About me
Sebastian Smee is an art critic for the Washington Post and the author of Paris in Ruins: Love, War and the Birth of Impressionism (Norton) and The Art of Rivalry: Four Friendships, Betrayals, and Breakthroughs in Modern Art (Random House). He won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism while at the Boston Globe in 2011, after being runner up in 2008.
The Art of Rivalry, which was reviewed positively in the New York Times, the Atlantic and the New Yorker, came out in 2016 and has been translated into a dozen languages.
In Australia, Smee worked as the art critic for both the Sydney Morning Herald and the Australian. Living in the UK between 2000 and 2004, he worked for the Daily Telegraph, The Art Newspaper, The Guardian, The Independent, The Times, The Financial Times, Prospect, and The Spectator.
He was awarded the Rabkin Prize for art journalism in 2018 and was a MacDowell Fellow in 2021. He taught the Garis Seminar for Creative Non-fiction at Wellesley College between 2010 and 2022. He has authored books on Mark Bradford and Lucian Freud and contributed essays to books on an array of other artists.