Why Picasso, Matisse, Hepworth, Cassatt, and Degas Thrived on Rivalry

How the Right Creative Rival Can Help You Grow as an Artist

By Thea Fiore-Bloom, PhD

You’re thinking you need a rival like you need Rabies or an IRS audit.

I mean, the last thing you want in your life is more tension.

Besides, you have friends. So why on earth would you want a rival?

Because friends can spark an idea, but rivals can leave us incandescent with inspiration.

 

Don’t get me wrong.

Close, uncompetitive friendships with fellow artists are invaluable.

But both male and female artists need challenge as well as confirmation to grow stronger.

The good news is that the kind of rival that helps good artists become great isn’t the mud-wrestling-with-Lucha-Libre-mask variety.

 “The ideal rivalry […] is not the macho cliché of sworn enemies, bitter competitors and stubborn grudge holders slugging it out for artistic and worldly supremacy, writes Sebastian Smee in his 2018 book, The Art of Rivalry (256).

Instead, Smee says, a good rival teaches you about yielding, intimacy, and openness to influence.

A spicy, charged, competitive friendship, like a rivalry, teaches artists how to fight in the service of our art.  (This comes in handy, especially for women who’ve been socialized to ‘be nice” and back down.)

“It all comes down to how you interpret rivalry,” said successful NY jeweler Barbara Klar. “If you put a negative spin on rivalries, you lose; when you see them as valuable – you win.”

So if you have a fellow artist friend who seems annoyingly competitive with you at times, you might want to rename them a rival.

Let’s discover seven unexpected ways an art rival can make your art career soar.

 

1. Your Creative Rival Releases Your Best Work Ever

A good rival can inspire us to tense our muscles and work like mad.

But a great art rival can inspire us to let it all go—to surrender our artistic inhibitions and insecurities with seemingly reckless abandon.

But the letting go is not reckless at all.

It’s required for a breakthrough.

For instance, the meticulous young Willem de Kooning was drawn to the wild and woolly, Pan-like Jackson Pollock for good reason.

Smee writes: 

“When he [de Kooning] began to pay attention to Pollock’s intoxicating attitude, his outrageous behavior, and above all, his manner of painting, he could see exactly what he was missing out on in his own work.

 

De Kooning wanted a share of this same feeling—this sense of being in his paintings, unaware of what he was doing.

Pollock’s lack of self-consciousness, the sense of unimpeded, rippling release his paintings conveyed, offered an antidote to everything, the endless revisions” (309).

De Kooning yielded to the desire to ditch the giant eraser that he had metaphorically strapped to his own back.

And when he cut it free, he broke through his old barriers and allowed himself to paint with reckless abandon, producing some of his best work.

“Growing as an artist is about allowing,” Klar said.

“If you are brave enough and self-aware enough to admit you are impacted by the art and actions of others, there’s no end to your evolution as an artist.”

 

 

 2. Your Rival Tells You Where Your Slip Is Showing

Our rival’s talent or strength in one area often can awaken us to our weakness in that same area.

Perhaps it’s a weakness we deny or flinch at when mentioned, but that we know, deep down, is the obstacle blocking our evolution.

For example, the shy, awkward but meticulous Degas probably helped the dashing, brilliant but careless Manet to become more aware of Manet’s propensity for occasionally putting things in the wrong place in paintings.

For example, Manet did things like place a right-handed guitar into the arms of a left-handed guitar player (“The Spanish Singer,” 1861) or depict wounds on the wrong side of Jesus’s body in his 1864 work “The Dead Christ.”

A rival, unlike a close friend, is allowed to offend us by making us aware of our Achilles heel.

This feels like a gum scraping without anesthesia when it’s happening.

But if we can pause and not overreact, our art can evolve to the next level, and our soul will  Salsa dance.

We may not want to make a rival our new best friend, but they can act as one of the best friends our art ever had.

3. Your Art Rival Can Gift You With Game Face

Rivals can show you that the only way out is through.

Before Klar stood in line to show pioneering NYC jeweler and gallery owner Robert Lee Morris her work at the beginning of her career, she was his acolyte.

But he became a mentor and eventually a helpful rival, all because of what happened on a certain Sunday.

“There was one Sunday a month Robert had open days. You would stand in line and get 10 minutes to show him your work,” Klar said. “If he liked it, he would invite you to sell in the gallery. I got my courage up and put myself in line with all these amazing, more established artists.

You know that moment you get yourself someplace you’re supposed to go, but then when you’re standing there, you’re thinking, ‘Oh my god, who am I to be here, in this line with artists of this caliber? I’m loosing it.’”

 

“Finally, it was my turn, said Klar. “Robert hardly looked up at me, just down at my work. It was so intimidating.

Eventually, he said:

‘Well, I kind of like it. If you did X, Y, and Z and come back, we’ll see.’”

“I was new at this so I felt rejected, devastated, depressed…then pissed.

I was walking down the sidewalk mouthing, ‘F%#@ you!’ I got home and started stomping around the studio.

And then it just came to me…this gut check …I said to myself, ‘You know what, Barbara? If this is a game, then you’re going to play.’ That day, Klar tapped into her professionalism, her courage within.

Put Your Game Face On

That Sunday, she found her game face and put it on.

 She saw Robert Lee Morris as a worthy rival and teacher, not an enemy or critic.

“That event marked the death of my naiveté. I did exactly what Robert suggested. I went back in line on the next open day.”

“He saw my work, clapped his hands, and I was taken into the gallery. For the first time in my life, I started selling a lot of my artwork, making real money. I was pumped.”

“I will always credit Robert and that gallery, Artwear, for raising our collective jewelry consciousness.

While I was there, we had a healthy rivalry, and Morris taught me about saleability—that’s an important lesson for a professional artist,” Klar said.

 

4. Your Rival Helps You Shine Light on Your Shadow

What annoys or elates us about a rival can be a treasure map to help us find our genius.

Carl Jung insisted that a trove of untapped personal creativity lies waiting for us all within our shadow.

Psychologists sometimes define the shadow as the disowned parts of ourselves we unintentionally project onto another until we claim them as our own.

Example. Let’s say I work with metal.

I casually disparage a rival artist for not soldering, but only cold joining her metalwork, leaving it beautiful but raw-looking.

Thing is, if I paid more attention to my inner dialogue, I might see I’m talking trash about her because deep down, the shadow part of me I don’t admit to, longs to experiment with raw pieces myself.

For example, I think it was a cross projection of shadow that fueled the rivalry between Matisse and Picasso.

 

Picasso vs Matisse

Both geniuses allowed themselves to alternately annoy and elate the hell out of one another for at least 18 months around 1907.

Matisse’s work was concerned with “ wholeness, stability, and calm,” while Picasso was happy with the “splintered, aggressive, and jagged,” writes Smee.

Many artists would never hold that hot cauldron of conflict with a rival for 18 minutes, never mind 18 months.

But by holding the tension of their opposites for over a year and a half, Picasso and Matisse got to the bottom of what they wanted to say in their art.

Their willingness to have a rival and their allowing for shadow to have a home in their creative process resulted in two sets of transcendent work that disrupted art history.

 

“If you’re afraid to allow, and be vulnerable and admit you are excited or even occasionally envious or depressed by the work of another,” Klar said, “you stop your own evolution as an artist.”

An artistic rival prompts helpful internal as well as external debates.

 

5. Your Rival Will Whip Up Wild Idea Salads 

The Café Guerbois was a mecca for artists and served as a debating floor for Cezanne, Manet, Renoir, Emile Zola, and other writers and artists with passionately opposing viewpoints in the 1860s.

 

Monet said this about his time there:

“Nothing could have been more interesting than those talks, with their perpetual clashes of opinion. You kept your mind on the alert, you felt encouraged to do sincere research, you laid in supplies of enthusiasm that kept you going for weeks and weeks until a project you had in mind took definite form. You always left the café feeling hardened for the struggle, with a stronger will, a sharpened purpose, and a clearer head.”

– Claude Monet

Clashes of opinion with a rival keep our minds salad zesty, curious, and stimulated.

Rivals inspire us to join the party, but they do the equally important job of showing us the door.

 

6. Your Art Rival May Show You The Door 

Klar’s jewelry rival, Morris, eventually went on to great success.

“He was a real kind of observation in how it could be for me.

“Like, you sell your line to Home Shopping Network or QVC and then eventually sell your company, become a millionaire, have stuff made in Thailand or Mexico or wherever you’re going to go,” Klar said.

 

“That, at one point in my career, was a real option, but it just didn’t fit with who I am. I didn’t have that kind of personality, and I realized for me it was more about the art and the Zen of creating.

I know it might sound clichéd, but jewelry in my world is about…love. The millionaire route didn’t give me a big thrill,” Klar said.

Yet following her heart led to her own Soho galleries, clients like Annie Lennox, Lena Horne, Joan Jett, and Bill Clinton, and enduring satisfaction springing up from her ever-changing line of personal work.

Sadly, your relationship with a worthy rival has an expiration date.

Avoid lingering in rivalries that no longer inspire you. Eventually, they stop being a catalyst and start becoming an obstacle to growth.

 

Warning: Beware of a Toxic Rival

Certain rivalries can be toxic from day one.

“There are rivalries that can go beyond the realm of ‘challenging’ and are in actuality destructive to participate in, writes psychologist Dr. Christian Jarrett.

“Rivalries should be handled with care.

Guard against obsession, and if the competition is doing you no favors, cut free, and focus on your own game.”

Honor your gut when it tells you who’s not a good candidate for a healthy rivalry.

“I don’t want to say it, because I happen to want to see the good in everybody,” Klar said, “but some artists are just addicted to creating chaos, you eventually learn the hard way—that those people have to be avoided.”

 

7. Healthy Rivalries Kick Resistance To The Curb

You can’t facet the diamond of your artistic genius without working your ass off.

And you can’t work your ass off if resistance is kicking it.

A good rivalry is one of the few forces in life that can kick resistance’s ass to the curb.

“Resistance by definition is self-sabotage,” writes Steven Pressfield in his book The War of Art.

This self-sabotage often takes the form of avoiding our work in our own special ways. (One of my fave forms of resistance is wild clutter clearing done while listening to endless audiobooks on obscure aspects of ancient Rome).

“If you’re struggling with motivation,” writes Jarrett, “it’s even possible that the introduction of a little head-to-head competition could be just what you need.”

“A certain amount of opposition is a great help to a man. Kites rise against, not with, the wind.”

– John Neal, 1850

PS: But What about Famous Female Artist Rivals?

This article sprang from my reading of  Sebastian Smee’s powerful 2017 work The Art of Rivalry, in which the author describes four charged friendships that changed the history of art.

 

Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse.

Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas

de Kooning and Jackson Pollock

Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud

You may have noticed Smee neglected to include any rival women artists in his book.

This is unfortunate because we would benefit from reading in-depth stories of great women artists whose professional differences with colleagues were viewed as epic rivalries (as opposed to “catfights,” romantic jealousy, or envy as they sometimes are).

In his intro, Smee addresses leaving women out of the text by explaining that there weren’t any rivalries, including major women artists, during the modern art period he focused on.

Really Sebastian?

I found a few.

 

The Art of Rivalry (Now With Women Added) would describe:

•  How the friendship/rivalry of Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt impacted Impressionism.
• The beneficial challenges sculptors Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore set for one another.
•  What photographers Diane Arbus and Richard Avedon derived from their creative rivalry.

I’d also love to read about beneficial rivalries between artists of color.

Know of other art, music, or dance rivals?

Let me know about your experience with rivals.

Are there artists you’d like to learn more about?

Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

 

A more polite form of this article was written by me and first published in Professional Artist Magazine.

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