Manet / Degas

Jointly organised by the Musée d’Orsay and the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Manet / Degas opens the 2023 season of major Impressionist exhibitions.

The bringing together of works by such seminal painters as Manet (1832-1883) and Degas (1834-1917) doesn’t simply allow us to look for similarities in their respective bodies of work. To be sure, analogies can easily be drawn between these two crucial artists as they contributed to the creation of new ways of painting through the period from the 1860s to the 1880s, notably in the themes they favoured (horse-racing, café scenes, prostitution, even the bathtub…), the genres they reinvented, the way they widened the quest for realism via new formal and narrative devices, in the art markets and collectors they won over, even in the places (such as cafés and performance venues) and the circles – both family-centred (for example in the case of Morisot, who married Edgar Manet’s brother Eugène) and revolving around friends – where they met up.

However, before and after the birth of Impressionism, on which this exhibition offers new perspectives, what differentiated these artists and even divided them stands out much more clearly. With their different temperaments and training, they didn’t share the same tastes in literature or music. Their directions in terms of careers and exhibitions diverged as early as 1873-1874, while their early friendship, which had initially been strengthened by shared experiences during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, immediately followed by the social upheaval of the Paris Commune, cooled. Consider the divide between Manet’s desire for official recognition and Degas’s obstinate refusal to follow official routes to legitimise his art. Looking at their private lives, once their youthful days over, they matured in utterly contrasting manners. Compare Manet’s highly sociable, very open, increasingly brilliant social life and his rich family life with Degas’s much more secretive ways and much narrower circles.

In his essay Degas Danse Dessin, poet and thinker Paul Valéry, a close friend of Degas, also focused a good deal on Manet. He wrote of “marvellous coexistences” verging on dissonant chords. Thanks to an unprecedented museum partnership bringing together a remarkable number of masterpieces never before displayed alongside each other, this exhibition now throws light on the contrasting artistic approaches adopted by Manet and Degas, enabling visitors to look afresh at the fleeting complicity and lasting rivalry between these two giants of the period. The exhibition’s layout also emphasises conflictual, heterogeneous, unforeseen aspects to the evolution of modern art, from its emergence, through its rise, to its triumph. In addition, it reveals the full extent of Degas’s body of work as, following Manet’s death, Degas gained an increasingly commanding position. The question also arises as to whether death somehow reconciled the two artists.