Chapter 4
Manet and Degas: Marriage, Music, and Artistic Ambivalence
In late 1868, Edgar Degas painted a portrait of his good friend Edouard Manet, showing him reclining on a sofa while his wife, Suzanne, sits at a piano facing away from him. The painting's most striking feature is that a large portion of the right side has been cut out and replaced with unpainted canvas - evidence of a shocking act of vandalism by Manet himself.
After completing the portrait, Degas proudly presented it to Manet. Some time later, visiting Manet's studio, Degas discovered to his horror that someone had taken a knife to the painting, slashing right through Suzanne's face. The culprit was Manet himself. Whatever explanation Manet offered, Degas was too stunned to hear it. He simply took his damaged painting and left "without saying goodbye," returning a small still life of plums that Manet had given him with a terse note: "Monsieur, I am returning your Plums."
This violent act revealed tensions at the heart of their friendship and Manet's marriage. Unknown to most of their circle, Manet had begun a secret affair with Suzanne Leenhoff, his parents' piano teacher, when he was just nineteen. By spring 1851, she was pregnant, giving birth to their son Leon in January 1852. To avoid scandal, Manet orchestrated an elaborate deception: Leon was registered as "Koella, Leon-Edouard," supposedly Suzanne's brother rather than her son. Manet became the boy's godfather and lived a double life, shuttling between his family home and Suzanne's apartment.
Degas had first met Manet in 1861 while both were at the Louvre. Despite Degas's typically touchy nature, the encounter sparked a lasting friendship. Though they became close friends, Manet and Degas had fundamentally different artistic approaches. Degas was a disciplined draftsman who had taken to heart Ingres's advice: "Draw lines, young man, and still more lines." While Ingres represented everything Manet rebelled against, Degas revered him. Yet Degas was also influenced by Delacroix, who rejected the obsession with drawing, claiming "there are no lines in nature."
As their friendship deepened, the relationship grew increasingly complex. Degas was acutely aware of Manet's standing in their circle but could also "bask in Manet's glow" through their close connection. Beyond the cafe, their families became intertwined - Leon worked for Degas's father's bank, and both artists attended intimate musical soirees at the Degas home and at the Morisot sisters' residence.
Degas's portrait of Manet and Suzanne was not merely a marriage portrait but also a painting about music. Having become a regular at the Manet home, Degas appreciated Suzanne's brilliant musicianship. She played for guests and introduced their circle to other musicians. While Manet himself had only a casual interest in music, Degas was genuinely absorbed, holding a season ticket to the opera since age twenty.
Manet's attack on Degas's portrait may have stemmed from suspicion that Degas's bias against marriage was justified. Degas's analytical, dissecting way of looking at the world contrasted sharply with Manet's intuitive, holistic vision. The portrait laid bare this distinction in a way Manet found briefly intolerable. Yet Degas likely wasn't deliberately trying to cause damage - such dynamics are rarely conscious. Soon after slashing Degas's picture, Manet painted his own, gentler portrait of Suzanne at the same piano - perhaps an apology, perhaps a demonstration of how it should be done.
Despite this incident, their friendship and rivalry endured throughout the 1870s, addressing similar subjects with competitive spirit but growing less fraught over time. After Manet's death in 1883 from complications of syphilis, Degas missed him acutely. While no works by Degas were found in Manet's collection, Degas had amassed an extraordinary trove of Manet's works - eight paintings, fourteen drawings, and over sixty prints - revealed to the world only after his death in 1917.
Chapter 5
Matisse and Picasso: Color, Form, and the Battle for Modernity
In early 1906, Henri Matisse made his first visit to Pablo Picasso's studio, accompanied by his daughter Marguerite and the American collectors Gertrude and Leo Stein. This meeting between the thirty-six-year-old Matisse and twenty-four-year-old Picasso marked the beginning of what would become one of art history's most significant relationships, at a crucial moment in both artists' careers.
The contrast between the two men was stark. Picasso, short but solidly built, lived in a barely furnished room in the dilapidated Bateau-Lavoir with his mistress Fernande Olivier. Though not yet fluent in French, he possessed a charisma that could transform those around him. Matisse, bearded and bespectacled with a permanent vertical crease bisecting his brow, lived across Paris in more conventional circumstances with his wife and three children.
By 1906, Matisse's revolutionary work was gaining recognition despite vicious public criticism. At the Salon d'Automne, he'd been labeled "the incarnation of Disorder" and accused of creating graffiti rather than art. Yet he persisted in his studio, and his audacity attracted attention from fellow artists and key figures in the art business. His bold work "Le Bonheur de Vivre" was set to display at the Salon des Independants, and his prospects were improving - largely thanks to the Steins, who had purchased his controversial "Woman in a Hat."
Matisse initially viewed Picasso almost as a younger brother, responding with magnanimity rather than hostility despite feeling threatened by the Spaniard's brilliance. For his part, Picasso understood the importance of attending the Steins' gatherings despite the discomfort, finding refuge in their impressive art collection when conversation lagged.
Beneath his social command, Matisse was a man under enormous pressure - suffering panic attacks, nosebleeds, insomnia, and plagued by insecurities. His artistic audacity came at significant personal cost. The unprecedented nature of his color experiments frightened even him, leaving him uncertain of their validity. Part of him hoped to make Picasso a protege, adding him to followers like Derain and Braque. Yet Matisse couldn't help but notice Picasso's magnetism and enviable draftsmanship skills, recognizing that the younger artist would likely never be anyone's acolyte.
Days after visiting Picasso, Matisse exhibited his latest masterpiece, Le Bonheur de Vivre, at the Salon des Independants. This radiant Arcadian vision featured languorous nudes, embracing couples, and dancers in a paradise-like setting with ecstatically vivid colors. Initially shocking even to Leo Stein, the painting's unprecedented use of saturated color and distorted proportions bewildered most viewers. Yet Stein soon declared it "the most important work of our time."
Picasso was blindsided. He had spent months planning his own Arcadian painting, The Watering Place, featuring naked boys and horses by water. When he saw Matisse's bold innovation, he immediately abandoned his project, realizing it would appear unadventurous by comparison. What began as Matisse's noble gesture of artistic solidarity evolved into an intense competitive dynamic.
Around late 1906, Picasso began plotting a picture intended to establish his ascendancy over Matisse. Originally conceived as a sexual allegory about venereal disease, it evolved into a depiction of five prostitutes in a brothel, staring aggressively at the viewer. The work that would become Les Demoiselles d'Avignon tormented Picasso for nine months, requiring all his energy. He worked in seclusion in a second, smaller studio, mostly at night, becoming increasingly uneasy and throwing down his brushes in frustration.
Matisse finally saw the Demoiselles after returning to Paris, visiting the Bateau-Lavoir with critic-dealer Felix Feneon. His reaction was muted but bitter, reportedly saying, "A little boldness discovered in a friend's work is shared by all" - implying Picasso had stolen his ideas without fully grasping them to create something deliberately ugly. What galled Matisse most was how the Demoiselles seemed aimed directly at him - its splintered, aggressive composition opposed to his concern with wholeness and calm, its appropriation of African masks he had introduced Picasso to, and its reference to his prized Cezanne painting.
Despite the growing rivalry, the painters remained on civil terms, agreeing to exchange works in late 1907. Picasso had chosen Matisse's portrait of his daughter Marguerite, while Matisse selected a still life with jagged angles and vivid colors. Though Gertrude Stein later claimed they each chose the other's weakest work to criticize later, both paintings were actually confident pieces that each artist respected. Picasso kept the portrait of Marguerite all his life, later calling it "a key picture."
By 1913, the power dynamic had shifted dramatically. Picasso, championed by dealer Kahnweiler, Gertrude Stein, and critic Apollinaire, had established himself as the new leader of a pan-European avant-garde through the development of Cubism. Rather than lashing out, Matisse embraced aspects of Cubism, cutting back on bright colors in favor of grays, blacks, and blues while emphasizing angular geometry and simplified forms. When Picasso fell ill after his father's death that year, Matisse visited him, bringing flowers and oranges. Their reconciliation surprised many, especially when they later went horseback riding together. This pattern of yielding, twisting, overcoming, and yielding again would continue throughout their lives - a subtle martial arts dance transposed to the aesthetic realm.
Chapter 6
Pollock and de Kooning: American Ambition and Artistic Brotherhood
Outside the Cedar Tavern in Greenwich Village one night in the early 1950s, Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock sat on the curb passing a bottle back and forth. De Kooning, in his early fifties, intelligent and mischievous, told Pollock, "Jackson, you're the greatest painter in America!" Pollock, volatile and often drunk, replied, "No, Bill, you're the greatest painter in America." The exchange continued until Pollock passed out. Though cast as rivals by the growing art world, their relationship was far more complex than simple competition.
Every truly memorable success comes despite a handicap, but sometimes the handicap isn't a deficiency but an outsized talent. While Pollock struggled to overcome his manifest shortcomings as an artist, de Kooning's challenge was the opposite - a prolonged effort to set aside his native mastery. Amazingly, it was the example of the inept stumblebum Pollock that helped de Kooning, the trained virtuoso, unpick his mastery and find true originality.
De Kooning arrived in America as a brilliant draftsman with classical training from Rotterdam, but wanted to purge himself of these advantages. "I'm in my element when I am a little bit out of this world," he later said. "When I'm falling, I'm doing all right; when I'm slipping, I say, hey, this is interesting!" Meanwhile, Pollock suffered deeply from his lack of drawing aptitude compared to his brothers and classmates. His early efforts in life-drawing classes were ham-fisted and clunky. "My drawing I will tell you frankly," he wrote to his brother Charles in 1930, "is rotten it seems to lack freedom and rhythem it is cold and lifeless."
The two men first met in 1942 through an exhibition organized by artist John Graham that mixed talented American painters with better-known European modernists. Lee Krasner, who would later marry Pollock, took him to meet de Kooning at his West 21st Street studio. The encounter brought together two very different men: de Kooning with his rough Dutch drawl, Pollock with his nasal midwestern cadences. Neither was talkative, and Krasner likely carried most of the conversation. This potentially momentous first meeting between two artists who would transform twentieth-century art somehow misfired. As Krasner bluntly recalled: "I don't think either of them was very impressed."
By late 1943, Peggy Guggenheim offered Pollock his first solo show and a contract guaranteeing regular income - unprecedented for an American modernist. Though financially unsuccessful (only one drawing sold), the exhibition garnered reviews in eight major publications. Alfred Barr of MoMA purchased The She-Wolf for $650 in 1944, and after Pollock's second show in 1945, Clement Greenberg declared him "the strongest painter of his generation."
De Kooning observed Pollock's rise with envy but also excitement. At forty, eight years older than Pollock, he'd sold exactly one painting. Yet he didn't begrudge Pollock's success, admiring his independence and "contempt for people who talk." He recognized that Pollock's breakthrough could benefit them all - here was art "free of Paris" with "a disciplined American fury." "Pollock was the leader," de Kooning later acknowledged. "He was the painting cowboy, the first to get recognition...He had come much further than I. I was still seeking my way."
Inspired by Pollock's spontaneity, de Kooning began to "cut loose" in his own painting. Though still working primarily with brushes at an upright easel, he embraced a new level of spontaneity - painting wet-into-wet, utilizing drips and varying viscosities, and rotating his canvas like Pollock. The resulting black and white abstract paintings finally convinced him to make his public stand with a solo show at Charlie Egan's gallery in April 1948.
Despite being cast as rivals by critics, Pollock and de Kooning's tension soon relaxed into genuine mutual admiration. That spring, de Kooning made his first visit to Long Island to see Pollock and Krasner. The trip evidently affected him deeply - over the following years, de Kooning spent increasing time in the region before eventually moving to East Hampton, choosing a house just minutes from Pollock and Krasner, across from the cemetery where Pollock would later be buried.
In August 1949, Life magazine published a two-and-a-half-page spread titled "IS HE THE GREATEST LIVING PAINTER IN THE UNITED STATES?" featuring Pollock posing arrogantly before one of his horizontal drip paintings. This article proved pivotal not just for Pollock but for American culture, crystallizing America's postwar confidence. Pollock's paintings resonated because they were simultaneously modern, aggressive, difficult, yet also beautiful and transcendent - they looked like nothing before them.
By 1950, both artists were ascendant. Pollock had achieved unimaginable fame, while de Kooning's "Excavation" won a prize from the Art Institute of Chicago. Both represented the United States at the Venice Biennale, were collected by MoMA, and featured in popular magazines. Yet their paths diverged dramatically. De Kooning retreated from abstraction to create his aggressive "Woman" series - monstrous, big-busted figures with bared teeth. Meanwhile, Pollock began a precipitous decline, breaking three years of sobriety and descending into alcoholism.
Pollock's relationship with de Kooning deteriorated into physical confrontations. The nadir came in summer 1954 when de Kooning and Franz Kline were horsing around with an inebriated Pollock. They fell, with de Kooning landing on top of Pollock, breaking Pollock's ankle. On August 11, 1956, driving drunk with his girlfriend Ruth Kligman and her friend Edith Metzger, Pollock crashed his Oldsmobile, killing himself and Metzger instantly. Only Kligman survived.
At Pollock's funeral, de Kooning was among the last mourners to leave. Later, at Conrad Marca-Relli's home, when Pollock's dogs wandered in, de Kooning declared, "I saw Jackson in his grave. And he's dead. It's over. I'm number one." Yet moments later, he was discovered weeping in the garden. Though de Kooning was now undisputedly "number one," he behaved as if still needing to prove himself. Within a year of Pollock's death, he began an affair with Ruth Kligman, shocking their friends. As one observer noted, this "really put the stone on Jackson's grave."
Chapter 7
The Paradox of Artistic Influence: Finding Your Voice Through Others
What emerges most powerfully from these four stories is the paradoxical nature of artistic influence. Each relationship reveals how creative breakthroughs often come not from isolation but from deep engagement with another artist's vision - followed by a necessary separation. This pattern of attraction, absorption, and ultimate independence forms the backbone of artistic development.
The most productive artistic relationships combine admiration with ambivalence. Freud was "in thrall" to Bacon's spontaneous brilliance while maintaining his commitment to patient observation. Degas absorbed Manet's modernity while rejecting his surface-oriented approach. Picasso appropriated aspects of Matisse's innovations while deliberately moving in an opposite direction. De Kooning embraced Pollock's freedom while maintaining his connection to traditional painting skills.
In each case, the artists needed something from each other that they couldn't provide for themselves. Their relationships created a space where they could simultaneously learn from and push against another powerful creative force. This dynamic tension proved far more productive than either pure emulation or complete isolation would have been.
Smee's book ultimately suggests that finding your artistic voice isn't about avoiding influence but about engaging with it deeply enough to discover your own path through and beyond it. The greatest artists don't emerge fully formed in isolation - they develop through intense relationships that both nurture and challenge them. As Picasso once said of his relationship with Matisse: "You have got to be able to picture side by side everything Matisse and I were doing at that time. No one has ever looked at Matisse's painting more carefully than I; and no one has looked at mine more carefully than he."
These rivalries remind us that creative breakthroughs rarely happen in isolation. They emerge from the friction between different sensibilities, from the productive tension of influence and resistance. The story of modern art isn't just about individual genius but about the complex web of relationships that shaped each artist's development. In these intimate rivalries, we find not just the story of four pairs of artists but a deeper truth about creativity itself - that our most significant work often emerges from our most challenging relationships.
