Manet/Degas

The thirteen rooms of the Met’s latest blockbuster seek to present a dialogue between Édouard Manet (1832–1883) and Edgar Degas (1834–1917), two of the essential lights of the late-nineteenth-century French avant-garde, who are revealed to be simultaneously inheritors of an Old Master figural tradition from Titian to Delacroix and progenitors of a novel post-Courbet urban realism. They duke it out in the form of some 160 oils, watercolors, drawings, pastels, and etchings. The opening vista features a self-portrait of each artist on a purplish wall with a nail polish name (“Bonne Nuit”) and a great diagonal gash running floor to ceiling between them. Perhaps meant to be edgy, this design inadvertently reveals, along with Manet’s superior brushwork and Degas’s surpassing drawing, an unbridgeable divide between two artists who were acquaintances more than friends, who traveled in the same circles, who aimed to upend established notions of art in France, but who ultimately do not really communicate much to each other, in a show that does not significantly expand our understanding of this critical period in Western art, despite its embarrassment of aesthetic riches.

Gallery one reveals Degas as Manet fanboy in multiple portraits he made of the slightly older artist: etchings, pencil and chalk sketches, and a painting of an excessively portly Manet on a sofa watching his wife Suzanne play the piano (1868–69). I suspect she did not like the way Degas portrayed her and had the canvas cropped vertically through her body: adjacent is a beautiful picture Manet painted of her at the piano around the same time, perhaps as husbandly compensation. Manet, who consistently painted friends and peers throughout his too short life, never made a confirmed image of Degas. This is telling. As the wall text reads, “although they rarely worked side by side, each took stock of the other’s work, distilling it until it became foundational for his own project or, perhaps just as interesting, never integrating it at all.” Similar but different is, however, no proper thesis for a show, and from the get-go the lack of integration is far more evident than any purported commonality or communality.

The show’s first half features Degas in a catch-up role. Notwithstanding the Musée d’Orsay’s large portrait of the Bellelli family (1858–69), his commanding tribute to Piero and Renaissance sacra conversazione paintings (hung on an accent wall painted with the lighter violet “Mauve Desert” color), it is not until one gets to the horse racing scenes in gallery seven that Degas finds a métier that suits his interest in organismic physical convolutions and excellent draftsmanship. Up until then, he seems the inferior artist. Of course, part of that is Olympia’s fault. The justly celebrated loan here of Manet’s trenchant picture (1863–65) from the Musée d’Orsay—its first-ever visit to America and presumably the impetus for the entire enterprise—is rewarded by a fine view of it in gallery four against that complementary deep purple wall color. Unfortunately, this still startlingly frank image of a white prostitute and her Afro-Caribbean maid, the latter of whose origins were brilliantly expounded upon in a show at Columbia University’s Wallach Art Gallery in 2018–19, is inelegantly hung with two unfailingly weird Degas attempts at history painting, Semiramis Building Babylon (1861) and Scene of War in the Middle Ages (ca. 1865), and his unconventionally composed but socially respectable Woman Seated beside a Vase of Flowers (1865) from the Met. The idea of the room is to explore how the two artists tried to engage in Paris’s official exhibition culture in the early 1860s, but the works do not speak to each other. Besides, Olympia kills everything else in sight, a point unironically made in the section of the room behind Manet’s masterpiece, which is filled with corpses: Manet’s The Dead Toreador (probably 1864) and The Dead Christ with Angels (1864), and Degas’s large and unwieldy Scene from the Steeplechase: The Fallen Jockey (begun 1866), plus, curiously, Manet’s etching of a very much alive Lola de Valence (1863). Walk into the next room and you will see Manet’s superb painting of the same Spanish dancer (1862) but hung so that you cannot compare it to its etching. At the end of this room titled “Beyond Portraiture” is the second great Manet in the show, his similarly Goya-inspired The Balcony (1868–69), with its vivid greens, hypnotic portrait of Berthe Morisot, and wispy, agitated dog—an eye-popping picture to build an entire exhibition around.

The eighth room, titled “From One War to Another,” is a hodgepodge. There is a conflictless wall with paintings by each artist that contain Black figures: Manet’s is from 1861–62 and of the Tuileries Gardens, and Degas’s was made in New Orleans in 1873. They feel tossed in here. They would have been much more provocative if hung with Olympia, and alongside an uncharacteristically clumsy picture by Manet of French/West African Jeanne Duval (1862), whose lover was his friend Baudelaire. This would then better reflect the interesting material in Denise Murrell’s essay on the demimonde in the beautifully illustrated but slight catalogue (no entries on pictures, only fifty-five pages of text). Manet’s works concerned with the American Civil War, the Commune, Victor Henri Rochefort, and the killing of Emperor Maximilian are powerful, but they would have benefitted from the inclusion of the large, reconstructed oil version of The Execution of Maximilian (ca. 1867–68) from London, sadly exiled to the thirteenth and final room with Degas’s collection of Manet and amidst pictures that speak to it not at all. Such missteps occur frequently in this ultimately puzzling show.

The best pairing in the exhibition is Degas’s In a Café (The Absinthe Drinker) (1875–76) and Manet’s Plum Brandy (ca. 1877), in the eleventh gallery. But by this point the dispirit in the face of the actress Ellen Andrée, who posed for both masterpieces, may be paralleled in the constitution of the viewer, with the two repeated wall colors becoming tedious and less complementary as the artists’ palettes brightened through Impressionism’s impact. Each room blends into the next, even as Manet and Degas remain visually and technically distinct. The wall text fills in the gaps in the catalogue (which is differently organized, at any rate), but except in discussions of prints, does not deal with style or technique. Degas’s continued infatuation with Manet forms the tacked-on conclusion of the show, in a room bearing a selection of Manet’s pictures and prints that he bought after the artist’s death of complications from syphilis at the age of 51.

I was fortunate to study under Linda Nochlin and Robert Rosenblum at the Institute of Fine Art, NYU, in the 1990s, when the era of Impressionism was a robust field in academia and museum cultures. Nochlin’s important essays on the Bellelli family, Impressionist portraiture, Manet’s Masked Ball at the Opera (1873), his still lifes, and Degas as an anti-Semite (all absent from the catalogue’s bibliography) remain among the best writing on the period. Leading edge scholars Griselda Pollock, Anne Higonnet, Tamar Garb, Hollis Clayson, Carol Armstrong, Richard Kendall churned out revelatory books and essays: the excitement and edginess of the movement was evident. Now, however, displays of the period feel tired, making the movement seem academic. When a show of Manet’s and Degas’s exquisite and unforgettable works whose brushwork and draftsmanship can magically bring meaning to your existence feels perfunctory you know there is a problem.

The Met, that beloved flagship of American museums, bears an obligation to put on exhibitions that both dazzle and delve into new areas of scholarship in the long nineteenth century. Less of Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity (2013) and Rooms with a View (2011) and more of Thomas Cole’s Journey: Atlantic Crossings (2018), Turner’s Whaling Pictures (2016), Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends (2015), and, going further back, the magnificent Manet/Velázquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting (2003). And the Met must continue to support canon-challenging monographic exhibitions on deserving, lesser-known lights such as its successful displays of Peder Balke (2017), Vigée Le Brun (2016), Girodet (2006), Samuel Palmer (2006), Gilbert Stuart (2004), Théodore Chassériau (2002), or Augustin Pajou (1997). It is notable that at the moment the museum has on exhibitions of Manet/Degas, Matisse and Derain, and Picasso: a familiar march of male modernists. As the market, which increasingly dictates the focus of many museums, more fully embraces the contemporary realm, and university departments leave positions in the field unfilled, nineteenth-century art needs to be better supported. There is some good news: this is happening on 5th Avenue. Not in Manet/Degas, but in the Met’s permanent collection, in new acquisitions of Scandinavian and German and Belgian pictures and sculptures and works on paper, and in the canny loan of oils by Leighton, Millais, and Burne-Jones from Ponce that have been integrated into the galleries. No need to queue to see a truly engaging and evolving take on this most fertile period.