When America’s greatest 20th century artist Jackson Pollock was killed in a car crash, his friend and rival Willem de Kooning told someone at the funeral, “Now I am number one.”
Competitive sport is easily understood, competitive art not as easily. Federer and Nadal, for example, raising each other’s game, inspired and frustrated by the other. Each found something in the other to make him whole. Similarly, Ali and Frazier, or McEnroe and Borg, Fischer and Spassky. Rivalry made them; it also defined their times.
It was true of the relationship between the American artists, and just as significant in the lives of three other pairs (“couples” is a tempting term to use for the manner in which they seem to fall in and out of love, break up, make up and carry on regardless) in The Art of Rivalry , a study of eight artists by Sebastian Smee.
Smee, the art critic of the Boston Globe , looks at the careers of Pablo Picasso-Henri Matisse, Eduard Manet-Edgar Degas and Lucian Freud-Francis Bacon besides, to understand the role of friendship and betrayal in modern art.
Rivalry as inspiration, mutual influence as the key to evolution, jealousy, intimacy and entitlement as features of growth are all beautifully delineated in the essays. By choosing to focus on one ‘other’ – Picasso and Braque might have made for a similar study, for example – Smee has ensured both clarity and simplicity, which are also the twin virtues of his writing style.
Why did Manet slash a painting of himself and his wife that Degas had made? Did Picasso pull himself back and take another path after seeing Matisse’s The Joy of Life ? Why was Freud’s portrait of Bacon stolen from a Berlin museum? Manet did not collect Degas, but Degas collected Manet. Picasso hung a favourite portrait of Matisse in his studio. The anecdotes weave in and out of the stories, speculation enriches the historically known. “There is an intimacy in art history,” says Smee, “that text books ignore.”
The concept of greatness has changed in the modern era, the one this book deals with. If in the past, the focus was on mastery, now it had shifted to originality. Consolidation was replaced by disruption; assurance by deliberate uncertainty. In many cases, the road to finding a distinctive voice ran through the vicissitudes of personal and professional rivalry and all the emotions it threw up.
The only survivor of the Pollock crash was his mistress Ruth Kligman. Within a year of Pollock’s death, de Kooning began an affair with her. It was as if he were saying, “to the survivor go the spoils”: the ranking, the relationship, everything. Smee guides us through private lives with an understanding smile.
It seems some great artists, like great sportsmen, cannot exist in isolation. They require a rivalry, an equal to allow them to discover what they might be capable of. This is a quote not from Smee’s book but from On Being John McEnroe by Tim Adams. But it fits.
Suresh Menon is Contributing Editor, The Hindu
