Art and Design
A massive new exhibition at the Met explores the fractured personal and professional relationship between two giants of the French art world
The French painters Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas were not only contemporaries who each created legendary masterpieces that contributed significantly to the development of Impressionism, but they also had complicated personal and professional relationships that were of great importance to their social lives and artistic careers . The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new Manet/Degas exhibition combines a treasure trove of loans from the Musée D’Orsay and elsewhere with its own rich holdings to explore this relationship, offering audiences rare opportunities to see world-famous paintings on this side of the museum to see Atlantic.
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The main protagonist of Manet/Degas is Manet’s groundbreaking work Olympia, which travels to America for the first time 158 years after its first exhibition at the 1865 Paris Salon. The painting was shocking in its time because it centered on a sex worker staring boldly from the canvas into the viewer’s eyes. It sparked scandalous success, brought Manet instant acclaim, and helped the burgeoning Impressionist movement break with artistic conventions.
“This is only the third time it has left Paris,” said the Met’s Stephan Wolohojian, who co-curated Manet/Degas with Ashley Dunn. “There aren’t many frequent flyer miles! It’s a phenomenal job. I think we’ve done it justice and thought very carefully about how we can incorporate it and celebrate its presence here.”
In contrast, at the 1865 Salon, Degas exhibited a much more conventional historical painting, a war scene in the Middle Ages, which ended up being completely ignored. “Manet is attracting a lot of attention, and Degas, meanwhile, is struggling with how to create a historical painting worthy of the Salon,” Dunn said. “The Degas painting really doesn’t resonate.”
Édouard Manet’s Olympia. Photo: Patrice Schmidt/Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN Grand Palais
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Manet remained loyal to the Salons, exhibiting there until his last major work, Un bar aux Folies Bergère, shown at the Salon in 1882. (Of this work, Degas said curtly: “Manet, stupid and cunning, a playing card without pressure, a Spanish trompe l’oeil painter.”) In contrast, Degas alienated himself from the salons, taking a complete break in 1870 and settling eventually setting up his own series of eight annual independent exhibitions, now known as the Impressionist exhibitions.
Manet/Degas does a fantastic job of exploring the central place that the Paris Salons would hold for any artist. “We try to highlight differences in exhibition strategies,” Dunn said. “Manet remains loyal to the salons, while Degas wishes that Manet would join the group and he laments that he refuses to do so.”
Yet despite their extremely uneven beginnings at the 1865 Salon and the divergent artistic paths that followed, the two men nevertheless became rivals and inspirations for each other, with Manet – as an outsider to Impressionism – making a major contribution to the Impressionist aesthetic, to whose Degas played a key role in the development. Manet/Degas convincingly examines this and many other aspects. One of these would be the overlapping Parisian milieu in which both found themselves, which often met in salons where members of the cultural elite such as Charles Baudelaire, Émile Zola and the painter Henri Fantin-Latour met. Manet/Degas also shows how the two men were among the few artists who stayed and defended Paris during the siege of the Franco-Prussian War – serving in the National Guard, they were heavily influenced by the war and responded to it in art afterwards created. “Both had strong ties to their city and it was extremely important to both of them to defend it during the war.”
A woman sits next to a flower vase, Edgar Degas. Photo: Juan Trujillo/The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Another interesting point that Manet/Degas explores in the relationship between their subjects is the very uneven distribution of portraits they made of each other. While the exhibition features an entire wall of sketches Degas made of Manet, there are no documented instances of Manet making a portrait of Degas. “This is particularly notable because Manet made many portraits of friends,” Wolohojian said. “It wasn’t that he didn’t paint friends, artists, writers, etc.”
Even more fascinating is that Manet/Degas shows a finished portrait that Degas made of Manet and his wife Suzanne. This painting was violently slashed by Manet and then returned to Degas, who angrily took it back and reciprocated the insult by returning a painting Manet had given him. Degas kept the cut-up double portrait, eventually hanging it in his apartment and even prominently displaying it in a photograph of himself in the 1890s. “It’s a very complicated story,” Wolohojian said. “It’s easy to say, ‘That’s it between them.’ But then in the 1870s they were both in Paris during the war and the Commune and volunteered to help.”
The exhibition also spotlights the two men’s legendary first meeting, said to have taken place at the Louvre in the early 1860s, when each was making a name for himself. As the story goes, the meeting took place when Manet met Degas, who was making a copy of a Velásquez painting – Manet turned to Degas and said something like this: “How bold of you to make an etching directly without a preparatory drawing.” I would never do something like that!” Manet himself also made a copy of the same painting, although it is not known whether he did this before or after meeting Degas.
Installation view of Manet/Degas. Photo: Anna-Marie Kellen/Photo by Anna-Marie Kellen, courtesy of the Met
“It’s just wonderfully stimulating for curators to think of our galleries as spaces for these kinds of encounters between contemporary artists,” Wolohojian said, reflecting on the idea of what storied meetings might currently be taking place in the Met’s galleries. Dunn added that the account was important to the emergence of each painter’s aesthetic: “It’s a very rich story in thinking about their mutual interest in Velasquez and also their early training and self-education through copying.”
Manet/Degas is a vast but carefully conceived exhibition that complements each artist’s rich holdings at the Met with a careful and generous selection of borrowed works, primarily from the Musée d’Orsay and the Musée de l’Orangerie, with over 50, other institutions and collectors contribute to this. “I think one of the wonderful things about this exhibition is that we come to appreciate the particular strengths of each artist,” Wolohojian said, “and also how extraordinarily different they both were.” Through that difference, they help us understand their shared experience to make it more profound.”
“Manet/Degas” was already an exciting experience for the crowds that had come since the exhibition opened and were particularly excited to see the Olympics in the United States for the first time. “One person who came to the show in a wheelchair was so happy,” Wolohojian said. “They thought they would never come to Paris again, and the thought that they could just come to New York to see the Olympics was just so exciting and celebratory to have the painting here. It’s hard to put on an art historian’s hat when you see such human excitement.”
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