Manet/Degas at the Met: Ballet, the Race Track, Bordellos, and Pathos

Superb art and a puzzling relationship make an exhibition worth savoring.

E arlier this week I wrote the first of a two-part review of Manet/Degas at the Met. Though the tense, one-sided relationship between the two avant-garde artists has been well plumbed over the 150 years since they met, it has never unfolded via a display of their art, in the flesh, on Fifth Avenue. It’s a feast.

I wrote primarily about the first half of the exhibition and the curse of the two-artist, “compare and contrast” exhibition, which is in fashion, and bad fashion it almost always becomes. The two are often big names, such as Picasso and Calder, to give a good example of a bad show, but one, in this case Picasso, outclasses the other in almost all respects.

I feared this was happening to Degas (1834–1917) at the Met. He and Manet (1832–1883) were contemporaries, but Manet soared to heights of fame long before Degas. Degas is an acquired taste. Manet’s Olympia is a sizzler. His Spanish subjects are hot, hot, hot, his seascapes cerulean blue, and even his dead Christ and dead toreador have charisma. Degas, meanwhile, painted ethereal, diffuse history paintings, didactic to the point of talky, and austere portraits that are compelling but off-putting.

We leave the first half of the show and my two-part story with Degas tied in knots. He and Manet first met in 1861 or 1862 in a gallery at the Louvre while Degas was copying what was then thought to be a painting by Velázquez. “How audacious,” Manet said of Degas’s technique. Through the 1860s, as Manet became a sensation and Degas a modest success, the two became good, even close friends. Degas seems to have worshipped Manet, drawing what seems to me to be too many portraits of him. Manet didn’t reciprocate.

Degas painted a full-length portrait of Manet lounging on a sofa while he watched his wife play the piano and gave it to the couple. Surprise! A few weeks later, he learned that Manet had sliced nearly all of his wife from the canvas.

Befogged by hurt and fury, Degas took the picture back. A chill descended, and the two eventually reconciled, but it was never the same. By 1870 and through the first half of the exhibition, it seems that Degas would be forever sulking in Manet’s shadow.

George Moore, the very smart, Irish-born, French critic who knew both men well, said their friendship was “jarred by the inevitable rivalry.” I don’t agree. Aside from professional friendship and that one contretemps with a razor blade and canvas, Manet doesn’t seem to have thought about Degas much at all.

Fear not. In the second half of Manet/Degas, Degas evens the score. He dazzles in a strange, furtive way. Manet keeps doing Manet. Degas becomes the puzzle we never solve. By 1917, when he died, he had turned his apartment into what we could call a shrine to Manet.

With A Woman Seated beside a Vase of Flowers, from 1865, we learn that Degas can indeed do sensuality. It shows he can be decorative, even flashy, portraying as he does a handsome woman sitting by an enormous flower arrangement, not as big as the ones in the Met’s lobby but big enough as well as ornate, sumptuous, and very beautiful. It’s as much a still life as a portrait. He merges the two genres. He’s also found a modern look.

After this, Manet/Degas draws much of its energy from a straightforward point-by-point. It’s as if the two are in a race and we’re spectators cheering for one and then the other as each does something bold and fresh, and then bolder and fresher. Manet’s Repose, from 1871, is a well-known portrait of the artist Berthe Morisot, who was close to both Manet and Degas.

It’s very good, but Degas’s portrait of Eugène Manet, Manet’s younger brother and Morisot’s husband, holds our eye. A beautiful young woman like Morisot may be meant to repose, but Eugène looks both dapper and very much at home in his state of repose in a country field. He’s a man for all seasons. Morisot looks like a hothouse flower. Manet’s Woman with a Fan, a portrait of Jeanne Duval from 1862, looks silly. With her white hoop skirt, she looks as if she has parachuted to earth.

At the Racecourse — and we’re now at the seventh section of the show — is the first where Degas stars. Degas grew to love horse races, an English sport brought to Paris, and introduced a-day-with-the-ponies motif to Manet. Manet’s Races in the Bois de Boulogne, from 1872, in a private collection, looks like a photo finish with atomic energy. It’s a blur. Degas’s False Start (1869–72) is a close study of horses. Yes, it’s an action picture, but it’s an anatomical study, too. Manet is great at snapshot looks. He’s reportorial. Degas likes to diagram his subjects. He likes the off moments.

In the mid 1990s, when I was a young curator at the Clark, I worked on an exhibition called “The Little Dancer,” based on the Clark’s much-adored Degas bronze sculpture of a young ballerina. Sterling and Francine Clark’s collecting wasn’t adventurous, as a rule. From the 1920s through the ’40s, they bought lots of art that was avant-garde when they were children, including 43 Renoirs. They were cutting-edge in two respects: Degas and Winslow Homer. They acquired an encyclopedic collection of 250 first-rate Degas works in all media and from his entire career.

The Little Dancer, which we expected to be a hit, flopped. The exhibition was the first to present Degas’s ballerina novices as scrawny, half-starved, sharp-elbowed teens who dabbled, by choice or under duress, in prostitution.

This was an unwelcome observation, since mothers and daughters, for years, looked at the Clark’s Little Dancer bronze with affection and nostalgia. She reminded them of the middle sister in The Sound of Music, a little needy and nerdy but a striver and a bud waiting to blossom. That she might have been a tough and a hooker was a revelation, and not a good one.

My point is that Degas is hard to love. His art is cryptic. His themes are back-of-house, whether backstage, the milliner’s workshop, the bar, or before or after the race. He first sneaks a peak, then stays to ogle. I’m not saying his work isn’t beautiful. His ballet pastels are delicious and a chromatic feast. But what he delivers has an ever-so-creepy look of the night. It’s a voyeur’s take. Manet’s take is carnal.

As a person, Degas was habitually on the verge of spitting up an elephantine hairball. Though bitchy and myopic, he gathered a circle of friends but, romantically, he courted neither animal nor vegetable nor mineral.

Degas exhibited in multiple Impressionist Salons and, busybody and busy bee that he was, organized many of them. Manet robustly refused to exhibit with the Impressionists, upstarts that they were, sticking with the Paris Salon and, in years when the Salon rejected his work, exhibiting at his home or in a pop-up gallery.

It’s not that Manet didn’t like Impressionism or draw from it. In Boating, from 1874, for instance, Manet painted a scene of leisure in brilliant, sparkling, blue water. It would become an Impressionist staple. The Impressionisms section of the Met’s show,  with only seven or eight things, doesn’t do justice to a topic as tasty as “What’s Impressionist in their work?” We see from Degas’s Dancing Class, shown in the inaugural Impressionism show in 1874, that Degas preferred interiors and didn’t like painting en plein air. He liked studio work. What drew him, then, to the other Impressionists?

I liked the section on war a lot. It’s about four wars, more or less. One or the other, or both Manet and Degas, treated topics related to the Civil War in America, the German invasion of Paris in 1870, the Paris Commune that followed, and the French political interference in Mexico that led to Emperor Maximilian’s 15 seconds of fame before a firing squad in 1867.

Degas’s mother was from New Orleans. The family, which was scattered, entirely sympathized with the Confederacy, as did most Europeans. In 1872, Degas visited New Orleans. It’s a fun slice of his life. His family was in the cotton business, and his two paintings of what he called the cotton office are there. One is from the museum in Pau in the French Pyrenees, so I doubt I’ll see it again.

Degas spent much time in bustling offices, so the scenes must have been fascinating to him, especially motifs such as a table covered with fresh cotton that merchants are inspecting. Reconstruction-themed Louisiana concerned him not a whit. War very much concerned Manet, a political artist unlike Degas and an ardent, as opposed to mild, republican. Manet made four versions of the execution of Maximilian, a Hapsburg royal persuaded by Napoleon III to helm a rump government that the French established in Mexico in 1864. The French hoped to make mischief in cahoots with the Confederates.

Manet did these four paintings in 1867. Alas, Max was left holding the bag when the French pulled their troops from Mexico. Captured by a local militia, he and some of his cronies were shot. Three are small painted versions of the shooting, which is Manet’s riff on Goya’s Third of May, 1808, which depicted the execution by firing squad of Spanish rebels against Napoleon. Manet never finished a final, big studio oil, which, either before or after his death, was cut into pieces.

The National Gallery in London owns substantial fragments of this version of The Execution of Maximilian, on view at the Met. This and Manet’s Battle of the USS “Kearsage” and the  CSS “Alabama” are dramatic, you-are-there pictures, and Manet’s great at this genre, but the sea-battle scene is dynamite while Maximilian owes too much to Goya. Manet seemed unable to get beyond Goya and lost interest.

Through the 1870s and through Paris’s bars, shops, theaters, and bathtubs, Manet and Degas seem to follow each other. Whether consciously or by instinct, they’re covering similar subjects. I’m of two minds on this part of the show, the last where both artists are actively working. By 1880 or so, Manet’s health was in decline. He painted lots of small, sweet still lifes, a measure of how housebound he had become.

Looking at Degas’s Absinthe Drinker, from around 1875, and Manet’s Plum Brandy, from 1877, we see what we’ve seen over and over. Degas had an eye for seedy living. His absinthe drinker looks like a drunk. Manet’s, like Degas’s dressed in pink, looks as though she’ll perk up any minute. Manet’s Nana, also from 1877, is a high-class courtesan and seems happy about it. Nana’s a character from an Émile Zola novel of the same name. In Manet’s depiction, she is hardly fallen, seems bourgeois, and appears, once fully dressed, ready to be presented for Sunday lunch with a suitor’s parents.

Degas’s Interior, from 1868 or 1869, displayed near Nana, is film noir. A young woman in her undergarments cowers in a darkened interior as a man hovers against what looks like the door of the bedroom. It could be from Zola. In Degas’s lifetime, it was called “The Rape.” It oozes menace. Manet seems very tame. It’s great to see these pictures, but don’t we know that Manet can be very matter-of-fact and Degas never is?

In 1883, Manet died from his long, difficult bout with syphilis and rheumatism. Whither went Degas? He had nearly 35 years left in him. He’s hardly forgotten, though his late work wasn’t much noted. He hand-molded lots of wax models, including for The Little Dancer, but they weren’t cast in bronze and sold until after his death. He moved into photography and, by 1900, was considered a modern Old Master. His eyesight gradually failed. A bigot who hated Jews and Protestants, Degas alienated lots of polite company.

And he never finished with Manet. His response to Manet’s death — “he was greater than we thought” — was characteristically snide, but, in death, Manet looms, and greatly so. In 1890, Degas contributed to the fundraiser that purchased Olympia for the Musée du Luxembourg. In 1895, he bought Gauguin’s copy of Olympia at Gauguin’s estate sale, displaying it in the vestibule of his home in Paris. What Degas could recover of Manet’s big, unfinished, sliced Execution of Maximilian was on display, too. That’s the remnant that the National Gallery in London owns. It’s a wreck, but it shows Manet in the middle of angst and struggle. Tell me about it, Degas seems to think.

By that time, Degas’s art collection was extensive and expansive, starting with El Greco and other Old Masters, moving to Ingres, Delacroix, and other artists from his younger days and then to his contemporaries. Degas thought he might form a museum of his collection. He talked about it among his friends but never pulled the trigger.

Degas owned almost all of Manet’s prints. He bought a pastel portrait of Manet’s wife done by Manet in 1874. Madame Manet on a Blue Sofa shows her in the same pose as Olympia, though wearing enough layers to protect herself from a blizzard. Degas’s friends late in life said he cherished it. He bought a Manet still life of a ham and an odd, slummy, imaginary bust portrait of a Roma woman with a lit cigarette hanging from her mouth.

What did he see in this, I wondered? It’s Manet on a not-so-good day. Looking at her blouse, though, I saw that Manet made it with long, vertical strokes of viscous paint, twisting and turning his brush and then filling it again. Talk about the presence of the artist! His last Manet purchase, in 1897, was Manet’s last portrait of Morisot, whose husband, Manet’s brother, Degas had painted 23 years before. Each Manet seems to have been acquired to continue Degas’s relationship with him, with Manet there in Degas’s home, on his walls, and in his head. Looking at Manet’s Maximilian, and thinking about Degas’s fraught relationship with him, one could easily miss a bit of pathos. Note the two men holding hands as they’re about to die.

The book, with six short essays, is very good. I liked all of them. Isolde Pludermacher’s essay on Manet’s politics is beautifully written. Stephan Wolohojian’s “Degas After Manet” tackles the pathos of Degas’s last years. Manet/Degas is a museum exhibition, not a novel or a movie, I know, and at the Met, a traditional place.

I’d love to see a version that started with Degas, an old man brooding and musing in his apartment, surrounded by Manet, performing an inquisition of the dead artist, and fashioning his own version of Manet-the-Slasher, vandalizing Degas’s painting of Madame Manet, and going through the relationship from there. At some point after Degas, in fury, took back his painting of the couple, he sewed a strip of blank canvas where half of Madame Manet had been. Did he intend to repaint her? Did he need to?

I’ve read Wuthering Heights too many times, I think.