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This is a story about rivalry among artists. Not the kind of rivalry that grows out of hatred and dislike, but rather, rivalry that emerges from admiration, friendship, love. The kind of rivalry that existed between Degas and Manet, Picasso and Matisse, Pollock and de Kooning, and Freud and Bacon. These were some of the most famous and creative relationships in the history of art, driving each individual to heights of creativity and inspiration - and provoking them to despair, jealousy and betrayal. Matisse's success threatened Picasso so much that his friends would throw darts at a portrait of his rival's beloved daughter Marguerite, shouting 'there's one in the eye for Matisse!' And Willem de Kooning's twisted friendship with Jackson Pollock didn't stop him taking up with his friend's lover barely a year after Pollock's fatal car crash. In The Art of Rivalry, Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic Sebastian Smee explores how, as both artists struggled to come into their own, they each played vital roles in provoking the other's creative breakthroughs - ultimately determining the course of modern art itself.
We live in an age of constant distraction. Is there a price to pay for this? In this superb essay, renowned critic Sebastian Smee explores the fate of the inner life in the age of the internet. Throughout history, artists and thinkers have cultivated the deep self, and seen value in solitude and reflection. But today, with social media, wall-to-wall marketing and the agitation of modern life, everything feels illuminated, made transparent. We feel bereft without our phones and their cameras and the feeling of instant connectivity. It gets hard to pick up a book, harder still to stay with it. Without nostalgia or pessimism, Sebastian Smee evokes what is valuable and worth cultivating: he guides us from the apparent fullness of the app-filled world towards a more complex sense of self, and the inner life. If we lose this, Smee asks, what do we lose of ourselves? “Every day I spend hours and hours on my phone ... We are all doing it, aren’t we? It has come to feel completely normal. Even when I put my device aside and attach it to a charger, it pulses away in my mind, like the throat of a toad, full of blind, amphibian appetite.”––Sebastian Smee, Net Loss
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This volume, with more than 400 reproductions, will be the most comprehensive publication to date on Lucian Freud, covering a span of seventy years and including many works not previously reproduced. The result is a corpus of great works that reveal him to be the premier heir today of Rembrandt, Courbet, and Cézanne. The book includes not only Freud’s paintings but also his sketches, woodcuts, and powerful etchings. While the bulk of his paintings are female nudes, his cityscapes, plant studies, and interiors, executed in his distinctive muted palette and visible brushwork, are all included. Freud, who has lived in London ever since his family left Berlin in 1933 when he was ten, has achi...
British artist Lucian Freud is widely considered the most important figurative painter working today. His portraits may be physically unflattering to their subjects, but they are honest, frank, and unapologetic.
"This volume charts Freud's work on paper, including the etchings, over his entire career. It features the formative early work, the sketches in preparation for painting his masterpiece, Large Interior W11 (after Watteau) (1983), the sketches of the completed painting in the studio and the astonishing later studies of his mother. The book ends with the etchings of recent years"--Jacket, p. [2].
In 1964 Lucian Freud set his students at the Norwich College of Art an assignment: to paint naked self-portraits and to make them "revealing, telling, believable ... really shameless." It was advice that the artist was often to follow himself. Visceral, unflinching and often nude, Freud's self-portraits chart his biography and give us an insight into the development of his style. These paintings provide the viewer with a constant reminder of the artist's overwhelming presence, whether he is confronting the viewer directly or only present as a shadow or in a reflection. Freud's exploration of the self-portrait is unexpected and wide-ranging. In this volume, essays by leading authorities, including those who knew him, explore Freud's life and work, and analyze the importance of self-portraiture in his practice.
The Brown Sisters presents a photographic project as compelling in effect as it is simple in conception: four women, 25 years. Each year since 1975 photographer Nicholas Nixon has made a group portrait of his wife and her three sisters facing the camera in the same order: Heather, Mimi, Bebe, and Laurie. The series now measures a quarter century in the lives of the sisters, who in 1975 ranged in age from 15 to 25; each picture is dense with allusions to the year of experience that separates it from the one before.
Lucian Freud is not only the most celebrated artist working in England, but one of the most private. He has frequently stated his reluctance to be photographed and he has almost never agreed to be interviewed. Following the publication of the last ten years of his work by Jonathan Cape in the autumn of 2005, the painter has agreed to talk to Sebastian Smee, a writer on art whom he greatly respects, in a series of conversations rather than formal interviews. He wants to talk about painting itself, the demands of his own work and the painters he admires. Two photographers have had access to Freud's studio. The late Bruce Bernard was a friend for many years and the subject of two of Freud's pai...
The glazed terracotta technique invented by Luca della Robbia, along with his exceptional skill as a sculptor, placed him firmly in the first rank of Renaissance artists in the fifteenth century. This quintessentially Florentine art - taking the form of dazzling multicoloured ornaments for major buildings, delicately modelled and ingeniously constructed freestanding statues, serene blue-and-white devotional reliefs, charming portraits of children, and commanding busts of rulers, along with decorative and liturgical objects - flowed in abundance from the Della Robbia workshops for a hundred years. Developed further by each generation, the closely held technique achieved new heights of refinem...