The Art of Rivalry: Four Friendships, Betrayals, and Breakthroughs in Modern Art - Softcover

Smee, Sebastian

 
9780812985078: The Art of Rivalry: Four Friendships, Betrayals, and Breakthroughs in Modern Art
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0812985079 ISBN 13: 9780812985078
Verlag: RANDOM HOUSE, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

Pulitzer Prize–winning art critic Sebastian Smee tells the fascinating story of four pairs of artists—Manet and Degas, Picasso and Matisse, Pollock and de Kooning, Freud and Bacon—whose fraught, competitive friendships spurred them to new creative heights.

Rivalry is at the heart of some of the most famous and fruitful relationships in history. The Art of Rivalry follows eight celebrated artists, each linked to a counterpart by friendship, admiration, envy, and ambition. All eight are household names today. But to achieve what they did, each needed the influence of a contemporary—one who was equally ambitious but possessed sharply contrasting strengths and weaknesses.

Edouard Manet and Edgar Degas were close associates whose personal bond frayed after Degas painted a portrait of Manet and his wife. Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso swapped paintings, ideas, and influences as they jostled for the support of collectors like Leo and Gertrude Stein and vied for the leadership of a new avant-garde. Jackson Pollock’s uninhibited style of “action painting” triggered a breakthrough in the work of his older rival, Willem de Kooning. After Pollock’s sudden death in a car crash, de Kooning assumed Pollock's mantle and became romantically involved with his late friend’s mistress. Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon met in the early 1950s, when Bacon was being hailed as Britain’s most exciting new painter and Freud was working in relative obscurity. Their intense but asymmetrical friendship came to a head when Freud painted a portrait of Bacon, which was later stolen.

Each of these relationships culminated in an early flashpoint, a rupture in a budding intimacy that was both a betrayal and a trigger for great innovation. Writing with the same exuberant wit and psychological insight that earned him a Pulitzer Prize for art criticism, Sebastian Smee explores here the way that coming into one’s own as an artist—finding one’s voice—almost always involves willfully breaking away from some intimate’s expectations of who you are or ought to be.

Praise for The Art of Rivalry

“Gripping . . . Mr. Smee’s skills as a critic are evident throughout. He is persuasive and vivid. . . . You leave this book both nourished and hungry for more about the art, its creators and patrons, and the relationships that seed the ground for moments spent at the canvas.”—The New York Times

“With novella-like detail and incisiveness [Sebastian Smee] opens up the worlds of four pairs of renowned artists. . . . Each of his portraits is a biographical gem. . . . The Art of Rivalry is a pure, informative delight, written with canny authority.”—The Boston Globe

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Sebastian Smee is an art critic for the Washington Post. He was previously the chief art critic at the Boston Globe, where he won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2011, having been a runner-up in 2008. He joined the Boston Globe’s staff from Sydney, where he worked as national art critic forThe Australian between 2004 and 2008. Prior to that, he lived for four years in the UK, where he worked on staff at The Art Newspaper, and wrote for The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, The Independent, The Times, The Financial Times, Prospect Magazine, and The Spectator. He has contributed to five books on Lucian Freud. He teaches non-fiction writing at Wellesley College.

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chapter 1

FREUD and BACON

The thing is, unless you look at those Muybridge figures with a magnifying glass, it’s very difficult to see whether they’re wrestling or having sex.

—­FRANCIS BACON

Lucian Freud’s 1952 portrait of his friend, the artist Francis Bacon, is the size of a pocket paperback [see Plate 1]. Or it was: It disappeared from the walls of a German museum in 1988 and hasn’t been seen since.

It showed Bacon head-­on and from very close in. “Everyone thought of him as a blur,” Freud would later say, “but he had a very specific face. I remember wanting to bring Bacon out from behind the blur.”

In the finished picture, Bacon’s famously jowly cheeks expand to fill the frame, and his ears almost touch the edges. His eyes are cast down—­though not to the floor. They have a pensive, faraway look, a suggestion of inward retreat. It is an elusive but unforgettable expression, one that combines self-­mourning with a strange hint of inner fury.

Freud went on to achieve worldwide renown for the fleshy amplitude of his pictures and for his use of thick, oily paint, lavishly applied. But in 1952, when he painted Bacon, his style was very different. He specialized in surface tension. Working on a small scale, he kept the paint as smooth as possible—­no visible brushstrokes. Control was paramount. So was an evenness of attention, fastidiously maintained across the entire surface of his pictures.

Even so, the contrast between the left and right sides of Bacon’s distinctive, pear-­shaped head is odd—­and becomes more remarkable 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 skidding about. An S-­shaped lick of hair—­you can count the strands—­casts 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 his mouth. A sheen of sweat shines from that side 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, fertile—­and volatile—­relationship in British art of the twentieth century.

In 1987, thirty-­five years after it was painted, and just months before it disappeared, this tiny picture was sent to Washington, DC. If it hadn’t been painted on copper, one could have put a stamp and address on the back and sent it as a postcard. Instead, it was carefully packaged and crated and sent along with eighty-­one other works to the US capital. It was to be part of a Freud retrospective, organized by Andrea Rose of the British Council, at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, situated on the National Mall.

Despite its size, the portrait of Bacon was one of the show’s most charismatic objects. It helped, undoubtedly, that the subject himself was famous. Bacon, who was still alive at the time (he died in 1992), was a far better-­known artist than Freud himself. Since the 1960s, major exhibitions of his work had been mounted not only in London, where he lived, but also in places like the Grand Palais in Paris and the Guggenheim and Metropolitan museums in New York. No British artist of the twentieth century had received more sustained critical acclaim. None had plumbed the darker recesses of the popular imagination with a body of work so bold and broadly influential. Bacon was a bona fide international star.

Freud was a different kind of artist. He was, as the critic John Russell described him, “a worrisome and disquieting presence”—­stubborn, perverse, hardworking, immune to fashion. He had exhibited regularly from his early twenties all the way into his sixties (he was now sixty-­six), and was enough of a presence in England to be made a Companion of Honour in 1985. But outside the British Isles, he barely registered. And in the United States he was quite unknown.

Less audacious (at least ostensibly) than Bacon’s work, Freud’s also appeared more conventional in its fidelity to appearances. His kind of painting—­figurative, objective, anchored in observation—­had been out of fashion for almost a century. His clearest predecessors were not Pollock and de Kooning (the Dutch-­born American painter with whom Bacon was most often compared), much less Duchamp and Warhol, the dominant influences on artists in the 1970s and early ’80s. They were nineteenth-­century painters such as Courbet, Manet, and especially Degas.

His work, what’s more, was ugly. His manner of painting—­unflinching realism, prolonged scrutiny, a beady-­eyed focus on humid, blotched skin and sagging flesh—­was a turnoff. It was raw and rash-­ridden. Sweaty. You could almost smell it. It certainly didn’t fit with the American museum world’s notion of advanced art, which, since the 1960s, had tended to be minimal, abstract, conceptual, and altogether more hygienic.

And yet, for all Freud’s peculiarity—­for all the sense that he was some kind of throwback—­a growing number of people in Britain (critics, dealers, fellow artists) had come to feel that he was nearing the height of his powers as an artist. For the best part of two decades, he had been producing paintings of such visceral impact, such sustained intensity and conviction, that although they did not fit into any obvious category or narrative of contemporary art, they were impossible to dismiss.

Keen, then, to extend his reputation beyond the UK, the British Council had organized an exhibition of Freud’s work they could send abroad. Organizers at the British Council selected the works and negotiated the loans (most of Freud’s works were in private collections). They produced a handsome catalog, too, with an insightful introductory essay by Robert Hughes, the influential Time magazine art critic. Hughes homed in on Freud’s portrait of Bacon in the essay’s very first sentence. The portrait’s even light, he wrote, had “something Flemish” about it; its size conjured the Gothic world of the “miniature”; it was “tight, exact, meticulous and (most eccentrically, when seen in the late fifties, a time of urgent gestures on burlap), it was painted on copper.” But what made the picture truly mesmerizing, stressed Hughes, was that it was also uncannily modern. Freud “had caught a kind of visual truth,” he wrote, “at once sharply focused and evasively inward, that rarely showed itself in painting before the twentieth century.” He had somehow given Bacon’s “pear-­shaped face the silent intensity of a grenade in the millisecond before it goes off.”

The British Council secured venues for the show in Paris, London, and Berlin. But they had trouble finding a US venue. Freud wasn’t well enough known, American museum curators claimed. His fleshy, indecorous work would be disconcerting to the general public. He was too British, too old-­school, too real. The American curator Michael Auping later recalled the general consensus: Confronting Freud’s work in the context of American postwar avant-­garde art, he wrote, was “like discovering pungent moulds...

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Verlag
RANDOM HOUSE
Erscheinungsdatum
2017
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0812985079
ISBN 13 
9780812985078
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
432
Kontakt zum Hersteller
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Verantwortliche Person
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