Manet/Degas – Met Museum
Stephan Wolohojian and Ashley Dunn, co-curators of the Met’s latest exhibition, a co-production between the Met in New York and Musée d’Orsay in Paris, take us on a tour highlighting the individual work and relationship of two of the greatest impressionist artists, Eduard Manet and Edgar Degas, and the connections, personal and professional, between them.
These two Parisian artists were close friends. Both fiercely ambitious and competitive, what they learned from each other informed their paintings in ways that are immediately obvious in comparisons of the works in this exhibition. They copied, they compared, they pushed, they competed, they stole ideas from one another and each was refreshed and stimulated into increasingly unusual and revolutionary experiments in painting. Often they chose the same subjects, contemporary life in Paris, the friends, homelife, and places of entertainment around them. Their relationship continued even after Manet died in April 1883, as his influence on Degas’ paintings is clear from the more than 30 years remaining of his life until his own death in September 1917.
They shared an exciting and febrile moment in art history, the middle of the 19th century, when everything was changing and those changes are reflected in their individual contributions but one without the other wouldn’t have had anything like the same impact on the art world, either in their own time or subsequently, in ours.
In playing a huge shared role in inventing modernism, theirs was a relationship that pushed the history of art forward.
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