Turner v Constable: Tate Britain’s exhibition evokes a long history of artistic rivalries J. M. W. Turner

“HJohn Constable said of JMW Turner: “Here I was and I fired a gun.” An exchange of gunfire between these two giants would make a good scene in a film of their lives, but in fact all Turner did at the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1832 was add a touch of red to the seascape, to distract attention from Constable’s painting next to it.

It was the hottest moment in what seems to us a struggle on land and sea for supremacy in British art. It is impossible not to see the new dual direction of Tate Britain’s work in this way. For it is a universally acknowledged truth, to paraphrase their contemporary Jane Austen, that when two great artists live at the same time, they must be bitter and merciless rivals. But is this really true, and does it help or hinder creativity?

Renaissance sculptor Benvenuto Cellini literally shot, blowing a man to death at point-blank range with an arquebus. But when he considered killing his rival Baccio Bandinelli, whom he claimed was “full of evil” and whose statue of Hercules looked “like a sack of watermelon,” it was with his trusty dagger. Cellini spotted Bandinelli across a quiet piazza, according to his autobiography, and reached for his blade to end their competition for the Medici patronage with a single knife stroke—but he was spared.

It’s just an intense moment recorded between Renaissance artists. In fact the story of the Renaissance can be told as a series of rivalries: Cimabue vs. Giotto, Bellini vs. Giorgione, Michelangelo vs. Raphael, Michelangelo vs. Bramante, Michelangelo vs. Titian and of course Michelangelo vs. Leonardo da Vinci. Michelangelo, the runner’s opponent, humiliates Leonardo by telling him in front of others that he is a failure: “You are the one who promised to make a bronze horse in Milan and were unable to do it.” Leonardo retaliated when he called for Michelangelo’s David to be made “decent” to wear bronze underpants.

When Artemisia Gentileschi moved to Naples, she had to obtain a weapons license in a very difficult city, which had an art mafia known as the Cabal that violently threatened competitors. In 1621, a gang led by the painter Giuseppe di Ribera severely injured the visiting artist’s assistant Guido Reni to scare him away from Naples. She may have fatally poisoned Domenichino, another outsider who received a large commission.

You can’t really call that healthy competition. But in Renaissance Italy it was thought that competition was constructive, with artists leading one another on: and given the works they produced, there may be something to the theory. Michelangelo’s most creative encounter was with Titian. He once said that a Venetian painter would be really good, if only he could paint. Despite this snide remark, the two artists mutually influenced each other, with Titian borrowing the pose of Michelangelo’s “Night” for his nude “Danie,” and Michelangelo rivaling the color and space of Titian’s “The Last Judgment.”

Such epic rivalries have occurred in modern times. After Francis Bacon’s death in 1992, Lucian Freud flourished, creating his huge, heroic nudes of Lee Bowery and Sue Tilly. They were friends, and on Bacon’s part it was perhaps out of love, but there was some sense in it that terrified the younger man in Bacon’s brilliance. With Picasso and Matisse, it was the opposite: after Matisse’s death, Picasso’s art became flabby. They have been pushing and pulling each other in competition for decades, ever since Matisse gave Picasso a painting in 1907, and Picasso was rumored to have used it as a dartboard.

However, such major creative tensions run counter to the opposite tendency of contemporary artists to bond together. Were there undercurrents of rivalry between Monet and Renoir, Dali and Magritte, Pollock and de Kooning? Perhaps, but the vanguards from the Impressionists onwards saw themselves as bands of friends united against the bourgeois enemy. When Gauguin and Van Gogh fell out, it was not because of rivalry, but because of Vincent’s illness. Picasso, although a rival to Matisse, collaborated harmoniously with Braque to create Cubism.

This belief that artists should be collaborators rather than competing enemies is quite prevalent. The 2019 Turner Prize nominees even chose to share the award “as a group.” It was charming, but what would Turner, let alone Michelangelo, say? Being removed from the competition makes the Turner Prize seem pointless. Maybe this is why there are no artistic heroes anymore.

Artistic competition goes to the heart of critical discrimination. T. S. Eliot said that a person who loves all poetry will be very boring when talking about poetry. The double galleries that bring up age-old rivalries are not superficial, but they help us all be critics and understand that love means choice. If you came away from Turner and Constable admiring both artists, you probably didn’t really feel that way. And if you prefer Constable, it’s Pistols at Dawn.