Manet/Degas, Musée d’Orsay review — a friendship and rivalry which drove art onwards

Degas, aged 27, was diligently etching a copy of Velázquez’s “Infanta Margarita” at the Louvre in 1861 when a jeering voice, patrician but with an affected Montmartre drawl, declared: “You have a lot of nerve, and with that method you’ll be lucky if you come out with anything.” Thus Manet, 29, introduced himself to the painter who became his close friend, rival and accomplice in forging modern art from a study of the Old Masters.

You can imagine the encounter in the opening moment of the Musée d’Orsay’s marvellous, psychologically gripping though incomplete exhibition Manet/Degas. Their self-portraits greet you: Manet in frock coat looks out, sarcastic yet charming, matching Zola’s description — “a quick and intelligent eye, a mobile mouth, sometimes a little mocking . . . with an expression of sensitivity and energy” — while Degas, no less a refined dandy, appears tentative, shy, stubborn, in formal stilted pose.

The scales, however, are already weighted — when these portraits were painted, Manet was over 40 and famous, Degas a precocious 20. Degas’ model was the classicist Ingres, whose advice — “draw lines, lots of lines” — he uncompromisingly followed in his early history paintings, such as the linear, crystalline “Semiramis Building Babylon”, and in the five-square-metre “Bellelli Family”, the youthful masterpiece begun in Florence in 1858 portraying his sad, long-faced Italian aunt Laura, her “detestable” husband, and his cousins, one anxious, one playful, in white pinafores.

Degas infused this painting with the sobriety and clarity of the Renaissance portraits he had admired at the Uffizi: “I would like to express a certain natural grace together with a nobility that I don’t know how to define,” he wrote. The painting radically gives an ordinary family group the monumentality of historical drama and conveys modern life, the tensions of a marriage, through a sombrely detailed interior.

At the Orsay, “The Bellelli Family” hangs opposite Manet’s enormous “The Balcony” — a stunning face-off. Manet’s inspiration was Goya’s “Majas on a Balcony”; his models were his friends, transformed into remote, disconnected figures, static, flat as playing cards squeezed between the green iron railings and shutters. This is Manet’s first portrait of dark, sultry Berthe Morisot; they mesmerised each other. In the painting she remains inaccessible behind the balustrade as she was to the married Manet in life. Critics called the picture hideous; Morisot thought, “I appear strange rather than ugly.”

If Degas has the edge as a virtuoso draughtsman, it is Manet’s estranging effects that hold the viewer. Where Degas was primarily inspired by Italy, as Ingres and Poussin had been, Manet struck out from French tradition by co-opting the starkness of Spanish art. He sought an awkward realism in his Spanish subjects — “Spanish Singer”, “Dead Toreador” — and inflected his portraits with appropriations from Velázquez.

In “Boy Carrying a Sword”, Manet’s son/stepson is costumed as a Spanish court page with a full-size sword, perhaps suggesting the weight of his uncertain paternity. Haggard “Jeanne Duval” in billowing crinoline suggests a wilting Infanta and, in a dazzling group of pictures, huge-eyed Morisot, always in black, here concealed behind a fan, there with mantilla-like lace, is at once a complex independent woman and accorded the pride and gravitas of Spanish royalty.

Alongside are Degas’ portraits of Eugène Manet, the artist’s brother and eventually Morisot’s husband, and of Morisot’s sister; more straightforward exercises in naturalism, they attest to close circles of friendship and (upper-class) family uniting Manet and Degas. Also here is Degas’ “Monsieur and Madame Manet”: Manet in characteristic languid pose listening to his wife Suzanne playing the piano. Except only half of her is there: Manet “thought that something about Madame Manet wasn’t right”, a contemporary said, and slashed the canvas, damaging the friendship, though both survived.

Manet’s most controversial family picture, “Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe” (1863), a nude woman seated at a picnic between two clothed figures, one based on Manet’s brother, the other on his brother-in-law, hangs just outside the show in the Orsay’s permanent collection; the scenario of a naked women shared between two men suggests Suzanne’s position as one-time lover of both Manet and his father. This and the following year’s “Olympia”, a sicklylooking prostitute reclining like Titian’s Venus, belligerently eyeing the viewer, anointed Manet leader of the avant-garde. With “Young Lady in 1866”, in a silk dressing gown waiting to be unbuttoned, watched by a cheeky parrot, he staked his territory: fashionable, confident, liberated women. “When I was painting modern Paris, Degas was still painting Semiramis,” he boasted.

Nevertheless, in the 1860s especially, Manet needed Degas as an affirming voice to his own radical project of painting modern life. Degas in turn was liberated by Manet to throw off history painting, and did so distinctively. His everyday scenes are harsher, bleaker: the implicit violence in the claustrophobic “Interior (The Rape)”; “L’Absinthe”, the desolate woman at a bar — answered by Manet’s “Plum Brandy”, featuring the same model drinking alone, but more vital, ambivalent and delicate in the light dabs of colour.

By the 1870s, Manet was experimenting with impressionism — “Boating”, “The Monet Family in their Garden at Argenteuil” — and, under Degas’ influence, with pastel, notably “Madame Manet on a Blue Sofa”, his wife ungainly and dull in the pose of his own “Olympia”, a paradoxical bright shimmer of unhappiness.

Degas, resisting plein-air painting, nevertheless showed at the Impressionist exhibitions, while the individualist Manet refused. At the 1876 exhibition Degas’ “A Cotton Office in New Orleans”, painted while visiting his American family and a picture of capitalism in action (with a hinterland of slavery), made his name. It captures the moment his uncle’s cotton brokerage went bankrupt — sloping floor, cotton floating in uneven waves, figures slumping in different directions all convey instability.

Degas’ fascination with gesture and movement — fleeting moments — allied him to the Impressionists. Unforgivably, this exhibition includes none of his dance paintings. After 1870, his path diverged from Manet’s: he concentrated on the body — “the muscles, I know them, they’re my friends” — in dance pictures and scintillating pastels of nudes, of which only two are displayed here, and nothing after 1887.

Manet, during his last illness, ventured a modern history painting: “Rochefort’s Escape” (1881), depicting communard Henri Rochefort fleeing his penal colony, though the beleaguered black figure in the little boat battling the waves is surely a self-portrait too. It is Manet’s final work here, though not the end of the exhibition, which loops back in the last room to another political painting about facing death: the anti-imperial monument “The Execution of Maximilian” (1867-68), inspired by Goya’s “The Third of May 1808”.

After Manet died in 1883, his heirs cut up “Execution”; Degas bought the fragments, reassembled the painting and went on to collect works at the heart of Manet’s story — including, here, “Berthe Morisot in Mourning”, her thin face carved in thick paint like a fearsome mask of misery, and the unflattering pastel of Suzanne. All were still in his collection at his death in 1917: so Degas lived loyally with his old friend until the end.

To July 23, musee-orsay.fr; then Metropolitan Museum, New York, September 24-January 7 2024