The Brooklyn Rail

Once in a blue moon, an exhibition as enthralling as Manet/Degas comes along. You wonder why it’s never been done before. Currently, more than 160 paintings, pastels, drawings, and prints by these two Parisians are on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Most were executed during a forty-year period beginning in the 1850s. You’ll find much-loved masterpieces from the second half of the nineteenth century as well as work that was on view in 1994 when the Met mounted Origins of Impressionism. Somehow, that movement has hardly been mentioned this autumn. Instead, the traditional roots of these two singular artists are being emphasized rather than their relationship to the avant-garde. At the Met, you’ll find portraits, including single figures and all sorts of groups, history paintings, still-lifes, nudes, musicians, ballet dancers, hat shops, cafes, seaside scenes, and horse races.

When push comes to shove, Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas are as unlikely a pair as Mutt and Jeff or Jack Sprat who could eat no fat and his wife who could eat no lean. At times, they seem like polar opposites. Manet can be assertive, while Degas is more low-key. Manet’s world is light-filled and vibrant; Degas’s, somber and downbeat. As they listen to music being played, go boating, pose post-performance, and gaze alluringly, Manet’s figures seem to enjoy what they are doing. Degas’s men and women can be stern and anxious: check out the troubled face of the Duchess of Morbilli (ca. 1865), or the way the father in the Bellelli family (ca. 1858–69) turns his back to viewers, or how, in La Source (1867-68), Mademoiselle Fiocre supports her head with an unballet-like gesture. Manet’s colors, even his blacks, are strong and punchy; often, Degas’s compositions are so pale, you feel as if you are looking through a scrim. Then, there’s the matter of Manet’s swashbuckling brushstrokes versus Degas’s more reserved surfaces.

In an exhibition predicated on a compare and contrast format, nothing could be more revealing than the two oil paintings for which actress Ellen Andrée posed during the mid-1870s. The couple Degas portrayed in In a Café (The Absinthe Drinker) (1875–76) are downtrodden. The morose woman, whose face looks as if she is strung out on drugs, is seated with a glass of the potent liquor; this dark world is underscored by shadows reflected in the mirror behind the two figures. The woman in a pink dress and a fashionable hat that Manet depicted in Plum Brandy (ca. 1877) is also lost in her thoughts. About to eat her plum soaked in brandy and holding an unlit cigarette, she, however, appears to be daydreaming. Moreover, her head is framed by the rectangle behind her as if she had sat for a double portrait. Which do you prefer, anguish or joy?

The fancy carved frames could have been distracting. Instead, they remind us how what was once radical ages into more conservative art. And three paintings that were cut into smaller works are instances of early examples of cropping before such a strategy existed. The show opens with a scene by Degas of Manet listening to his wife playing the piano (1868–69). Why did Manet trim his colleague’s scene? We’ve always been told he was displeased with the depiction of his mate. But was he? After all, almost immediately, we encounter Manet’s The Dead Toreador (probably 1864), a figure lying on the ground who originally was depicted in a bull ring replete with people in the stands. This stark, focused portrayal could not be more poignant. And then, just before we leave the galleries, we find the second version Manet painted of The Execution of Maximilian (ca. 1867–68). This time, after his death, his family chopped the large canvas into pieces. Degas, who later owned the picture, reunited the parts. Astonishingly, segments from the overall composition are admirable paintings in their own right.

Then, too, some of Degas’s most radical aspects are not on view at the Met because they were completed after Manet’s death in 1883 at the age of fifty-one. Degas, who was two years younger, lived until 1917. The awkward way Manet is stretched out on a sofa listening to his wife play the piano stands in for all the ungainly posed figures Degas limned. Later on, many women bathing in tubs as well as ballet dancers at rest were represented off-kilter. To some extent, it seems as if, in this show, compared to Manet, Degas had one arm tied behind his back.

Before Manet/Degas came to the Met, it was on view at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. In the thirty-seven-year history of that institution, it was in the top three most visited shows. Expect similar crowds at the Met.