Whatever Degas felt about Manet’s political thought – he once described him as “more vain than intelligent” – his belief in the importance of his art remained and may have become even stronger after Manet’s death from syphilis at the age of 51. And if gestures The tribute speaks louder than words, Degas has made a powerful one. In his increasingly reclusive years, he set about assembling a personal collection of Manet’s works, a selection of which concludes the exhibition in a section entitled “Degas after Manet.”
Degas acquired a significant group of Manet’s drawings when they came onto the market, an almost complete set of his prints, and eight oil paintings, some of which are here. Most are small: a penumbra portrait of the grieving Berthe Morisot is one of them; a colorful image of a smiling “gypsy with a cigarette” or another. (Bizet’s “Carmen” was a popular hit at the time.) The standout image, however, is a monumental but strangely fragmented image of an act of political violence.
Under the title “The Execution of Maximilian” the death of an Austrian archduke in 1867 by firing squad is depicted by Napoleon III. installed as a straw man ruler in Mexico and then left to his fate when colonization failed. The painting was so polemical that Manet had to hide it in the camp. At some point someone, probably a family member, cut up the canvas and sold pieces. Little by little, Degas eagerly collected some of them and kept them. (In 1992, the fragments’ current owner, the National Gallery in London, mounted the pieces on a support to partially restore the original composition.)
Degas and Manet first met in the galleries of a major public museum early in their careers. In the end they kept each other company in a small private room, the shadowy rooms of Degas’s Paris apartment. For some of us, this home museum full of objects may seem very unfashionable. It was a shrine, a reliquary, a place of worship, tended by a monastic artist who is personally difficult to like and aesthetically difficult to follow, one who occupies a distinctly secondary presence in the Met’s magnificent show but who emerges from it, on End a torchbearer hero.