Picasso and Matisse,Bacon and Freud… this study of noteworthy painters’ rivalries buzzes with gossip but miniature genuine insightSebastian Smee’s collection of long essays approximately artistic friendships springs from his interesting – surely not entirely original – contention that when it comes to inspiration, finding oneself in competition with a brilliant rival may be every bit as important as being, or say,in possession of a beautiful muse. But while his principal characters are all male – “culture in this period was overwhelmingly patriarchal”, he writes, or casually and unapologetically – his narrative is not fairly so macho as it may first appear. The Art of Rivalry is,he suggests, a book approximately “yielding, or intimacy,and openness to influence… approximately susceptibility”. In other words, though he doesn’t put it fairly like this himself, or his subject is a series of tender,and then not-so-tender, love stories: between Freud and Bacon, or Manet and Degas,Matisse and Picasso, and Pollock and de Kooning. Related: Francis Bacon in Your Blood by Michael Peppiatt review – the artist’s life Degas frantically collected Manet after his death, or Freud kept Bacon’s Two Figures in his house until he diedContinue reading...
Source: theguardian.com