Manet/Degas, the Must-Be-Seen Blockbuster at the Met

The story’s shaky, and the scholarship’s not new, but the art is fantastic.

F irst of all, I want to say how awed I was by Manet/Degas, the new exhibition at the Met. The exhibition examines the work of Édouard Manet (1832–1883) and Edgar Degas (1834–1917), two giants in French avant-garde art who were friends and antagonists. After Manet’s death, the relationship, wistful and enamored, continued in Degas’s head. It’s a solid, satisfying “compare and contrast” exhibition. Like all Met exhibitions, it’s beautifully arranged, and unlike many Met exhibitions, it’s coherent, mostly.

I’ll write two pieces about Manet/Degas, since it’s a sumptuous, dazzling exhibition.

How can anyone still say that the blockbuster, as a genre of museum exhibition, is dead? Allied with the Musée d’Orsay, the Met had chits galore, and what riches the exhibition brings to Fifth Avenue. The smaller of the two versions of Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe, from 1863, is there. It’s big enough, and it’s a feast for all the senses. Two years later, Manet exhibited Olympia at the Paris Salon. She’s the demimonde’s Statue of Liberty, fleshy but fit, cold as stone but white-hot. Her black maid, dressed in pink, presents to the lounging lady a suitor’s — or client’s — flowers. A black cat, a creature of the night in more ways than one, signals what’s beneath Olympia’s hand. Borrowed from the Musée d’Orsay, this scandalous picture is in the exhibition. It’s dazzling, explosive, and totemic.

Degas’s Bellelli Family, from 1859, is splendid as well, as is his portrait of Manet’s brother, which was in a private collection for years before its sale at auction earlier this year. The Absinthe Drinker, from 1875, is there. Few artists do that zonked look better than Degas. There are Degas ballerinas and bathers to the max. It’s got to be a blockbuster when Manet’s Boy with a Sword, The Spanish Singer, and The Balcony are under, not above, the title.

I don’t doubt they were both from Paris, well-born, and part of the avant-garde art scene from the 1860s to 1883, when Manet died. They did indeed know each other, and well, for a time. They had a tempestuous break in 1869 soon after Degas gave Manet a splendid double portrait of Manet and his wife, he lounging on a sofa, watching his wife play the piano. Weeks later, Degas learned that Manet evidently hated the depiction of his wife so much that he sliced most of her from the canvas.

That’s fierce. We don’t know why. Degas angrily took the picture back. They patched things up, saw each other socially, mostly in groups, through the 1870s. There’s very little written correspondence between the two. Degas writes about Manet in letters to friends, mostly with his typical snark. Even as artists go, Degas was exceptionally rancorous, envious, and obdurate.

Manet seems to have thought well of Degas as an artist. It’s not that he ever disliked or belittled Degas as a person. He just doesn’t seem to have thought about him very much at all. It takes two to do a gripping, high-test tango, whether it’s Petruchio and Kate, Adams and Jefferson, or Bugs and Elmer. Manet and Degas? No dueling pistols needed. They overlap but don’t collide.

Still, it’s a dream exhibition for the art that the Met has gathered. There’s some good intellectual material also, but it’s very one-sided, with the passion almost entirely and weirdly with Degas. In any event, the theme has been plumbed over the 150 years since the two artists met. Still, there’s much to see and enjoy. The five short catalogue essays are very good.

Manet/Degas begins with the face-off between two self-portraits, Manet’s from 1878, a few years before he died from complications from syphilis, and Degas’s from 1855. Manet did only two self-portraits while Degas did more than 20, not counting the many photographs he took of himself in old age. Manet depicts himself as a painter-bohemian. Degas chose bourgeois formality — he’s well dressed, carrying an art portfolio, and looking like a young lawyer headed to court.

The two met in 1861 or 1862, at the Louvre, in front of what was then thought to be a Velázquez portrait of Philip IV’s daughter. Degas was making an etching based on the picture, copper plate in hand. “How audacious of you to etch that way, without any preliminary drawing,” Manet said. “I would not dare do the same.” Manet would have done a preliminary drawing and etched from that. Degas preferred to etch directly from the motif.

An Enigmatic Relationship, a section in the show, begins with the story of the sliced painting of Manet and his wife. Decades later, long after the couple had died, Degas displayed the defaced picture prominently in his Paris home. He’d sewn a strip of blank canvas where half of Madame Manet had been. This is Picture of Dorian Gray stuff, I thought.

It’s all very antiseptic, though, reported with the rhetorical drama I recall from my high-school freshman-algebra textbook. Then there’s the suite of Degas drawings and etchings of Manet from around 1868. Manet, turned to the right, Manet in profile, Manet standing, and Manet holding his hat. Manet never — ever — does a portrait of Degas, sitting, standing, or squatting. He draws pictures of his wife.

There’s a section, not really needed, of Degas’s and Manet’s early training in the 1850s. Both traveled to Italy to copy the Old Masters. Both revered Ingres and Delacroix. Both studied Spanish art from El Greco to Goya, though Manet seems to have drawn much more from it than Degas did, though I wonder on this point. The exhibition invests Manet with Hispanophilia, and that’s correct, but I suspect Degas has it, too.

Central to both young men is the minimal time they spent in art academies. They both felt that academic training was too safe. It prepared you to be against — against adventure, against experimentation, against the new and strange.

There was a moment of frisson when the two men first met at the Louvre. Here we read Manet’s comment about Degas’s audacity. Reading the catalogue, I learned that the story and quote come from a secondhand source in a 1919 book on French etchings. Degas might have been the source, and Degas is not reliable.

“Never mind,” as Gilda Radner’s Emily Litella character said. Family Tensions is the next section. It’s not really about Manet and Degas together but about their families, so the two artists aren’t often intersecting and intertwining. I don’t mind the loss of plot since the art’s so good. Manet’s Boy with a Sword is there. It’s from 1861, so it’s early and among the first group of Manets to enter the Met collection, in 1889. Manet painted Music Lesson in 1870, depicting the poet Zacharie Astruc playing the guitar while an unknown woman holds a book of sheet music next to him. A year or so later, Degas borrowed the poses for two pictures he never exhibited or sold.

Degas’s Bellelli Family is in this section, and praise the Lord. It’s a fabulous portrait of four members of the Naples branch of Degas’s family. It’s about time we see that Degas is a superb, subtle colorist and master of a decorum that’s both austere and lush. Visitors knowing little about Degas at this point would assume that he’s Manet’s pet fanboy.

Challenging Genres, the next section, offers more meat. Though socially friendly, Manet and Degas were on different art planets even in the 1860s. Manet was indeed correct in using “audacious” to describe Degas, if indeed he ever did.

It’s by no means breaking news, but Manet, on the one hand, was a happy creature of the Paris Salon. In the 1860s, with a dealer-driven art market still inchoate, the juried Salon was the principal means for an artist to make a splash. Though preferring high-establishment taste, Salon judges sometimes took risks, such as showing Déjeuner sur l’Herbe and Olympia, both of which were “succès de scandales” pictures. No one, even a Salon judge, wants to be seen as blinkered or boring. Degas, on the other hand, wasn’t exactly a Salon flop, but he wasn’t a shining star, either.

This section, I’m afraid, blows poor Degas out of the water on the basis of sheer glamour. Olympia is here as well as Manet’s Dead Toreador, Dead Christ with Angels, Lola de Valence, and The Spanish Singer. Degas’s Scene of War in the Middle Ages, from 1865, was in the same Salon as Olympia. It went unnoticed. History painting was at the top of the hierarchy of genres as ruled by high-end taste. It’s something Manet didn’t tackle, though in 1864 he painted the splendid, rousing Battle of the USS “Kearsarge” and the CSS “Alabama.” This ocean-battle scene was a current event when Manet painted it, depicting as it did the fight to the death between a Union and a Confederate ship off the coast of France.

I like Degas’s history and mythological paintings, though they’re weirdly diffuse and disjointed, but so is war, and so were the Middle Ages. Semiramis Building Babylon, from 1861, an eight-footer, is in Manet/Degas, too. Semiramis was a conquering queen and an amalgam of myth and real life. She figures in the Bible, Shakespeare, a play by Voltaire, an opera by Vivaldi, and a 1954 movie starring Rhonda Fleming, among many other places. She is said to have castrated what would become the first eunuch.

It’s a very strange picture. Slender and dressed in white, Semiramis surveys a vast, gauzy Babylon and the Euphrates River, a passage filling the left half of the picture. Her horse, set in profile and looking very much like a figure from the Renaissance painter Mantegna, whom Degas revered, dominates the right half. Degas never exhibited it. Manet saw it and told Degas he should show it. “It’ll make more variety in your work,” he wickedly said. Ouch.

We live in a wacky world, but in normal times, I’d find in Manet/Degas a case of original sin. Compare-and-contrast exhibitions almost never work, intellectually or aesthetically. I first saw this at the Clark Art Institute years ago when it did its Degas/Picasso show. Lovely to look at but brittle to the touch. Each artist made thousands of works of art. A curator could cherry-pick to make any point he wanted, and an informed viewer or reader could cherry-pick to demolish any one or all of these points.

I don’t think the Clark invented the genre, but it struck me as opportunistic as well as disingenuous. “Degas” alone wasn’t then — and isn’t now — a name that shoots fireworks, but two’s better than one from a marketing perspective. Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, which ran at the MFA Boston in 2009, was a power throuple. It was slim, at 60 paintings, in part because its insurance value was a billion dollars. They’re three heavy hitters, to be sure, but the show was too small to do an effective mix-and-match.

Two of the worst shows I’ve seen over the years were Homer/Remington at the Amon Carter Museum and Calder/Picasso at the de Young in San Francisco. Yes, we can compare Calder and Picasso as much as we can compare a horsefly and Secretariat. Picasso’s a giant. Calder made things that sway and quiver in the breeze. Homer’s a giant. Remington’s best at bustin’ broncos in bronze. It’s difficult to launch a serious scholarly study from there.

Manet/Degas avoids these cul-de-sacs, here and there barely. By its Challenging Genres section, Manet is clearly the fiery star. The curators rub it in by giving Dead Christ with Angels, a Met picture, a show-within-the-show. It celebrates Manet’s genius with etchings based on the painting and a gorgeous but superfluous watercolor, ink, and pencil version that Manet did after the painting and gave to Émile Zola.

The one hint of Degas’s future is Scene from the Steeplechase: The Fallen Jockey, from 1866. It’s Degas’s first Salon picture dealing with modern life. We don’t know whether the jockey is dead or alive, but it screams “now” and “impact.” Even here, the Met beclouds Degas’s moment in the sun. The label notes that it’s based on Manet’s Bullfight, a Salon picture from 1863.

In the 1870s, Degas and Manet seemed to go in different directions. They went to some of the same dinner parties. Degas was deeply involved in the avant-garde Impressionist salons, while Manet refused to participate in them. Though Manet and Degas both worked on developing publicity and sales venues other than the Paris Salon, the Impressionists, for Manet, were a Pont Neuf too far. When Manet died in 1883, Degas said, “He was greater than we thought,” a veiled dig.

Rest assured, Degas is like Eve Harrington to Manet’s Margo Channing. In Saturday’s story, I’ll write about how he seizes the spotlight. Both men stayed in Paris during the 1870 war as part of the National Guard. It was a searing experience for both. Degas visited New Orleans — some of his family lived there — and experienced the South during Reconstruction. There’s Degas and the demimonde, in which he thrives, Degas and ballet, and, after Manet’s death, his nearly 35 years living with his memories and creating his own personal Manet.

Manet/Degas reaches equipoise halfway through. Better late than never.