Books by Sebastian Smee

Paris in Ruins: Love, War, and the Birth of Impressionism

by Sebastian Smee

The Pulitzer Prize–winning art critic’s gripping account of the “Terrible Year” in Paris and its monumental impact on the rise of Impressionism.
From the summer of 1870 to the spring of 1871, famously dubbed the “Terrible Year” by Victor Hugo, Paris and its people were besieged, starved, and forced into surrender by Germans―then imperiled again as radical republicans established a breakaway Commune, ultimately crushed by the French Army after bloody street battles and the burning of central Paris. As renowned art critic Sebastian Smee shows, it was against the backdrop of these tumultuous times that the Impressionist movement was born―in response to violence, civil war, and political intrigue.
In stirring and exceptionally vivid prose, Smee tells the story of those dramatic days through the eyes of great figures of Impressionism. Édouard Manet, Berthe Morisot, and Edgar Degas were trapped in Paris during the siege and deeply enmeshed in its politics. Others, including Pierre-August Renoir and Frédéric Bazille, joined regiments outside of the capital, while Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro fled the country just in time. In the aftermath, these artists developed a newfound sense of the fragility of life. That feeling for transience―reflected in Impressionism’s emphasis on fugitive light, shifting seasons, glimpsed street scenes, and the impermanence of all things―became the movement’s great contribution to the history of art.
At the heart of it all is a love story; that of Manet, by all accounts the father of Impressionism, and Morisot, the only woman to play a central role in the movement from the start. Smee poignantly depicts their complex relationship, their tangled effect on each other, and their great legacy, while bringing overdue attention to the woman at the heart of Impressionism.
Incisive and absorbing, Paris in Ruins captures the shifting passions and politics of the art world, revealing how the pressures of the siege and the chaos of the Commune had a profound impact on modern art, and how artistic genius can emerge from darkness and catastrophe. 8 page insert, 20 color images

The Art of Rivalry: Four Friendships, Betrayals, and Breakthroughs in Modern Art

by Sebastian Smee

Pulitzer Prize–winning art critic Sebastian Smee tells the fascinating story of four pairs of artists—Manet and Degas, Picasso and Matisse, Pollock and de Kooning, Freud and Bacon—whose fraught, competitive friendships spurred them to new creative heights.

Rivalry is at the heart of some of the most famous and fruitful relationships in history. The Art of Rivalry follows eight celebrated artists, each linked to a counterpart by friendship, admiration, envy, and ambition. All eight are household names today. But to achieve what they did, each needed the influence of a contemporary—one who was equally ambitious but possessed sharply contrasting strengths and weaknesses.

Edouard Manet and Edgar Degas were close associates whose personal bond frayed after Degas painted a portrait of Manet and his wife. Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso swapped paintings, ideas, and influences as they jostled for the support of collectors like Leo and Gertrude Stein and vied for the leadership of a new avant-garde. Jackson Pollock’s uninhibited style of “action painting” triggered a breakthrough in the work of his older rival, Willem de Kooning. After Pollock’s sudden death in a car crash, de Kooning assumed Pollock's mantle and became romantically involved with his late friend’s mistress. Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon met in the early 1950s, when Bacon was being hailed as Britain’s most exciting new painter and Freud was working in relative obscurity. Their intense but asymmetrical friendship came to a head when Freud painted a portrait of Bacon, which was later stolen.

Each of these relationships culminated in an early flashpoint, a rupture in a budding intimacy that was both a betrayal and a trigger for great innovation. Writing with the same exuberant wit and psychological insight that earned him a Pulitzer Prize for art criticism, Sebastian Smee explores here the way that coming into one’s own as an artist—finding one’s voice—almost always involves willfully breaking away from some intimate’s expectations of who you are or ought to be.

Praise for The Art of Rivalry

“Gripping . . . Mr. Smee’s skills as a critic are evident throughout. He is persuasive and vivid. . . . You leave this book both nourished and hungry for more about the art, its creators and patrons, and the relationships that seed the ground for moments spent at the canvas.”—The New York Times

“With novella-like detail and incisiveness [Sebastian Smee] opens up the worlds of four pairs of renowned artists. . . . Each of his portraits is a biographical gem. . . . The Art of Rivalry is a pure, informative delight, written with canny authority.”—The Boston Globe

The Art of Rivalry: Four Friendships, Betrayals, and Breakthroughs in Modern Art

by Sebastian Smee

Pulitzer Prize–winning art critic Sebastian Smee tells the fascinating story of four pairs of artists—Manet and Degas, Picasso and Matisse, Pollock and de Kooning, Freud and Bacon—whose fraught, competitive friendships spurred them to new creative heights.

Rivalry is at the heart of some of the most famous and fruitful relationships in history. The Art of Rivalry follows eight celebrated artists, each linked to a counterpart by friendship, admiration, envy, and ambition. All eight are household names today. But to achieve what they did, each needed the influence of a contemporary—one who was equally ambitious but possessed sharply contrasting strengths and weaknesses.

Edouard Manet and Edgar Degas were close associates whose personal bond frayed after Degas painted a portrait of Manet and his wife. Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso swapped paintings, ideas, and influences as they jostled for the support of collectors like Leo and Gertrude Stein and vied for the leadership of a new avant-garde. Jackson Pollock’s uninhibited style of “action painting” triggered a breakthrough in the work of his older rival, Willem de Kooning. After Pollock’s sudden death in a car crash, de Kooning assumed Pollock's mantle and became romantically involved with his late friend’s mistress. Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon met in the early 1950s, when Bacon was being hailed as Britain’s most exciting new painter and Freud was working in relative obscurity. Their intense but asymmetrical friendship came to a head when Freud painted a portrait of Bacon, which was later stolen.

Each of these relationships culminated in an early flashpoint, a rupture in a budding intimacy that was both a betrayal and a trigger for great innovation. Writing with the same exuberant wit and psychological insight that earned him a Pulitzer Prize for art criticism, Sebastian Smee explores here the way that coming into one’s own as an artist—finding one’s voice—almost always involves willfully breaking away from some intimate’s expectations of who you are or ought to be.

Praise for The Art of Rivalry

“Gripping . . . Mr. Smee’s skills as a critic are evident throughout. He is persuasive and vivid. . . . You leave this book both nourished and hungry for more about the art, its creators and patrons, and the relationships that seed the ground for moments spent at the canvas.”—The New York Times

“With novella-like detail and incisiveness [Sebastian Smee] opens up the worlds of four pairs of renowned artists. . . . Each of his portraits is a biographical gem. . . . The Art of Rivalry is a pure, informative delight, written with canny authority.”—The Boston Globe

Lucian Freud: The Self-portraits

by Sebastian Smee, David Dawson, Jasper Sharp, Joseph Koerner

The artist stripped bare by himself: Lucian Freud’s self-portraits redefine the genre
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.

Lucian Freud was born in Germany in 1922, and permanently relocated to London in 1933 during the ascent of the Nazi regime. After seeing brief service during World War II, Freud had his first solo exhibition in 1944 at the Alex Reid & Lefevre Gallery in London. Despite exhibiting only occasionally over the course of his career, Freud's 1995 portrait Benefits Supervisor Sleeping was sold at auction, at Christie's New York in May 2008, for $33.6 million, setting a world record for sale value of a painting by a living artist. Freud died in London in 2011.

Mark Bradford (Phaidon Contemporary Artists Series)

by Sebastian Smee, Anita Hill, Cornelia H. Butler

The first comprehensive study of the work of one of the most significant abstract painters of his generation.
This timely entry in the Contemporary Artists series focuses on Mark Bradford, the Los Angeles-based artist best known for his large-scale abstract paintings that examine the class, race, and gender-based economies that structure urban society. His collages and installations, made of materials scavenged from the streets, have created a unique body of work that still stands as a strong response to the impromptu networks that emerge within a city. In this new title, his life and work are explored as never before.

Paris in Ruins Love, War, and the Birth of Impressionism

by Sebastian Smee

From the summer of 1870 to the spring of 1871, famously dubbed the "Terrible Year" by Victor Hugo, Paris and its people were besieged, starved, and forced into surrender by Germans--then imperiled again as radical republicans established a breakaway Commune, ultimately crushed by the French Army after bloody street battles and the burning of central Paris. As renowned art critic Sebastian Smee shows, it was against the backdrop of these tumultuous times that the Impressionist movement was born--in response to violence, civil war, and political intrigue.

In stirring and exceptionally vivid prose, Smee tells the story of those dramatic days through the eyes of great figures of Impressionism. Édouard Manet, Berthe Morisot, and Edgar Degas were trapped in Paris during the siege and deeply enmeshed in its politics. Others, including Pierre-August Renoir and Frédéric Bazille, joined regiments outside of the capital, while Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro fled the country just in time. In the aftermath, these artists developed a newfound sense of the fragility of life. That feeling for transience--reflected in Impressionism's emphasis on fugitive light, shifting seasons, glimpsed street scenes, and the impermanence of all things--became the movement's great contribution to the history of art.

At the heart of it all is a love story; that of Manet, by all accounts the father of Impressionism, and Morisot, the only woman to play a central role in the movement from the start. Smee poignantly depicts their complex relationship, their tangled effect on each other, and their great legacy, while bringing overdue attention to the woman at the heart of Impressionism.

Incisive and absorbing, Paris in Ruins captures the shifting passions and politics of the art world, revealing how the pressures of the siege and the chaos of the Commune had a profound impact on modern art, and how artistic genius can emerge from darkness and catastrophe.

Freud

by Sebastian Smee

Lucian Freud (1922-2011) was interested in the telling of truths. Always operating outside the main currents of 20th-century art, the esteemed portrait painter observed his subjects with the regimen and precision of a laboratory scientist. He recorded not only the blotches, bruises, and swellings of the living body, but also, beneath the flaws and folds of flesh, the microscopic details of what lies within: the sensation, the emotion, the intelligence, the bloom, and the inevitable, unstoppable decay.

Despite rejecting parallels between him and his renowned grandfather, the correlation between Lucian Freud's sitting process for portraiture and Sigmund Freud's psychotherapy sessions is a fascinating element to this figurative oeuvre. Despite the thickness of the impasto surfaces, Freud's portraits of subjects as varied as the Queen, Kate Moss, and an obese job center supervisor penetrate the physicality of the body with a direct and often disarming insight. The result is as much a psychological interrogation as it is an uneasy examination of the relationship between artist and model.

This book brings together some of Freud's most outstanding and unapologetic portraits, to introduce an artist widely considered one of the finest masters of the human form.