Why It Takes a Great Rivalry to Produce Great Art

From an early age we’re told to be nice, play well with others, color inside the lines, and be cooperative and respectful to those around us. Yet it doesn’t take too long—high school or one’s first job—to realize that this ideal state of social harmony rarely exists in the world. And, that being nice may actually hurt you. Indeed, rivalry seems to make the world go round.
 The Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Sebastian Smee, while not avoiding the personal, is interested in this larger question in his new book The Art of Rivalry in which he considers how the making of art develops and evolves out of the collision between rival artists. The pun in his title suggests that he’s interested in looking at the work that results from the personal and artistic relationships of his four pairs of modern painters: Francis Bacon and Lucien Freud; Edgar Degas and Édouard Manet; Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse; Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning.
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