Copyright © 2016 by Sebastian Smee
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
Random House and the House colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Willem de Kooning, excerpts from an interview with James Valliere, from Partisan Review (Autumn 1967). © 2016 The Willem de Kooning Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Fernande Olivier, excerpts from Loving Picasso: The Private Journal of Fernande Olivier. Copyright © 2001 by Gilbert Krill. Translation copyright © 2001 by Christine Baker and Michael Raeburn. Reprinted by permission of Cacklegoose Press, London.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
NAMES: Smee, Sebastian, author. TITLE: The art of rivalry : four friendships, betrayals, and breakthroughs in modern art / Sebastian Smee. DESCRIPTION: New York : Random House, 2016. | Includes index. | Includes bibliographical references. IDENTIFIERS: LCCN 2015050361| ISBN 9780812994803 (hardback) | ISBN 9780812994810 (ebook) SUBJECTS: LCSH: Picasso, Pablo, 1881–1973—Friends and associates. | Matisse, Henri, 1869–1954—Friends and associates. | Manet, Édouard, 1832–1883—Friends and associates. | Degas, Edgar, 1834–1917—Friends and associates. | Pollock, Jackson, 1912–1956—Friends and associates. | de Kooning, Willem, 1904–1997—Friends and associates. | Freud, Lucian 1922–2011—Friends and associates. | Bacon, Francis, 1909–1992—Friends and associates. | Artists—Psychology. | Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.) | BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Artists, Architects, Photographers. | ART / History / Modern (late 19th Century to 1945). | HISTORY / Modern / 20th Century. CLASSIFICATION: LCC N71 .S596 2016 | DDC 700.92/2—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015050361
ebook ISBN 9780812994810
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
List of Illustrations
Introduction
Freud and Bacon
Manet and Degas
Matisse and Picasso
Pollock and de Kooning
Illustration Insert
Dedication
Sources and Acknowledgments
By Sebastian Smee
About the Author
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
FIGURE 1 Lucian Freud, WANTED poster, 2001 (color litho).
PRIVATE COLLECTION / © THE LUCIAN FREUD ARCHIVE / BRIDGEMAN IMAGES.
FIGURE 2 Lucian Freud, Study of Francis Bacon, 1951.
PRIVATE COLLECTION. COPYRIGHT LUCIAN FREUD / LUCIAN FREUD ARCHIVE / BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY.
FIGURE 3 Francis Bacon, Portrait of Lucian Freud, 1951 (oil on canvas). / Whitworth Art Gallery, The University of Manchester, UK / Bridgeman Images.
© THE ESTATE OF FRANCIS BACON. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED / ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK / DACS, LONDON.
FIGURE 4 Willem de Kooning, Self-Portrait with Imaginary Brother, c. 1938, pencil on paper, 13 1/8 x 10 1⁄4 inches (33.3 x 26 cm), Kravis Collection.
© 2016 THE WILLEM DE KOONING FOUNDATION / ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK.
INTRODUCTION
In 2013, on a trip to Japan, I took a bullet train from Fukuoka to Kitakyushu to see a painting by Edgar Degas. Often, if you travel long distances to see single works of art, it’s with unrealistically high hopes. You set out on the trip with the piety and anticipation of a pilgrim. And when you reach your destination and the longed-for encounter takes place, you feel obliged to whip up a level of excitement that justifies all the mental preparation, the time, the expense. It’s either that, or crashing anticlimax.
On this trip to Japan, however, I remember feeling neither. The painting I had come to see was a double portrait [see Plate 6] of Degas’s friend, the artist Édouard Manet, and Manet’s wife, Suzanne. It shows the bearded, dapper Manet reclining on a couch, his expression blank, his body halfway between seated and supine. Suzanne is seated across from him at the piano.
It’s actually quite a small picture—you could pick it up in your arms without having to stretch too wide. And it’s fresh—so fresh it might have been painted yesterday. There’s nothing rhetorical or grandiloquent about it. Instead, it feels almost aloof, disinterested; blessedly free of illusions and false feeling.
For all these reasons (and despite my earnest pilgrimage), the painting left no room for disappointment. Nor, however, did it trigger a need to resort to emotional inflation. Standing before it, I found myself absorbed instead by its peculiar coolness.
Degas and Manet had been close, I knew. But there is a quality in the painting of emotional withholding, which in turn stokes an ambivalence that never entirely resolves itself. You can’t tell if Manet, in the picture, is experiencing the dismal agony of torpor, a kind of marrow-draining lethargy, as he sits there listening to his wife (who was, by the way, an expert pianist); or if he is instead enjoying the bliss of reverie, an indolence so sweet and complete that it insulates him from everything that might disrupt his luxurious mental drift…
The Manets sat for the painting over the winter of 1868–69. A mere half decade had elapsed since Édouard had painted the Déjeuneur sur l’Herbe and Olympia, those infamous provocations that had so appalled the critics, prompting the public to yelps and ridicule. (They are now, of course, the two most famous paintings of their time.) Manet had followed them up with an astonishing gush of creativity lasting several years. But the torrid reception accorded his paintings did not let up. His infamy only increased.
What had it all cost him? Was Degas, by 1868, painting a man exhausted by his herculean labors, undone by antipathy? Or did he have something more subtle and secretive in mind?
—
AT THIS POINT, it becomes necessary to say that what I had actually come to Japan to see was not the work as Degas had painted it but, rather, its incompletely repaired remains. Not long after its creation, a part of the painting had been sliced away with a knife. The knife had gone right through Suzanne’s face and body.
This was not, it turns out, the deranged act of some maverick museumgoer—the kind who will once in a while throw acid at a Rembrandt or take a sledgehammer to a Michelangelo. It was the act of Manet himself. And this is where the dismay sets in. For everybody (everybody who knew him) loved Manet. He was charming, convivial, self-deprecating—the most gallant, the suavest of men. Why he would do such a thing, at a time when he and Degas were supposed to be friends (close enough friends to cooperate on this intimate portrait), has always seemed baffling. The explanation usually offered—that Manet objected to Degas’s less-than-flattering portrayal of Suzanne—sounds plausible, up to a point; but there is something incommensurate about it. You don’t take a knife to a painting quite so easily. There must, surely, have been more to it.
I went to Japan not to try to solve the mystery, but really just to get closer to it. Mysteries are magnetic, in this way. But of course, it’s not always evidence they attract. Just as often it’s further enigmas, deeper questions, stranger suppositions.
—
UNSURPRISINGLY, THE SLASHING INCIDENT had occasioned a falling-out between Manet and Degas. It was soon patched over. (“One can’t stay enemies with Manet for long,” Degas is supposed to have said.) But things were never quite the same between them. And then, just over a decade later, Manet was dead.
Thirty years later when Degas died—an isolated, curmudgeo
nly figure—he was surrounded by a collection that included not only the slashed painting (which he had retrieved from his friend and tried to repair), but three more of his own drawn portraits of Manet, and then a trove of more than eighty works by Manet himself. Was all this not evidence that Manet retained a special and perhaps sentimental fascination for Degas, long after he was gone? If so, what did it signify?
—
THERE IS, I BELIEVE, an intimacy in art history that the textbooks ignore. This book is an attempt to reckon with that intimacy.
Its title is The Art of Rivalry, but the idea of rivalry it presents is not the macho cliché of sworn enemies, bitter competitors, and stubborn grudge-holders slugging it out for artistic and worldly supremacy. Instead, it is a book about yielding, intimacy, and openness to influence. It is about susceptibility. That these states of susceptibility are concentrated early on in an artist’s career, and that they have a limited life span—that they were never going to last beyond a certain point—is in many ways the book’s true subject. For these kinds of relationships are inherently volatile. They are fraught with slippery psychodynamics, and difficult to describe with any kind of historical certitude. Nor do they often end well. If this is a book, in other words, about seduction, it is also to some extent about breakups and betrayal.
—
BREAKUPS ARE ALWAYS DISMAYING. Even if things are later patched up, it’s never easy to find a solution to the vexing problem of what happened in the first place. It’s almost impossible to achieve the necessary distance. Too big a part of you, perhaps, was in play, and your debt to the other—whatever form it took—may still be too deep. How, keeping faith with the truth of what happened, do you acknowledge that debt, without losing sight of the damage inflicted on you? And of the damage you yourself inflicted? Such questions sound unhelpfully vague. But they churn beneath the wake of the four stories in this book.
Living in London, in the early 2000s, I got to know the painter Lucian Freud, whose early friendship with Francis Bacon is perhaps the most fabled in twentieth-century British art. Here, too, there had been a falling-out, occasioning much private dismay and bitterness—so much so that ten years after Bacon’s death it was still thought unwise to raise the subject with Freud.
In the hush of the meantime, however, visiting Freud’s home, one couldn’t fail to notice the huge Francis Bacon painting that hung on Freud’s wall. It was a haunting image of violent male lovers, teeth bared, blurred on a bed. Freud had bought it for £100 from one of Bacon’s earliest shows, shortly before their friendship first began to unravel. He never let it go. And (with only one exception in an entire half century) he never agreed to lend it out to exhibitions. What did this imply?
—
AND WHAT, FOR THAT MATTER, did it suggest about the uneasy friendship between Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning—the two most celebrated American artists of the twentieth century—that, less than a year after Pollock’s sudden death, de Kooning embarked on an amorous relationship with Pollock’s girlfriend, Ruth Kligman, the sole survivor of the fatal crash?
And then, as well, what did it say about the significance of Matisse to Picasso that, after Matisse’s death in 1954, Picasso not only continued to paint complicated tributes to him, but also kept Matisse’s portrait of his young daughter, Marguerite—a painting he had once enjoyed watching his friends throw darts at—in pride of place in his own home?
—
ALL EIGHT OF THE ARTISTS at the center of this book, I’m well aware, are men. We think of the period I write about—roughly 1860 to 1950—as “modern,” but of course modern culture through this period was still overwhelmingly patriarchal. There are many storied relationships between male and female modern artists, and a few between women and women; but most of the significant ones—one thinks, for example, of Auguste Rodin and Camille Claudel, Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera—had a romantic component, one that tends to obscure and complicate the aspects of rivalry I try to lay bare here. Uncomplicated by heterosexual passion or chauvinistic condescension, those aspects hinge on relations that can be characterized, broadly speaking, as “homosocial.” They include male status competitiveness, wary friendship, peer admiration and even love, and a hierarchical dynamic that is never settled, even when it seems to be.
Women nonetheless play roles of enormous importance in each chapter. Among them are first-rate artists such as Berthe Morisot and Lee Krasner; courageous collectors including Sarah Stein, Gertrude Stein, and Peggy Guggenheim; and brilliant, independent-minded accomplices such as Caroline Blackwood and Marguerite Matisse.
All eight of the artists I focus on, it’s well known, had other friendships, other rivals, other influences and enablers. But there is sometimes—there is usually, I believe—a single relationship more consequential than all the others. Picasso understood, I think, that he would not have painted the Demoiselles d’Avignon, his great, breakthrough painting, and pushed through, with Braque, into Cubism without the seductive pressure supplied by Matisse. Freud, too, knew that he would not have stopped drawing in his tight, fastidious style and become the great painter of blooming, livid flesh that he did but for his friendship with Bacon. De Kooning, similarly, would not have opened up his way of working and painted his first full-throttle masterpieces in the 1950s without the influence of Pollock. And Degas would not have stopped painting the past, leaving his studio to go out onto the street and into the cafés and rehearsal rooms, without the impact of his friendship with Manet.
—
THIS BOOK, THEN, is about the role of friendship and rivalry in the formation of these eight artists, each of them among the greatest artists of the modern period. In four chapters, it tells the story of four celebrated artistic relationships by homing in on the peculiar bubble in time—usually three or four fraught years—that surrounded a particular crucial incident: a portrait sitting, an exchange of works, a studio visit, or an exhibition opening.
In each case, two different temperaments—two kinds of charisma—were magnetically attracted to each other. Both artists were on the cusp of major creative breakthroughs. Each had already made huge advances; but no signature style had been settled on; no single idea of truth or beauty prevailed over others. All was potential.
And then, as each relationship developed—sometimes tentatively, at other times with a headlong intensity—a familiar dynamic set in. Where one artist had an enviable fluency (socially as well as artistically), the other was stuck. Where one was willing to court risk, the other lagged behind through excess of caution, varieties of perfectionism, doggedness, and psychic clogging. The effect of the artist in question encountering his more fluent, more audacious peer was revelatory—and liberating. Cracks of possibility opened up. A new way not only of working but of facing the world was revealed. The direction of one’s life was changed.
From that moment, things inevitably became complicated. Initially one-way, the flow of influence soon began to course in both directions. Even as the more naturally “fluent” artist surged ahead, he became conscious of shortcomings in his own repertoire—skills, audacities, and forms of stubbornness that the other artist had in abundance.
Each story here, then, traces a movement away from an urgent attraction to another person, through a phase of ambivalence, and on toward independence—that vital creative process we call “finding your voice.” That search for independence, for a kind of spiritual distinction that militates against the yearning for union and collegiality, is a natural part of the formation of any truly potent creative identity. But it also speaks, of course, to the very modern yearning to be unique, original, inimitable; to acquire the solitude, the singularity, of greatness.
And so it’s not by chance that the artists I have chosen to write about are both great and modern, because this same dynamic—between solitude and recognition, between singularity and belonging—is at the very heart of the story of modernism.
—
IF THE
RE IS A FUNDAMENTAL difference between rivalry in the modern era and rivalry in earlier epochs, as I believe there is, it is that in the modern era artists developed a wholly different conception of greatness. It was a notion based not on the old, established conventions of mastering and extending a pictorial tradition, but on the urge to be radically, disruptively original.
Where did this urge come from?
It was a response, most basically, to the new conditions of life—to a sense that modern, industrialized, urban society, although in some ways representing a pinnacle of Western civilization, had also foreclosed on certain human possibilities. Modernity, many began to feel, had shut off the possibility of forging a deeper connection with nature and with the riches of spiritual and imaginative life. The world, as Max Weber wrote, had become disenchanted.
Hence the quickening interest in alternative possibilities. These new fascinations opened up huge areas of artistic terrain. But by rejecting inherited standards, modern artists inevitably found themselves out on a limb. They had cut themselves off—not just from all the usual avenues of success (the official Salons, the prizes, the commercial dealers, the collectors and sponsors) but from the psychic reassurance of valid criteria.
The problem of quality in this situation became urgent. If modern artists rejected standards widely shared in their own culture, how could they know how good they were? If they perceived tremendous value in the art of children, for instance (as did Matisse), how could anyone make the determination that their art was excellent—better than a child’s; better than someone who had trained for years precisely to advance beyond the art of children?
If, like Pollock, they flicked and dribbled paint from a stick onto a canvas stretched out on the floor, how could anyone claim that this kind of art-making was superior to painting by someone who had trained for years with paints and paintbrushes and palettes and easels, following a hallowed tradition? There were critics, of course. But they were usually biased, and often even more convention-bound than the public. There were sympathetic poets and writers. But none could quite grasp the nature of the struggle from an artist’s point of view.
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