“Manet/Degas” features work by two of the pinnacles of 19th-century painting, which is to say, two of the pinnacles of painting. You can’t go wrong with a subject like that, and the Met hasn’t: it’s a crowd-pleaser that’s also genuinely illuminating. It’s surprising, then, that the museum can boast that this is the “first major exhibition” considering the mutually fascinated duo.
To translate the pairing into 20th-century terms, it’s not like Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, who were the subject of a great MoMA exhibition back in 1989. Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas were never in any sense collaborators “roped together like mountain climbers,” as Braque recalled of the Cubist era. They were comparable, rather, to Picasso and Henri Matisse: rivals who could hardly take their wary yet admiring eyes off each other.
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Manet and Degas are inseparable from the great historical phenomenon we call Impressionism, yet both are somehow tangential to it. Manet was considered the movement’s progenitor, yet he never took part in its exhibitions, preferring to take his stand in the official French Salons—“the real field of battle,” he believed—no matter if his works were, like most Impressionists’, sometimes rejected. Degas, by contrast, ceased submitting his work to the Salons and enthusiastically took part in the renegade Impressionist shows. Moreover, if by “Impressionism” one means the plein-air landscapes of Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, and Alfred Sisley, as one often does, then the label is evidently ill-suited to Manet and Degas. Both of them, in the spirit of their elders like Gustave Courbet, the prophet of Realism, and Honoré Daumier, who turned social commentary into high art, were painters of modern urban life.
And we don’t often think of Manet and Degas as a pair. One reason is that, while they were born only two years apart—Manet in 1832, Degas in 1834—Degas lived much longer: Manet was just 51 when he died, Degas lived to the age of 83. And then there’s politics: Manet a man of the left, Degas a conservative who, at the time of the 1894 Dreyfus affair, was revealed to be a repulsive anti-Semite. Moreover, Manet flourished early, artistically: He painted many of his best-known works in his thirties—Olympia and Le déjeuner sur l’herbe both date from 1863, for example—whereas Degas really hit his stride a little later, I’d say around 1870.
Maybe that’s why Manet can seem further away from us. The snapshot-like compositions of some of Degas’s paintings and pastels, not to mention the proto-readymade gesture of clothing the bronze Little Dancer with a real skirt and hair ribbon, connect directly with the modernism of the 20th century, while Manet remains a man of the mid-19th. The painter-critic Jacques-Émile Blanche would write in 1924 that “Degas’ speculative and inductive intellect is much closer than that of Manet to the ideal of those painters to whose futures we look confidently.”
By the same token, however, Manet’s reputation is indisputably that of the innovator who sparked the whole course of modern art: Pierre Bourdieu was not the only one to have called him a revolutionary, whereas Degas was a modernist despite his own resistance to it. He insisted on the fundamental significance of drawing while his Impressionist colleagues reserved that role for color.
Co-curated by Stephan Wolohojian and Ashley Dunn in collaboration with Laurence des Cars, Isolde Pludermacher, and Stéphane Guégan, and previously shown at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the exhibition is a compare/contrast exercise effectively focusing its attention on the two artists’ approaches to related themes and subject matter: portraiture, seascapes, horse racing, the women of Paris, and so on. We witness too their shared apprenticeship to the old masters on view in the Louvre, and learn of their ambiguous fascination with the Salon on the one hand and their Impressionist colleagues on the other, as well as their responses to the American Civil War and other conflicts.
And yet what emerges most vividly from the exhibition is what the curators leave essentially tacit: the fundamental difference in style, or rather, in the feeling for paint itself, between the two artists. Manet, it seems, was entranced by the physicality of paint, its tactility and manipulability, which he never hesitated to showcase. For this reason, he never tried to cultivate the impeccable (and therefore invisible) finish that was so beloved by the artistic establishment with which he never ceased to contend.
By contrast, Degas, a draftsman through and through, appreciated paint for its fluidity—its blurrings and blendings and suffusions (no wonder he was the master of pastel!), tending toward a kind of atmospheric quality—more than as palpable matière. And yet, paradoxically, what Degas depicted with that almost bodiless flow of color retained its volumetric solidity, where the implacable presence of Manet’s tangible brush marks seems to aspire to the flatness of what would later become mainstream modernism.
Although the critics of his day attacked Manet for painting mere morceaux—bits and pieces—one realizes from the comparison with Degas that he was, on the contrary, an aspirant (usually successful) to the masterpiece. Think of such touchstone works as, most notably, Le déjeuner sur l’herbe (here, a full-scale sketch from the Courtauld Gallery, London, stands in for the finished painting), Olympia (on display for the first time in the United States), The Execution of Maximilian (we see the version, on loan from the National Gallery, London, that Manet’s family cut into pieces after the artist’s death, that were that were later reassembled by Degas, and are now owned by the National Gallery), and A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (not in this exhibition). None of Degas’s works is an isolated cynosure in that way. He was, albeit very differently from Monet, a painter of series rather than of unique statement pieces.
I don’t mean to assert Manet’s superiority. Gun to my head, I’d even admit a preference for Degas, thanks to his emphasis on the transitory over monumentality. But the exhibition’s melancholy last room, devoted to Degas’s collection of art by his departed friend and rival, suggests a kind of haunting, as if there were something in Manet’s art that Degas could neither internalize nor reject. As for Manet, none of his contemporaries ever stirred that kind of fascination in him. Velázquez may have been the only rival he recognized.