MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewDespite their whiteness, these are eight colorful men, and Smee efficiently lays out the relationships — where each was in his career when he met the other, what that connection meant, how their friendship ripened and often soured — no small feat considering the lives at hand ... Smee’s focus is on the role of a particular kind of intimacy as creative fuel, and so his choice of an all-male cast for his book makes sense in this context ... The book’s straw man is the academy. Textbooks, Smee argues, ignore intimacy. But as he is also forced to note, there have been a number of scholarly books and exhibitions that explore competition as a productive agent in modernism.
Arthur Lubow
PositiveBookforum...in detonating the taboo at the beginning, Lubow defuses it, too. It is not the climax of the book, but one more beveled pane of the window onto its subject ... Lubow’s descriptions of her uptown childhood are among the most vivid in the book and establish its recurrent themes ... The author’s workaround is clever: Individual short chapters are dedicated to her most iconic pictures—textual snapshots, as it were. We get the story behind the photographs.
