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This is a story about rivalry among artists. Not the kind of
rivalry that grows out of hatred and dislike, but rather, rivalry
that emerges from admiration, friendship, love. The kind of rivalry
that existed between Degas and Manet, Picasso and Matisse, Pollock
and de Kooning, and Freud and Bacon. These were some of the most
famous and creative relationships in the history of art, driving
each individual to heights of creativity and inspiration - and
provoking them to despair, jealousy and betrayal. Matisse's success
threatened Picasso so much that his friends would throw darts at a
portrait of his rival's beloved daughter Marguerite, shouting
'there's one in the eye for Matisse!' And Willem de Kooning's
twisted friendship with Jackson Pollock didn't stop him taking up
with his friend's lover barely a year after Pollock's fatal car
crash. In The Art of Rivalry, Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic
Sebastian Smee explores how, as both artists struggled to come into
their own, they each played vital roles in provoking the other's
creative breakthroughs - ultimately determining the course of
modern art itself.
In 1964 Lucian Freud set his students at the Norwich College of Art
an assignment: to paint naked self-portraits and to make them
'revealing, telling, believable... really shameless'. It was advice
that the artist was often to follow himself. Visceral, unflinching
and often nude, Freud's self-portraits give us an insight into the
development of his style as a painter. The works provide the viewer
with a constant reminder of the artist's overwhelming presence,
whether he is confronting the viewer directly or only present as a
shadow or in a reflection. Essays by leading authorities -
including those who knew him well - explore Freud's life and work,
and analyse the importance of self-portraiture in his practice and
the intensity that he maintained when studying his own.
We live in an age of constant distraction. Is there a price to pay
for this? In this superb essay, renowned critic Sebastian Smee
explores the fate of the inner life in the age of the internet.
Throughout history, artists and thinkers have cultivated the deep
self, and seen value in solitude and reflection. But today, with
social media, wall-to-wall marketing and the agitation of modern
life, everything feels illuminated, made transparent. We feel
bereft without our phones and their cameras and the feeling of
instant connectivity. It gets hard to pick up a book, harder still
to stay with it. Without nostalgia or pessimism, Sebastian Smee
evokes what is valuable and worth cultivating- he guides us from
the apparent fullness of the app-filled world towards a more
complex sense of self, and the inner life. If we lose this, Smee
asks, what do we lose of ourselves? "Every day I spend hours and
hours on my phone ... We are all doing it, aren't we? It has come
to feel completely normal. Even when I put my device aside and
attach it to a charger, it pulses away in my mind, like the throat
of a toad, full of blind, amphibian appetite." Sebastian Smee, Net
Loss
Lucian Freud is not only the most celebrated artist working in
England, but one of the most private. He has frequently stated his
reluctance to be photographed and he has almost never agreed to be
interviewed. Following the publication of the last ten years of his
work by Jonathan Cape in the autumn of 2005, the painter has agreed
to talk to Sebastian Smee, a writer on art whom he greatly
respects, in a series of conversations rather than formal
interviews. He wants to talk about painting itself, the demands of
his own work and the painters he admires. Two photographers have
had access to Freud's studio. The late Bruce Bernard was a friend
for many years and the subject of two of Freud's paintings. Bernard
was an authority on photography, a great picture editor, and also a
very fine photographer. He made a number of studies of Freud at
work. Over the last five years in particular, Freud's assistant,
the painter David Dawson, has been photographing the artist
constantly. The results reveal various stages of works in progress,
including paintings of Dawson himself, and the intensity of the
activity in this very secret domain. The only precedent to such a
document might be David Douglas Duncan's photographs of Picasso at
work, but nothing as extensive has been published on such a major
painter before.
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