Friends at an exhibition come with risks. Some might like to go at a brisk trot, others to linger in front of every last work. There are those who keep silent and those who like to chat.
It can be easier to visit solo, as I did the Manet/Degas exhibition, on at the Musée d’Orsay until July (after which it goes to the Metropolitan Museum of Art).
Except I was far from alone.
On a Wednesday morning in April, the museum was packed cheek by jowl, and it was difficult both to move about and to stand in one place for any length of time. Scenes of complex navigation played out for Manet (1832-1883) and Degas (1834-1917), whose self-portraits, holding the tools of their trade, hang together by way of a greeting.
It isn’t really a fair comparison. Born in Paris within two years of each other, Degas paints himself in 1855 at only 21, while Manet is shown at 47, just beginning his painful syphilitic end. A split in the wall between these portraits gives the punter a glimpse of Manet’s Olympia (1863) on display a few rooms ahead.
When their friendship took off in the 1860s, Degas made a number of portraits of Manet in repose, looking elsewhere as he sits or sprawls on furniture, in a sketch from 1868 holding onto his hat as if eager to go.
Manet never seems to have returned the favour. Some think Degas is part of a cropped duo off by themselves at the bottom of Manet’s Races in the Bois de Boulogne (1872). All we get of this pair of racegoers is a couple of well-turned-out backs.
In La Nouvelle Peinture (1876), the critic Edmond Duranty writes: “What we need is the unique character of the modern individual in his clothing…With a back, we want to reveal a temperament, an age, a social status…”. That’s all very well, but how one can now say that it is Degas’ back, or indeed that he is with Mary Cassatt, I’m not sure. Accompanying the Impressionists and their relations is a brand of hopeful iconography and matchmaking.1
As the story goes, Manet and Degas first met in the Louvre sometime in the early 1860s. Degas was at work on a copy of a Velázquez (workshop) painting. His and Manet’s etchings of the Infanta Margarita Teresa are in the show, together with Manet’s paintings “after” Titian, Degas’ after Mantegna, both after Delacroix.
In rooms where Géricault himself once brawled, Manet and Degas gained the strength for, as Duranty puts it, “wrestling with tradition body-to-body.”
For them, as for many others, the Louvre was a place to copy. Sitting before Veronese’s Wedding Feast at Cana, a woman does just this in a painting by Samuel Morse. She’s helped by a man.
In the show, Manet and Degas’ faithful copying jobs are followed by rooms of portraits of family and friends into which they each stuck copies of reproductions. James Tissot, another painter friend of Degas’, sits in front of a framed replica of a Cranach (workshop) painting from the Louvre.
Sometimes Manet and Degas reproduce their own works. The exhibition presents us with views of Manet’s Olympia (1863) as well as a print of it within his Portrait of Émile Zola (1868), not to mention Gaugin’s copy from 1891.
Degas bought this painting in 1895, when Gaugin left for Tahiti bringing a photograph of the Manet with him. Apart from this Gaugin after Manet, the rooms are filled with just Manet and Degas, hanging side by side at the races, by the sea, and in the café. Both look on as women bathe and sing, buy and sell.
Men of similar privilege if not character, they shared a set of preoccupations and friends. One room is given over to the circle of Berthe Morisot. (An exhibition of Morisot’s paintings is at the Dulwich Picture Gallery until September.) Like Degas, Manet met Morisot in the Louvre, as he was copying Titian, she Veronese. “Sexy,” said a man to his friends as we all stood in front of Manet’s portrait of Morisot from 1873.
Manet and Degas had a strange kind of friendship. An exchange of paintings in around 1869 seems to have gone awry, with Manet cutting much of his wife Suzanne from a Degas portrait of the couple, and a sore Degas giving back a Manet still life of a bowl of plums.
There is a record of squabbles and insults on both sides. Yet when Manet died in 1883, Degas collected his work, including his platter of a ham waiting to be sliced. For a while in the 1890s, Degas considered starting his own picture gallery. Morisot wrote on her deathbed: “Tell Degas that if he founds a museum he must choose a Manet…”.
In a small but long pastel alone on a wall by the Musée d’Orsay toilets, Degas is back in the Louvre. As was his wont, he is unobserved as he observes, peering out from behind a column at two museumgoers.
This pair is a study in contrasts. Closer to us, a seated woman glances up from her book. The woman standing behind her, partially blocking the view, gazes with shoulders thrown back. One takes up space with her (prohibited) umbrella, the other buries herself in a catalogue or guidebook; one looks exalted, the other perhaps a bit weary. Whether or not these visitors are together, they seem to be having rather different experiences of the museum.
Degas won’t let us know the book, or even the paintings on the walls, but the room’s imitation marble decoration and wood floor suggest that we are in the Grande Galerie. Tissot displays a similar interest in materials in his own paintings from inside the Louvre.
In this older room, empty of visitors, the marble walls seem made for the ancient contents, which include a Roman statue of the Three Graces that Napoleon bought for his museum in 1807.
Degas’ own two pastel graces are neither copyists nor, it seems, connoisseurs. Some have thought Degas’ model was the actress Ellen Andrée, whom we see in her cups at the Café de la Nouvelle Athènes in a Degas and a Manet paired together in the show. But in a letter of 1918 Mary Cassatt identifies herself as “the woman at the Louvre leaning on an umbrella”. Mary’s sister Lydia is often named as the reader.
With his eye problems getting worse, Degas kept returning to the Louvre, following women around in drawings, in the prints he made for his and Cassatt’s ill-fated journal Le Jour et la Nuit, and in his paintings.
The painter Walter Sickert became friends with Degas the year Manet died. He describes a studio visit:
“I watched Degas with interest one day when he was glazing a painting with a flow of varnish by means of a big flat brush. It represented a lady drifting in a picture gallery. He said that he wanted to give the idea of that bored, and respectively crushed and impressed absence of all sensation that women experience in front of paintings. As he brought out the background in a few undecided strokes, suggesting frames on the wall, he said with irrepressible merriment, 'I’ve got to make it look a bit like Veronese’s Wedding Feast at Cana'. There you have Degas."
Forget Manet’s knife, reading can do its own damage.
In the Manet/Degas exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay, one is body to body, wrestling with notions of friendship, a history of misogyny, and the ecstasy and fatigue of the museum.
So good I am trying to share the piece with my wife!
Nice Take, Beatrice!😍