and his vocabulary. I have an extensive art book collection which I pore over from time to time, but with that, I still knew very little about the artists lives, and now, at least as far as these 8 artists go, I feel much better informed!

A sharp, brilliantly researched and moving portrait of as strange a collection of artistic geniuses as have ever improved or insulted the earth. The old master Robert Hughes would be delighted and, knowing the author’s background, proud. Superb.

This book was tremendously interesting. I knew of all of these artists-some better than others, but was unaware of these intimate friendships & how these relationships made the artists' work so much better. Really making me wish I had my own frienemy - what would it do for my art? But alas, all of these relationships were fraught with hard core drama & I'm just not a drama queen. This book I think has changed the way I will look at these artists' work as well, given me a deeper perspective.

What did I like ? All the backdoor gossip - I have not given, much thought to the creation of art work, just lavished my attention on the finished work. By comparing an artist to one of his contemporaries/friend - their impact on eachother, their reaction to the work of the other- the sometimes painful process of self- expression - and the rise and fallof their careers - this book deepens my respect and appreciation . A notable exception would be Jackson Pollack - butI never cared for his work anyway. A great read if you care about art.

While this book is well-written, it didn’t seem to hold together. I never did get a sense of what the author was after or why he selected these particular artists to pair. The stories are interesting, to be sure, but it all seemed a little contrived. Even with extensive familiarity with these artists, it was a bit of a stretch. However, worth reading mostly for placing the artists in their respective eras.

This is not a book I would normally read. I learned a lot of about the personal lives of these artists and some of their motivation behind their art.

The book examines the friendships and rivalries between four pairs of 19th and 20th century artists (in the following non-chronological order): Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon, Edouard Manet and Edgar Degas, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. My review is perhaps too long, but, concentrating as it does exclusively on the relationship between these artists, it deals with only one part of this superb book, which brings the artists’ personalities vividly before us, is full of other incidents in their lives and has perceptive things to say about the climate in which they worked.Freud and Bacon met for the first time in 1945, when Freud was 22 and Bacon 35. They took to each other immediately. They were both wild, led rackety lives and were socially undisciplined, Freud’s paintings were at that time very precise, controlled and result of the closest scrutiny; Bacon’s the very opposite: impulsive and daring; and Freud was fascinated by it (and by Bacon’s extrovert personality). Bacon, for his part, admired Freud’s draftsmanship, though probably indifferent to his friend’s work. They made portraits of each other. Freud’s portraits of his sitters often took weeks; Bacon’s distorted portraits were mostly dashed off in an intense spurt from memory or from photographs. Bacon was, at that time, much better known and very much better off than Freud, who became financially dependent on him until his own marriage in 1953 to his second wife, Lady Caroline Blackwood of the Guinness family. The relationship between Freud and Bacon began to fray as Freud observed Bacon’s masochistic infatuation with and dependence on one of his lovers, the violent Peter Lacy; Bacon resented one of Freud’s intervention in 1952, and made more negative comments on Freud’s style. Their close friendship came to an end (though they still socialized on and off for the next twenty years or so and they even worked on each other’s portraits. And Bacon’s work contributed to the changes in Freud’s later style, when Freud abandoned precise linear draftsmanship for an equally intensely observed but now powerful impasto and for the three-dimensionality of heavy bodies. There is now a ruthlessness about his depiction of flesh which some critics have called “cruel”, which is also a charge made against Bacon. Freud now became really successful and prosperous, and perhaps Bacon’s resentment of this brought about their final falling out in the early 1970s. Smee has written four books on Freud, which may account for this chapter to be the best and least speculative of the four. It is superb in its analysis of the personalities and works of both men.Manet and Degas, both in their late twenties with Degas the younger by about three years, first met in 1861. Manet was had a relaxed and sociable personality, Degas an austere, puritanical and somewhat tortured one. Manet seemed happily married; Degas, though moved by female beauty, was a natural bachelor. Manet was already a fluent painter of “real life” subjects (as distinct from the allegorical, historical or mythological subjects that were favoured by the establishment of the Salon), whereas Degas was struggling to find a path between Ingres and Delacroix, the revered senior artists representing Neo-Classicism and Romanticism respectively. Manet persuaded him to abandon this for painting “real life”. The two men became close friends, but Degas was anxious to be his own man and not merely an acolyte of Manet’s. Smee argues that the difference that appeared between the two men was that Manet was interested in external appearances and paid little attention to expressing characters through faces (true, I think of Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe, but surely not of Olympia? And Smee himself writes about Manet’s interest in the face of Berthe Morisot with whom he was for a while bewitched), whereas Degas looked for an inner truth in the people he painted and that this would best be captured if he caught them unawares. Degas was good at conveying tensions in a marriage. In 1869, during the period when Manet was known to be pursuing Berthe Morisot, he painted a picture of Manet and his wife Suzanne. He showed Manet on a sofa listening to Suzanne playing the piano, and painting conveyed a distance between them (partly caused also by the fact that Manet was not very interested in music). Degas presented the picture to the couple; but when he next visited them, Manet had cut a piece off the painting, which upset Degas very much. Smee sees this episode as very important; but the two men did not break off their friendship, though “its intensity was missing”.When Matisse and Picasso, his junior by twelve years, first met in 1906, Matisse was an established painter and Picasso was a rising star. Matisse was well disposed to Picasso as a fellow flag-bearer for modern art and encouraged him, but Picasso was determined not to be Matisse’s follower, and it was long before the two men were equals, with Picasso the bolder innovator and seeing himself as a rival to Matisse. Art historians agree that that this rivalry did exist, though Smee has, I think, too many phrases like “Picasso must have felt”, for which there is no evidence. The “breach” between them was over Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” (1907 – that is only year after their first meeting), but Matisse was not one for personal grudges, and, as in the case of Manet and Degas, the two men kept up friendly relations; and much of the antagonism was between their respective followers. When Picasso embraced cubism, Matisse even painted some pictures with something of cubism about them.De Kooning’s early art work showed that he was a very fine draftsman, though this bothered him, and he was looking for an escape from this particular talent. He moved away from representational to abstract art, but the latter was still linear and disciplined. Pollok, on the other hand, was initially unhappy about how poor his own draftsmanship was, and for this and other reasons he took to bouts of binge drinking during which he was occasionally violent. He then attached himself to Thomas Hart Benton who saw talent in him and helped him to improve his skills in representational art; but this did not satisfy him either. He experimented with surrealism; then was influenced by Roberto Matta, who got him to draw with blindfolds. In 1942, encouraged by a Jungian analyst, he began to doodle; some of this now went into his paintings; Peggy Guggenheim took him up, and he suddenly became famous among aficionados of modern art. The great 180 square feet mural he painted for her in 1943 a single night were, if you like, a gigantic but wonderfully rhythmic doodle. From there he moved on in 1947 to his famous drip-paintings of canvases he laid on the floor: to these apparently chance marks also he imparted a rhythm. Pollock had first met De Kooning in 1941. Fame had so far eluded De Kooning. He now began to admire the freedom in Pollock’s work (rather as Freud had admired Bacon’s) and he began to cut loose in his own paintings. The works he showed in 1948 were fluid and thickly-painted abstracts, though they lacked the rhythm of Pollock’s. As these began to attract attention, Pollock became aggressively jealous of De Kooning. Even so, they established a gruff and sometimes literally sparring friendship. They were now regarded (and regarded each other) as the two great masters of modern American painting. Just as in the case of Matisse and Picasso, it was not they but their followers (notably two leading art critics who hated each other) who sided with one and denigrated the other. In 1950, De Kooning abandoned abstract art and embarked on his famous set of “Woman” paintings. He was embarking upon something new and vigorous and much acclaimed at the very moment when Pollock’s work was becoming mechanical, critics were turning against him, and his behaviour became more intolerable than it had ever been. But De Kooning would not have achieved the fierce freedom of these new works if he had not initially been liberated by Pollock’s influence. When Pollock saw these figurative paintings, he shouted drunkenly to De Kooning that he had “betrayed” abstract art. There was of course no betrayal involved, any more than there had been when the paths of Freud and Bacon or of Manet and Degas or of Matisse and Picasso had diverged; and I don’t think “betrayal” merits its place in the subtitle of this book. The last few pages of this chapter show how, after Pollock’s death in a car crash in 1956, De Kooning’s behaviour and alcoholism became increasingly as unhappy and as alcoholic as that of his late friend. At the time of Pollock’s death, De Kooning was considered the greater artist; but that, too, would change during the remaining 41 years of De Kooning’s life.Sadly, the book has only 18 illustrations. Thank goodness for Google Images!

This hugely enjoyable book explores the intense competitiveness between friends Freud and Bacon, Manet and Degas, Matisse and Picasso, and Pollock and De Kooning. Sebastian Smee places each of these within their extensive surroundings as they leapfrog over each other with new or even copied ideas. Success all too often seems to make things worse. Rivalry is never far from friendship. There are telling quotations or observations such as “The people you love the most are the people you could hate the most”. Or “When you fall under the spell of someone, there is often a dual movement within you: Even as you succumb to the other person’s powerful influence, you feel an equal and opposite impulse to bolster your own identity, to fortify yourself – in a sense, to push back”. Or “He was concerned [at Manet’s suffering]. But he may also have been intrigued, and obscurely buoyed, as we often are when people we care about are seen to be struggling”. Or, “There is love and there is work, [Degas] said, and we only have one heart.” Or “What was to go on the canvas was not a picture [the critic Rosenberg] said “but an event.” But what comes through most strongly is the extreme poverty and difficulty of getting recognised that most of the subjects went through.

I enjoyed this very much. Well written and informative about the enriching exchanges between these 4 pairs of artisits. I learnt a lot!! Of course some of the time they were competing and some of the time supporting each other.

it really didn't come alive.Pedestrian in it's approach.Sluggish and no excitement.Perceived differences between artists...really?.Very put downable

A fascinating book. The chapter on Matisse and Picasso is especially good. Interesting how several of these painters were racked with doubt about their talent.