Punctuation as architecture, architecture as destiny. The floor-to-ceiling gash in the entrance wall of Manet/Degas at the Metropolitan Museum of Art physically separates the artists’ names and self-portraits from each other, relegating them to two different worlds: Manet’s restless brushwork skittering into painting’s future; Degas’s sculpted light embracing the memory of a neoclassical past. But the compare/contrast is a head fake. The paintings are also separated by more than two decades of explosive change — in politics, culture, and, most pertinently for this exhibition, in the way that Western artists, especially those navigating Paris’s tightly knit social strata, viewed their work, their public, and themselves.
Degas’s “Portrait of the Artist,” made in 1855 when he was 20 or 21, is essentially a student work, though one of extraordinary precocity, its pose a near-exact imitation of an 1804 self-portrait painted by his idol, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, at age 24.
When Manet started his “Portrait of the Artist (Manet with a Palette)” (c. 1878–79), he was in his mid-40s and more than 10 years past his miracle years of 1862–65, when he graced the world with “Olympia” (1863–65), “The Dead Toreador” (c. 1864), and “The Dead Christ with Angels” (1864) — all highlights of the current exhibition — as well as “Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe” (1862–63), which is represented by an oil sketch from circa 1863–68.
The Impressionism of Claude Monet and Auguste Renoir was already in full swing, and the flurry of brushstrokes in the older artist’s self-portrait, the most agitated of any painting in the show, signaled that he was keeping his eye on the vanguard. This canvas was also among the last he would attempt before his untreated syphilis caught up with him, inflicting his body with chronic pain until his premature death in 1883.
By 1878–79, Degas’s touch had loosened (though not by much) while his compositional sense veered dizzyingly off-kilter; witness the unsettling portraits of the artist Henri Michel-Lévy (c. 1878) and the writer Diego Martelli (1879), where everything in the room seems to be sliding into an abyss. Degas would live for nearly 40 more years, growing increasingly bitter and blind, until the social order that he and Manet so intimately knew collapsed in the industrialized death grip of World War I.
That doomed social order, born a century earlier out of revolution and terror only to stultify over decades of imperial folly, is the subject of Manet/Degas (both the exhibition and catalogue), while much critical writing about the show has focused on the fractious relationship of the two artists, with much ado about Degas’s notorious double-portrait “Monsieur and Madame Édouard Manet” (1868–69) — a gift he angrily retook after Manet sliced away Degas’s depiction of his wife, Suzanne — and a good deal of debate around whether Manet or Degas had the edge in terms of quality or modernity.
Beginning in the early 1860s, around the same time that he and Degas first met, Manet began to intensify the sensation of flatness in his work by compressing strokes of opaque paint against the canvas surface. The eye doesn’t peer through a window, as Leon Battista Alberti would have it in his Renaissance treatise On Painting (1435), but instead hits a wall of paint. In his best work, the telescoping of space onto surface still sets us back on our heels.
This effect is consummately manifested in the historical marker “Olympia,” but perhaps even more acutely in “The Dead Christ with Angels.” By far the artist’s most curious image — there’s nothing like it in the show other than some idiotic attempts by Degas at history painting — it depicts Jesus as a real corpse, more like a casualty at the barricades than a sacrificed messiah lain to rest, with an anatomically correct heart-piercing spear thrust through the left side of his ribcage rather than the traditional right, his unfocused eyes two pools of black paint, unready for resurrection anytime soon.
But the real shock is the black shadow chiseled between the white shroud and Jesus’s right shin, a Cubist facet that heightens our awareness of the crisp black contours surrounding, and flattening, the entire body. The frontal glare creating the strobe-like effect is the harshest light to be found in the exhibition and the one with the biggest wallop, flash-freezing the corpse, reducing its hands and feet to varying degrees of smudginess, and casting the rest of the picture, with the exception of the limpid faces of the angels propping the body up, into shadow.
“The Dead Christ with Angels” typifies the bluntness of Manet’s brush: phenomenal when wielded with elan (the body and head of Jesus), but mask-like and simplistic when rote eclipses nuance (those angel faces).
The otherworldly clarity of Manet’s paint handling takes the high-contrast frontality of Gustave Courbet’s epic paintings from the mid-19th century (“A Burial at Ornans,” 1849–50; “The Artist’s Studio,” 1855) and jacks it up tenfold. Still, the compositional setup is as conventionally symmetrical as anything his perennial polestar, Diego Velázquez, would have devised 200 years earlier, while Degas’s designs after 1870 are characterized by odd angles and a kind of anti-hierarchical decentralization, where the paintings’ putative subjects are shoved toward the edges and negative shapes are afforded a startling degree of importance. In formal terms, these pictures are but a few steps away from Analytical Cubism’s demolition of objects in space. All the shapes carry equal weight because they are nothing more, or less, than binder and pigment.
A case in point: the exhibition’s final section, “Degas After Manet,” contains a small photograph, “Self-Portrait with Paul-Albert Bartholomé” (c. 1895–97), that Degas, always the restless experimenter, made with a glass negative. In the photo, he sits behind and to the right of his artist friend Bartholomé, directly below the vandalized “Monsieur and Madame Édouard Manet,” which hangs in a pride of place on the wall, right beside Manet’s “The Ham” (c. 1875–80). By that time, the picture had been in Degas’s possession for nearly 30 years.
But the portrait of Manet sans Madame Manet is not as we find it in the exhibition, with a length of canvas replacing the missing space. Rather, it’s in a vertical frame that aligns with the path of Manet’s razor. The impression is such that the truncated figure at the piano had been part of Degas’s conception all along, and that it didn’t matter whether Suzanne was completely there or not — despite the artist’s talk of restoring her image — as long as the forms interacted intuitively.
“Monsieur and Madame Édouard Manet” is treated as a pivot point in the exhibition and in the commentary surrounding the show, with the consensus being that Manet was offended by Degas’s presumably unflattering portrayal of Suzanne or, as Jackson Arn suggested in The New Yorker, the unflattering portrayal of his marriage.
But the violence of Manet’s response seems outsized even for that, as if stemming from a threat of a different order. Perhaps it was the suspicion that Degas’s technical finesse and psychological dynamism surpassed anything he could bring to the table; or perhaps it was a creeping horror of Degas’s worldview — emotionally exhausted, borderline nihilistic, nothing like the masterpiece tradition in which he so fervently believed.
The artists’ aesthetic incompatibility can be gleaned from the psychic distance between the daydreamer pictured in Manet’s “Plum Brandy” (c. 1877) and the stupefied demimondaine of Degas’s “In a Café (The Absinthe Drinker)” (1875–76). Could Manet have been trying to plant a flag in his own territory by painting a corrective, the pretty but stolid “Madame Manet at the Piano” (c. 1868–69), while “Monsieur and Madame Édouard Manet” was still in his possession?
In his insightful review of Manet/Degas for Art in America, Barry Schwabsky compares the titular artists to Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, making the point that:
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.
They also completed one another, something that Degas seemed to understand after Manet’s death. What’s fascinating about the show is the degree to which the work of each artist seemed to possess whatever the other lacked — a helical dance of surface, structure, experimentation, strategy, and accident that would ultimately coalesce, as Western civilization imploded, into a hitherto unknown realm of chaos, control, and freedom.
Manet/Degas continues at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (1000 Fifth Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan) through January 7. The exhibition was organized by The Met and the Musées d’Orsay et de l’Orangerie, Paris, and curated by Stephan Wolohojian, John Pope-Hennessy, and Ashley E. Dunn at The Metropolitan Museum and Isolde Pludermacher and Stéphane Guégan at the Musée d’Orsay.
