The French Connection

Manet and Degas had a long, often petty friendship. The result was modern art.

- JACKSON ARN

It began, the story goes, with an insult, unless the insult was a compliment—with ambitious young artists, one never knows. Édouard Manet would have been about thirty when he visited the Louvre and met Edgar Degas, only two years his junior but as sullen as a teen-ager. Degas was hunched in front of a Velázquez painting of the Infanta Margarita Teresa, trying to copy what he saw. Manet, the chatty type, looked down at his fellow-artist’s attempt and said, “How audacious of you to etch that way, without any preliminary drawing, I would not dare do the same!” It was the early eighteen-sixties, and a two-decade friendship, marked by endless subliminal pokes and a few out-and-out slashes, had just been born.

“Audacious” is a weaselly word, but I mean the best when I say that “Manet/ Degas,” the Met’s sprawling yet intimate two-hander, is an audacious show. To me, it comes as a breath of fresh air, since—I might as well admit this now— I’ve often found its co-stars easier to respect than to enjoy. With Degas, I know I’m not alone: the austerity of his paintings borders on nastiness. (That they’ve decorated so many little girls’ bedrooms is one of art history’s tartest ironies.) Manet is a gentler painter, beloved by many, but his work has a peculiar stiffness that’s sometimes hard for me to take in bulk—I can’t always tell if it comes from the artist, his subjects, or both. What follow, then, are the thoughts of a reformed skeptic, who’s still not blind to these artists’ foibles but has learned to love them unconditionally.