Get Hold Of El Arte De La Rivalidad: Amistad, Traición Y Ruptura En El Arte Contemporáneo Devised By Sebastian Smee Accessible As Pamphlet

here to hear my thoughts on this book over on my Booktube channel, abookolive!

Fluidly written and informative.
As with all such projects Katie Roiphe's "Uncommon Arrangements" for instance it is not obvious why the author has zoomed in on this particular set of relationships as opposed to dozens of others, but who cares.
Smee delivers a lively and balanced account offraught but fruitful relationships between pairs of famous artists who have all generated multiple biographies.
While this book may be redundant for art historians, I learnt a lot from it since some of the artists included Bacon, de Kooning, Pollock, Picasso have never been among my personal favorites and I knew almost nothing about their private life.
Turns out most of the artists chosen by Smee "lived large", i, e behaved atrociously towards most people within their orbit, Who knew. Really A very interesting study of four sets of artistic rivalries that defined an important crosssection of modern art, Somewhat derivative and dependent on the standard biographical literature but occasionally quite perceptive, and always interesting and full of anecdote, This book is most useful for providing background and milieu for developments in modern European and American art, Smee sets up four matches of contemporary artists:: Freud and Bacon, Manet and Degas, Matisse and Picasso, and Pollock and de Kooning.
At times the pairings seemed a little forced not to much out of chronological order, Particularly with Matisse and Picasso, the interactions were often speculative, I cringed at every phrase like "he undoubtedly felt, ". Nevertheless there is plenty of spilled paint, outsized characters, complicated love affairs, and drunken brawls to engage anyone interested in art history.
I particularly liked the section on Bacon and Freud, even though this was one of the least effective in terms of defining the connection between the two.
I knew very little about either one, as much of art attention was focused on the Abstract Expressionists at the time.
Smee had a personal acquaintance with Freud, The Pollockde Kooning relationship never pales with the retelling, There are onlycolor plates in the book, and I had to frequently Google references to works not within the, This set up of pairing contemporaries is a different approach to art history, I enjoyed the journey. Overall.

Freud and Bacon

Manet and Degas

Picasso and Matisse,

De Kooning and PollockArt history is certainly not one of my areas of expertise, I know just enough about art and artists to be able to answer trivial pursuit questions with answers other than "Picasso.
" So reading this book from the vantage point of learning something new was a great experience, Smee is a good writer his book was neither terribly academic and dry, nor a vapid pop biography, If Smee's book was a meal, then it was rather wellcooked meat and potatoes, rather than a tv dinner or fancy French.
But if his intent was to prove something about the power of rivalry visavis art and artists, I'm not so sure he succeeded.
Almost, the book is an exercise in writing towards a theme Smee wrote the art of rivalry into being, perhaps in a bit of an "emperor's new clothes" facade.
Each of the four chapters centered on the "rivalry" between two artists, and in each of the four chapters, I learned a bunch about the artists, enough to find Picasso and Pollock to be sort of reprehensible their art might be great, but their personalities are shit.
Every chapter essentially reads like a piece of longform journalism though, and this unifying theme of "rivalry" just didn't hold water for me.
If you can ignore that, you will enjoy this book I was successful in that pursuit, This is art history as examined through the relationships of four pairs of contemporariesManet and Degas, Picasso and Matisse, Pollock and de Kooning, and Freud and Bacon.
With deft descriptions of the works and the techniques, and a little bogged down in the soap operaish relationship tangles, Smee explores how love, hate, envy, friendship and just close proximity challenged these artists to expand their work, grow as artists if not always as human beings and think in tandem with another person.
"Um dia, o pintor Lucian Freud viuse confrontado com a necessidade de tomar uma decisão tão inesperada quanto inusitados eram os motivos silenciados que a justificavam.
Convidado para uma festa de casamento, optou por declinar o convite por se encontrar na invulgar situação de ter já tido relações sexuais com a noiva, com o noivo e com a mãe do noivo.
Isto para lá de naquele momento estar casado com uma sobrinha da mãe do noivo e a boda decorrer em casa de Francis Bacon, que ali vivia com o seu amante, Eric Hall.


A estranheza da decisão tem eco em outros momentos tão dissonantes como quando Manet decide apunhalar um quadro pintado por Degas onde avulta a imagem de sua própria mulher.
Constatar que o pintor Francis Bacon chegou a oferecerse como acompanhante de cavalheiros nas colunas de anúncios do Times, de Londres.
Perceber como Pollock era um tipo infrequentável, arruaceiro, de um insuportável machismo, com frequência alcoolizado e incapaz de fazer um desenho decente.
Ou pressentir que Picasso nunca teria pintado uma obra tão decisiva e de rutura como “Les Demoiselles de Avignon”, nem teria impulsionado o cubismo, juntamente com Braque, sem a pressão e rivalidade que sobre ele exercia Matisse, cuja filha adolescente povoava o

imaginário libidinoso do pintor granadino.


Estes e muitos outros episódios aparecem narrados no livro “El arte de la rivalidad”, do crítico de arte e ensaísta australiano Sebastian Smee, vencedor do Prémio Pulitzer.
Construído à volta de episódios de amizade e amor, traição e rompimento protagonizados por quatro pares de artistas, todos homens e todos eles situados entre os mais importantes da modernidade, o livro faznos embarcar numa longa e surpreendente viagem à volta das vidas e dos encontros e desencontros entre Matisse e Picasso, Manet e Degas, Pollock e De Kooning, Freud e Bacon.


A partir das dinâmicas criadas pelas relações entre amigos que chegam em alguns casos a tornarse quase inimigos, Smee mostra como os temperamentos divergentes destes artistas acabam por desembocar seja pela rivalidade, pelo espírito de competição, pela vontade de ultrapassar o outro em avanços estilísticos decisivos para a história de arte.
Se é notável o início do capítulo dedicado a De Kooning e Pollock, situado numa noite do início da década de, com os dois pintores completamente bêbedos, sentados no exterior da Cedar Tavern, de Greenwich Village, a partilharem uma garrafa e a brindaremse mutuamente com o epíteto de melhor pintor dos EUA, não lhe ficam atrás as pulsões ou tensões eróticas e sexuais que podem estar por trás do golpe de Manet no quadro pintado pelo solteiro Degas, pintado num momento em que aquele casamento definhava de um modo que não terá escapado ao mais jovem pintor.


O que torna o livro extraordinário está muito para lá das abundantes “petites histories” sobre a vida de cada um dos protagonistas.
O mais relevante é a maestria com que o autor, ensaísta e crítico de arte, nos conduz, a partir daquelas rivalidades por vezes mais intuídas do que reais, através de uma irresistível história da arte centrada em períodos cruciais dos séculos XIX e XX, pela qual passam ainda personagens não tão secundárias como isso.
Entre elas estão Peggy Guggnheim, Gertrude Stein, Baudelaire ou Appolinaire, cuja influência sobre Picasso fica aqui exposta em toda a sua dimensão e importância.
Picasso de quem Matisse dizia: “Tal como um gato, seja qual for o salto mortal que dês, cairás sempre de pé”.

Valdemar Cruz in Expresso Curto I like the subject matter and the stories of thesecouples of artists friends and rivals were interesting.
Their lives were filled with uncertainty, selfdoubt, sexual tensions, betrayals, failure, and breakthroughs, Yet, at times their stories also felt petty and filled with selfabsorption, selfimportance and pompous, Maybe a fiction based on their reallife stories would have brought it closer, Чотири захоплюючі розповіді, що дають багато їжі для роздумів історичний контекст згаданих епох, стосунків між людьми, та, звісно, плин мистецтва Painters Without Pictures

So much of the pleasure in an art book comes from the combination of text, binding, and the art itself that it is difficult to review a cheaplyproduced advance proof via Amazon Vine of the words alone.
However, the publishers promise a "beautiful package with twopage color photo inserts of art, " Author Samuel Smee refers to the illustrations by number, and it is possible to look most of them up online, but there are a few cases where it is difficult to be sure exactly which version of a work he has chosen.
But even if one assumes that the final copy will be all that its publishers promise, the proportions are just wrong.
illustrations are just too few forpages of text, In a book about friendships, influence, and rivalries between pairs of artists Manet/Degas, Picasso/Matisse, Pollock/De Kooning, and Bacon/Freud, what really matters, surely, is that the paintings themselves should do the talking, whether reproduced in photographs or described in words.
But while Smee ranges from good to excellent when writing as a biographer, the actual artno matter how beautifully produced the final editiontakes a back seat to facts and anecdotes.


I read two of Smee's sections Bacon/Freud and Manet/Degas in detail, and skimmed the other two, I learned a lot, I must admit, I had known Francis Bacon's workhis theatrically contorted figures and screaming popesever since hisretrospective at the Tate the intimate skewed realism of Lucian Freud's portraiture stole more slowly into my awareness.
I gather I am by no means alone in this one of the more useful things that Smee does is to trace the trajectory of each artist's career: Bacon rising rapidly to a creative plateau Freud gaining slowly in reputation and fame right up to his death in.
I learned a great deal about the artists as men: Bacon's louche lifestyle and risktaking behavior with lovers who could be physically abusive or even criminal, Freud's two marriages and liaisons with a great number of womenall told with cameo appearances by many of the more famous or infamous figures of the London postwar social scene.
Somewhere along the line, Smee shows how the friendship may have given Freud more technical boldness, and perhaps nudged Bacon into portraiture, but my increased understanding of each artist's work was minor compared to what I learned about their lives.


In his chapter on the two French artists, Smee spends more time on Manet than on Degas, This is probably because he was the more interesting figure, flamboyant and genial in his social life, fresh and iconoclastic in his artistic one.
Degas, by contrast, was more private, married only to his art, Perhaps because I already knew most of Manet's work, I could run through the slides in my head, so to speak, watching how each stage in his development matched the appropriate picture.
But I learned little more about him as a painter, as compared to Julian Barnes' essays on the artist in sitelinkKeeping an Eye Open or even the amateur but insightful observations of Michel Foucault in sitelinkManet and the Object of Painting.
Smee opens his entire book intriguingly with a trip to southern Japan to see Degas' portrait of Manet and his wifea gift of friendship that Manet later destroyed by cutting the section with his wife right down the middle.
Intriguing. Biographers have no explanation for the violence of Manet's action, But here's the thing: I don't think Smee manages to explain it either,

Smee's relative lack of focus on the artworks themselves is especially regrettable since when he does address a painting in detail he can be superb.
Here is part of what he has to say about Freud's small portrait of Francis Bacon painted on copper in:

Even so, the contrast between the left and right sides of Bacon's distinctive, pearshaped head is oddand becomes more so the longer you study it.
The right Bacon's right, cast lightly in shadow, is a study in placidity, Over on the left, however, everything is slipping and sliding about, An Sshaped lick of hairyou can count the strandscasts a dashing shadow on Bacon's brow, The whole left side of his mouth twists upward, triggering a pouchy swelling, like the body's response to a sting, at the corner of the mouth.
A sheen of sweat shines from that corner of his nose, Even the left ear seems to convulse and squirm, Most striking of all is the way Bacon's left eyebrow extends its powerful arabesque into the furrow at the center of his forehead.
This has nothing to do with "realism" if you take that term literally no eyebrow behaves this way, But it's the engine that powers the whole portrait, just as the portrait itself is the key to the story of the most interesting, fertileand volatilerelationship in British art of the twentieth century.

Is this better than the pithy description by Robert Hughes: "the silent intensity of a grenade in the millisecond before it goes off" Perhaps, because it adds detailthough I wish Smee had added it to more of the other pictures he mentions in this textheavy book, and he could do with more of Hughes' incisive urgency.
He also offers the portrait as yet another unsolved mystery: who stole it from an exhibition in Berlin in, and why Ultimately, what most interests Smee is not the portrait, but the relationship and the stories that surround it.
He will attract many readers who have exactly the same priorities pure art lovers, not so much, .