Description
Four rivalries that made modern art. Sebastian Smee’s The Art of Rivalry — by the Pulitzer-winning critic — tells how competition forged genius: Freud vs. Bacon, Manet vs. Degas, Matisse vs. Picasso, Pollock vs. de Kooning. Each pair pushed the other further than either could have gone alone, and the sparks made masterpieces.
Smee writes with a novelist’s sense of character and a critic’s eye: the friendships curdling into feuds, the stolen ideas, the masterpieces made in answer to a rival’s challenge. It is art history as human drama — ambitious, gossipy, and profound about how creativity actually works when the stakes are everything.
One of the most readable art books of recent years: vivid, smart, and full of great stories. For anyone who loves art — or just loves a good rivalry. Unputdownable. Smee’s pairings are inspired and his storytelling superb. Art history has rarely been this much fun — or this sharp.
“The Art of Rivalry: Four Friendships, Betrayals, and Breakthroughs in Modern Art” by Sebastian Smee is a 2016 work of art biography that looks at creativity through an unusual lens: competition. The Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic traces four intense artistic friendships — Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, Edgar Degas and Édouard Manet, Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon, and Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning — and shows how admiration, jealousy, and one-upmanship pushed each pair toward breakthroughs neither could have reached alone.
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nSmee writes with a critic’s eye and a storyteller’s pacing, drawing on letters, studio gossip, and the paintings themselves to reconstruct these rivalries from the inside. Matisse and Picasso circle each other for five decades; Degas and Manet test the limits of Impressionism; Freud and Bacon drink and argue their way through post-war London; Pollock and de Kooning fight for the soul of American abstraction. The result reads less like dry history than like four linked dramas about ambition, insecurity, and the need to be seen.
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nPart biography, part psychology of creativity, the book argues that great work rarely emerges in isolation — it needs a rival. Accessible to general readers yet grounded in serious criticism, The Art of Rivalry is an engaging way into modern art for anyone curious about the human sparks behind the masterpieces.
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