The Brooklyn Rail

Édouard Manet (1832–1883) and Edgar Degas (1834–1917), Parisian contemporaries, were sometimes friends. And of course, as Impressionists both men portrayed the subjects Charles Baudelaire laid out in his influential 1863 essay “The Painter of Modern Life”: café scenes and popular entertainments; wars and domestic political events; and depictions of contemporary dress. With more than 160 paintings and works on paper on display, and a fully illustrated catalogue with scholarly essays, Manet/Degas is a classical blockbuster, a massive crowd-pleasing display of two painters who have often been presented at the Met. I am old enough to recall fondly the 1983 exhibition Manet 1832-1883, and the large Degas survey from 1988. Gathering some of the works from these prior exhibitions, Manet/Degas is advertised as something new—a dialogue between these two artists. And for the very first time, Manet’s Olympia (1863-65), his most celebrated work, has come to America. Possibly, then, the model here was MoMA’s Pioneering Modern Painting: Cézanne and Pissarro 1865–1885 in 2005, which set the duo’s paintings of various motifs side by side, and offered, in the catalogue, an ambitious theory of their relationship.

There might seem to be a rationale for the pairing in this show: Manet and Degas worked within the same French tradition, in opposition to the Salon painters, and early on they copied some of the same artists. Compare Manet, Copy after Delacroix’s “Bark of Dante” (ca. 1859) with Degas’s The Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople, after Delacroix (ca. 1860). But when Manet was doing Olympia, Degas was making his singularly odd history painting Scene of War in the Middle Ages (ca. 1865) and his double portrait, Edmondo and Thérèse Morbilli (ca. 1865). No Degas work has anything like the in-your-face erotic presence of Olympia. You need only compare his Interior (1868–69), generally said to be the scene of a rape, to Manet’s Nana (1877), with that frisky, young eye-catching woman dressing before her aged sugar daddy, to see two dramatically different images of posh, nineteenth-century heterosexuality. In short, such contrasts exist but there is no particular dialogue visible between the artworks displayed or identified in the catalogue. Manet and Degas were simply very different painters, as different as Delacroix and Ingres, to compare them to their illustrious precursors. The closest they naturally occur—Degas’s Beach Scene (1869–70) versus Manet’s On the Beach, Boulogne-sur-Mer (1868) and their rival cafe scenes, Degas, In a Café (The Absinthe Drinker) (1875–76), and Manet, Plum Brandy (ca. 1877)—happens when they deal with similar themes. Usually, however, Manet and Degas present very different subjects.

As the catalogue usefully indicates, while Manet, a cautious leftist, was an avowed republican, Degas was a dogmatic conservative who after the American Civil War visited his relatives in New Orleans; his great A Cotton Office in New Orleans (1873) records that scene. Ironically, while Degas’s mother had cousins who were prominent free men of color, Degas never mentioned his African American cousins, and only once depicted a Black woman. By contrast, Laure, the Black woman in Olympia, has recently been much discussed. But I hesitate to attribute their artistic differences to politics. Rather, we find in Degas’s domestic scenes, Family Portrait (The Bellelli Family) (1858–69) and also Sulking (ca. 1870) a desperate alienation never presented by Manet.

Perhaps we can begin to understand the relationship of these different painters by considering the stories of two partly destroyed paintings. Degas’s Monsieur and Madame Édouard Manet (1868–69) so offended Manet that he cut off and destroyed the right portion, which depicted his wife. What did he so dislike? That isn’t clear. On the other hand, later when one version of Manet’s The Execution of Maximilian (1867–68) was cut into pieces, in an act of political censorship, Degas reassembled that work. When Degas, who long outlived Manet, put together his private museum, he gathered a number of his dead rival’s artworks. Degas, it might seem, cared more for Manet’s painting than the political issues that separated them. And if that claim is correct, it identifies a real tribute to their friendship.

But that is just speculation. And as it stands, this is a show in search of a governing thesis. Crowded with too many minor works, it presents juxtapositions that just aren’t revealing. That Manet and Degas worked at the same time, and knew each other, does not by itself create a visual dialogue. Perhaps they simply were two very different painters. Of course, no exhibition including Olympia (1863–65) could fail to be immensely pleasurable. There is no comparable work by Degas and, in honesty, no equally impressive other painting by Manet on display. In his treatise Only A Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art (2007) the Princeton philosopher Alexander Nehamas asserts of Olympia that:

The painting’s magnetism is undeniable, and obvious even to those who dislike it. It attracts its viewers and doesn’t let them go, remaining incomprehensible, and while it intimates that all they need in order to put everything in it together is one more look, it refuses to yield to them just as Olympia herself seems somehow impervious to the fictional observer—perhaps a client?—who may be supposed to be standing in front of her.

Now, as was true when she was first shown, this remains a singular image.