In addition to being contemporaries who each produced storied masterpieces that were instrumental in the development of impressionism, the French painters Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas also shared complicated personal and professional relationships that were of great importance in their social lives and artistic careers. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new exhibition, Manet/Degas 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 Atlantic.
Headlining Manet/Degas is Manet’s groundbreaking work Olympia, which makes its first-ever trip to America, 158 years after it was first exhibited at the 1865 Paris Salon. Shocking in its day for centering a sex worker who stared boldly out from the canvas toward the viewer’s eyes, the painting caused a succès de scandale, bringing Manet instant acclaim and helping the budding impressionism movement break from artistic convention.
“This is only the third time it’s ever left Paris,” said the Met’s Stephan Wolohojian, who co-curated Manet/Degas with Ashley Dunn. “There’s not many frequent flier miles on that one! It’s a phenomenal work. I think we have done it justice, and we have thought so carefully about how to integrate it and celebrate its presence here.”
By contrast, at the 1865 Salon, Degas exhibited a much more conventional historical painting, Scene of War in the Middle Ages, which ended up going completely ignored. “Manet is garnering a lot of attention, and Degas is meanwhile struggling with how he can possibly produce a history painting worthy of the Salon,” said Dunn. “Degas’ painting really doesn’t land.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Manet would remain loyal to the Salons, continuing to show there right up until his last major work, Un bar aux Folies Bergère, which featured in the 1882 Salon. (Regarding this work, Degas sniped: “Manet stupid and shrewd, a playing card without printing, a Spanish trompe l’oeil painter.”) By contrast, Degas grew alienated from the Salons, making a complete break in 1870 and eventually setting up his own series of eight annual independent exhibitions, which are now known at the Impressionist Exhibitions.
Manet/Degas does a fantastic job of exploring the central place that the Paris Salons would have for each artist. “We try to bring out differences in exhibition strategies,” said Dunn. “Manet stays loyal to the Salons, whereas Degas wishes that Manet would join the group, and he laments that he refuses to do so.”
Yet in spite of their extremely uneven beginning in the 1865 Salon and the divergent artistic paths that would occur thereafter, the two men would nonetheless become both rivals and inspirations to each other, with Manet – as an outsider to impressionism – contributing greatly to the impressionist aesthetic that Degas was a central part of developing. Manet/Degas compellingly explores this angle, as well as many more. One of those would be the overlapping Parisian milieu that each occupied, frequently bumping shoulders at salons at which one could find such members of the cultural elite as Charles Baudelaire, Émile Zola and the painter Henri Fantin-Latour. Manet/Degas also shows how the two men would be among the few artists to remain and defend Paris during the siege of the Franco-Prussian war – serving in the National Guard, they would be deeply influenced by the war, responding to it in art created thereafter. “They both had a strong allegiance to their city, and defending it during the war was extremely important to them both.”
Another interesting point that Manet/Degas explores in the relationship between its subjects is the very uneven distribution of portraits that each made of the other. While the exhibition displays an entire wall of sketches that Degas made of Manet, there are no recorded instances of Manet completing a portrait of Degas. “This is particularly notable because Manet made a lot of portraits of friends,” said Wolohojian. “It wasn’t that he didn’t paint friends, artists, writers, etc.”
Even more intriguingly, Manet/Degas shows a completed 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, returning the insult by giving back a painting that Manet had given to him. Degas would keep the slashed 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,” said Wolohojian. “It’s easy to just say, ‘well that was it between them.’ But then in the 1870s they were both in Paris during the war and the Commune, volunteering to help.”
The show also gives central placement to the legendary first meeting of the two men, which purportedly happened at the Louvre in the early 1860, as each was making a name for himself. As the story goes, the meeting occurred when Manet came across Degas making a copy of a Velásquez painting – Manet approached Degas and said something to the effect of “how audacious 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’s not known if he did so before or after the meeting with Degas.
“For curators, it’s just so wonderfully evocative to think about our galleries as spaces for such encounters for contemporary artists,” said Wolohojian, musing on the idea of what storied meetings might be happening contemporarily in the Met’s galleries. Dunn added that the account is an important one for the germination of each painter’s aesthetic: “It’s a very rich story in terms of thinking about their mutual interest in Velasquez, and also their early training and self-education through copying.”
Manet/Degas is a huge yet also very carefully conceived exhibition that successfully lets the Met’s rich holdings of each artist shine via a careful and bounteous selection of borrowed works, primarily from the Musée d’Orsay and Musée de l’Orangerie, with over 50 other institutions and collectors contributing. “I think one of the wonderful things about this exhibition is that it gives us an appreciation of each artist’s particular strengths,” said Wolohojian, “and also how they were both so extraordinarily different. Through that difference, they help us something profound about their shared experience.”
Manet/Degas has also already proven a thrill for the crowds who have shown up since the exhibition’s opening, particularly excited to see Olympia in the US for the first time. “One person who came to the show in a wheelchair was so joyful,” said Wolohojian. “They thought they would never get to Paris again, and the idea that they could just come to see Olympia in New York, it was just so exciting and celebratory to have the painting here. It’s hard to put on your art historian hat when you see such human excitement.”
Manet/Degas is on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York until 7 January
