It does a disservice to Mr. Smee’s complex analysis to reductively seek a common denominator in these four cases. But it’s still striking that in all of them, one artist envied another’s boldness and almost animal impulsiveness, his quickness to act ... It’s the Matisse-Picasso chapter that fully delivers the adrenaline expected from rivalries. The rest of this engrossing book reads like high-end art history; this section also reads like sports ... Mr. Smee’s skills as a critic are evident throughout. He is persuasive and vivid about the art itself.
Thanks are due to Sebastian Smee, the Boston Globe’s Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic, who with novella-like detail and incisiveness opens up the worlds of four pairs of renowned artists ... Each of his portraits is a biographical gem, deftly taking social milieus, family backgrounds, and the art controversies of the day into account ... Smee’s vivid, agile prose is especially good at evoking the temperaments of the personalities involved ... his chapter on Freud and Bacon is a marvel.
Despite 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.
Perhaps the most enjoyable of the pairings is Bacon and Freud, because the ambivalence between them feels so awkward and profound...Smee is good on the sense of these friendships as a two-horse race. When one of them enjoys a coup or some kind of breakthrough, you feel the other man brood and take stock: how did he do that? It is not about admiration expressed through gritted teeth – there seems a genuine urge to absorb the other’s example, and then adapt it ... But it’s when the glaze of amity begins to crack that the reader’s interest quickens ... Smee doesn’t have any new material, but he shuffles the pack of familiar stories with dexterity and enthusiasm. His prose, spruce and well-mannered for the most part, suffers minor lapses here and there.
...it’s clear that Smee is onto something important. His book may bring us as close as we’ll ever get to understanding the connections between these bristly bonds and brilliance.
...one of those rare books that manages to show, convincingly, the exalted stuff of genius emerging from the low chaos of life ... For all the drama of these personal stories, Mr Smee never neglects the work that fed off these stormy encounters. He is eloquent about the art, capturing the essence of a painting in a few deft strokes ... One drawback to Mr Smee’s approach is that he sometimes resorts to speculation, filling out unknowable details.
