The Art of Rivalry summary

Most relationships experience some degree of asymmetrical balance of power, and those between famous artists are no exception. For example, Francis Bacon and Edouard Manet both held an upper hand of sorts in their friendships with their peers Lucian Freud and Edgar Degas, respectively.

While Bacon and Manet were both older and more established when these friendships began, in both cases they were also the ones with the more extroverted personality as compared to their younger colleagues.

In much the same way that Bacon’s extroverted character made him a role model to Freud, Matisse, too, had a profound influence on his more introverted peer, Picasso. But that dynamic wasn’t set in stone; Picasso’s profound desire to emerge from Matisse’s shadow eventually pushed him to invent Cubism together with Georges Braque, a landmark movement in art history.

Picasso felt insecure around Matisse who, through his native French, would regularly captivate crowds of people at the soirées held by his friends and collectors, Gertrude and Leo Stein. Picasso, a Spaniard, spoke rather broken French and could never hope to match Matisse’s charisma or hold an audience of potential patrons as he did.

In many friendships among painters, the extroverts tended to dominate the relationship – but they also worked in a different way, tending to paint with greater freedom. In turn, this inclination had a major impact on their peers.

In most cases, the technically superior of the two would be inspired by the other to adopt a freer style. Just take Freud, Degas, de Kooning and Picasso, all of whom were superb draftsmen, with technical expertise far surpassing that of their rivals. All of them were encouraged to approach their work with greater freedom, of both hand and mind, neither of which came naturally to them.

The great abstract-expressionist painter Jackson Pollock first became interested in art after his brother, Charles, took it up. His early teachers considered Jackson to be essentially talentless, but they failed to see his true ingenuity, which would come to transform the history of art.

Pollock was a wild child of the 1940s and 50s New York art scene. To be blunt, he was an alcoholic with a penchant for violent outbursts.

The artists you’ve learned about in these blinks are some of the most influential of all time. In fact, they were so important that their genius inspires people all over the world to this day.

And, while it might not have felt this way at the time, the relationships they had with each other were a driving force of the creativity that cemented their status as legends. After all, competition between these artists pushed them well beyond what they would have been capable of on their own. In the process, these very rivalries advanced the field of art as a whole.