The Art of Rivalry

Intriguing ... Smee writes beautifully ... tantalising -- Lynn Barber * Sunday Times *
Elegant ... accomplished -- Michael Prodger * The Times *
Lively and engaging -- Kathryn Hughes * Mail on Sunday *
A fascinating examination ... This is art history as human friction - one in the eye for those who think art is a high-minded enterprise. * Tatler *
The keynotes of Sebastian Smee's criticism have always included a fine feeling for the what of art - he knows how to evoke the way pictures really strike the eye - and an equal sense of the how of art: how art emerges from the background of social history. To these he now adds a remarkable capacity for getting down the who of art - the enigma of artist's personalities, and the way that, two at a time, they can often intersect to reshape each in the other¹s image. With these gifts all on the page together, The Art of Rivalry gives us a remarkable and engrossing book on pretty much the whole of art. * Adam Gopnik *
A magnificent book on the relationships at the roots of artistic genius. Smee offers a gripping tale of the fine line between friendship and competition, tracing how the ties that torment us most are often the ones that inspire us most. * Adam Grant, Wharton professor and New York Times bestselling author of Originals and Give and Take *
Modern art's major pairs of frenemies are a subject so fascinating, it's strange to have a book on it only now - and a stroke of luck, for us, that the author is Sebastian Smee. He brings the perfect combination of artistic taste and human understanding, and a prose style as clear as spring water, to the drama and occasional comedy of men who inspired and annoyed one another to otherwise inexplicable heights of greatness. * Peter Schjeldahl, art critic of the New Yorker *
One of those rare books that manages to show,convincingly, the exalted stuff of genius emerging from the low chaos of life * Economist *