In the end, the true artist goes it alone, no matter what the promptings of advisers, critics, friends. Especially those friends who are artists themselves, for without even knowing it they may also be your rivals. It’s not that the competitive impulse hardwired into so much artistic enterprise is necessarily a harmful one. It might be the thing that drives you on, that piques what this new book describes as “the yearning to be unique, original, inimitable”. But it is just as well to assume the brace position when the ambition of the artist collides with the duty of friendship.
The Art of Rivalry selects four pairs of artists who were also pals and investigates the streams of influence that flowed between each pair. Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon, Degas and Manet, Picasso and Matisse, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning are led into the ring like prizefighters, each eyeballing the other in a posthumous contest of achievement. Art being an unpredictable and often indecipherable commodity, it isn’t clear what conclusions the book is leading us towards. What Sebastian Smee does essentially is to reformulate familiar material – biography, art history, gossip – by viewing it through the prism of a close friendship. Perhaps the most enjoyable of the pairings is Bacon and Freud, because the ambivalence between them feels so awkward and profound. The earliest battleground of their friendship was Freud’s exquisite 1952 portrait of Bacon, painted on copper plate in a series of sittings close enough for artist and subject to be touching knees. Mesmerising, memorable, utterly modern, the picture pierced to the very core of Bacon’s volatile nature, somehow giving his face, in Robert Hughes’s great phrase, “the silent intensity of a grenade in the millisecond before it goes off”. Sadly it was stolen from the wall of a German museum in 1988 and has never been recovered.
Henri Matisse’s The Dream alongside Pablo Picasso’s Woman With Yellow Hair. Photograph: AP
What attracts one artist to another in this account is more than a matter of professional admiration. It is the magnetic force of personality, of daring to be one’s own man. Freud once said of Bacon, “His work impressed me, but his personality affected me.” He envied the older man’s social charm and gregariousness as well as his ruthless attitude to his work (Bacon would destroy whatever he considered unsatisfactory). A century earlier, in Paris, Manet’s sense of passionate conviction would inspire Degas to cultivate a similar boldness of outlook. In the early days of their friendship Picasso, the uncertain expatriate, was struck by the self-possession and ease of Matisse. De Kooning, who called his friend Pollock “the painting cowboy”, was beguiled by the younger man’s outlandishness, his sense of freedom, and his “desperate joy”. Temperament was as much a subject of emulation as technique.
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. Under Bacon’s influence, Freud quit drawing for years to explore the possibilities of paint. In time, it would enable his “mature” style and catapult him into the firmament of international masters. But it’s when the glaze of amity begins to crack that the reader’s interest quickens. Matisse regarded Picasso “almost as a younger brother”, encouraging him, introducing him to family and friends. When offered a gift from Matisse’s studio, Picasso asked for the portrait of his daughter Marguerite, an unusual choice given Picasso’s own struggle with fatherhood: he had recently returned his 13-year-old adopted daughter to the orphanage. He kept the picture all of his life, yet it didn’t prevent him one night – in a stew of resentment towards Matisse – firing toy arrows at it.
Influence, as we know, can create anxiety. While there is pleasure in falling under another’s spell, there comes the countervailing impulse to protect your own identity – “to push back”, in Smee’s phrase. It provokes strange behaviour. one of the famous stories here is of Degas’s 1868-69 portrait of Manet and his wife, Suzanne. As a portrait of a marriage it revealed rather more than Manet liked – the wife absorbed at her piano, the husband sprawled in a pose of bored distraction, perhaps dreaming of another woman. When Degas later visited Manet’s studio, he noticed that the painting he had given the couple had suffered an assault: the canvas had been slashed with a knife through Suzanne’s face. The culprit turned out to be Manet himself, for reasons unknown. They stayed friends, but it marked a break. Degas, one-time protege, had ambushed the master and asserted his independence. “A picture is something that requires as much trickery, malice and vice as the perpetration of a crime,” he once said – and he should know.
Edgar Degas’s Monsieur and Madame Manet (1868-69) – complete with Manet’s modification. Photograph: Alamy
In the last months of his life, Jackson Pollock fell in with a younger woman, an artist named Ruth Kligman. She was the only survivor of the car crash that killed Pollock and another friend. Within a year De Kooning, the dead man’s friend and rival, himself began a relationship with Kligman, which lasted seven years – yet when Kligman later wrote a memoir, it was about her time with Pollock. The connection endured: in 1963, De Kooning moved to a house opposite the cemetery where Pollock was buried. It is a tale twisted enough for a Hitchcock movie.
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. He writes “impunity” when he means “impudence”, “a burr in the side” is surely meant to be “a thorn” and so on. He gets the year of Freud’s death wrong, and is perhaps the only man in the world who thinks the Titanic went down in 1913 – a few small blemishes to be painted out when the paperback comes round. As a study of the dynamics of friendship between artists it offers some useful lessons, not the least of them in the tension that may inform every friendship: the longing to be close against the need to stand apart.
• Anthony Quinn’s latest novel, Freya, is published by Cape. The Art of Rivalry: Four Friendships, Betrayals and Breakthroughs in Modern Art is published by Profile. To order a copy for £14.44 (RRP £16.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.