The Art of Rivalry

by Sebastian Smee

  Degas was too smart, and too much a child of nineteenth-century positivism, to buy wholeheartedly into physiognomy. But he was obsessed with faces. And so facial expressions now became a central pillar in his attempt to renovate his aesthetic, to make himself modern in ways that marked him out from Manet.

  Manet’s signature, after all, was the blank, inscrutable stare. His utter refusal to impose any kind of heightened significance on faces and facial expressions was part of what made his pictures—especially the paintings of Victorine Meurent and of his son, Léon—so mystifying. The critic Théophile Thoré accused him of cultivating “a sort of pantheism which places no higher value on a head than a slipper.” Weren’t faces the whole key to portraiture? Wasn’t it for good reason that people paid special attention to them? Manet did not. He was as likely to dwell lovingly on a tattered shoe, a white dress, a pink sash, or a fan, as on any face.

  Degas saw this as an opportunity to etch out a major difference between him and Manet. Like many artists, he had a competitive relationship with literature. So he was deeply attracted to the idea that something purely visual—a face, a certain setting—could tell us more about a person’s interior life than all the lumbering verbiage of a nineteenth-century novel. Since painting A Woman Seated Beside a Vase of Flowers, he had become convinced that a good, a penetrating portrait was no longer merely a question of making the sitter’s face and demeanor express identifiable character traits. Instead, it was about the very modern notion of flux—the notion that inner life was an unstable, mercurial phenomenon that was no less revealing for being so slippery.

  The face was still key; it was what Degas sought to convey by it that was different.

  His convictions about this played into the drama that enveloped his portrait of Manet and Suzanne. “Do portraits of people in familiar, typical attitudes,” he jotted in his notebook, not long before embarking on his portrait of Manet’s marriage, “and above all give their faces and bodies the same expressions.”

  —

  INFLUENCED BY BAUDELAIRE, Manet also connected modern, urban life with flux and instability. But for him, the whole point was the charade itself, the play of disguises, the apprehension, as Edgar Allan Poe put it in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” that “there is such a thing as being too profound.” Manet liked the idea that truth (Poe again) “is not always in a well. In fact, as regards the more important knowledge, I do believe that she is invariably superficial.” His whole approach to art was in deep accord with this idea. His most famous pictures reflect that part of his personality that liked “to be light-hearted, enamored of all the most obvious things in life and wanting no complications.” For his letterhead he chose an appropriately unblinking motto: “Everything happens.”

  Manet’s insistence on surface values and whim has contributed to the feeling that his pictures are willfully opaque. Their meanings, then as now, are never clear. Seldom has a great painter produced so many bizarre anomalies: inappropriate clothing (or lack of clothing); strange mash-ups of genre; head-spinning combinations of contemporary realism and allusions to art history. Their mysteries are legion. But these mysteries sit on the surface, where their solutions cease to matter, and where they reflect instead—and above all—the pleasure of their own making.

  Degas may have admired aspects of all this. But he didn’t buy it. He was predisposed to see art in ethical terms, as an endeavor requiring both courage and sobriety, and he began to feel that Manet’s approach—his “pantheism”—resulted in a moral thinness, an attenuation of art’s profounder possibilities. He had little time for whimsy and a fundamental impatience with illusions. He believed that art must be in service to truth. His job was to reveal that truth; to catch it unawares; to ambush it. In this sense, there was something almost predatory about the way Degas painted.

  “A picture is something that requires as much trickery, malice, and vice as the perpetration of a crime,” he once said.

  —

  MANET HAD ATTEMPTED TO win over critics by setting up a pavilion of his own outside the 1867 Exposition Universelle. He filled it with fifty of his paintings. But the gambit backfired. The show failed to sell, leaving him in debt to his mother to the tune of 18,000 francs. By the next year, he had slipped into a serious funk. He was mourning his friend and confidant Baudelaire, who died at the end of August 1867. His rate of production had slowed almost to a halt. It seemed to him that whatever he ventured forth as an artist was delivered back at his door in tatters.

  He had retreated to Trouville, on the coast, whence he awaited the daily mail. Much of this merely brought news of more critical drubbings. “Here comes the muddy stream,” he would say. “The tide is coming in.”

  —

  IT WAS SOBERING, BUT perhaps also obliquely helpful, for Degas to see Manet in this weakened, needy state. Over the previous two or three years, the two men had grown especially close, so that by 1868 Degas was aware that something wasn’t right with his friend. He was concerned. But he may also have been intrigued, and obscurely buoyed, as we often are when people we care about are seen to be struggling.

  Things had not improved by the summer, which Manet spent with his family in Boulogne-sur-Mer. Again, he was bored and restless, oppressed by a sense of defeat. His mind kept turning to Degas. Crucially, Degas was someone in whom he, Manet, could see evidence of his own impact. To recognize talent in one’s peer and to see one’s own hand among the forces shaping that talent is always a tonic—especially for an artist confronting his own crisis of confidence. It was Manet’s example, after all, that had persuaded Degas to turn his attentions away from history and mythology and toward contemporary subject matter. It was his example that had made Degas fall in love with the life of the city. And it was his example that made Degas see the attractions, in art as well as in life, of insouciance, improvisation, and brevity, in place of all that was plodding, painstaking, and overly planned.

  Manet could take heart from all of this. Trying to rouse himself, he had an idea. He wrote to Degas: “I’m planning to make a little trip to London. Do you want to come along?”

  He tried to sound offhand about it, explaining that he’d been tempted by the low cost of the journey: “You can go from Paris to London 1st class return for 31 francs 50.” But there was a peculiar urgency in the request. “Let me know immediately,” he wrote, “because I will write and tell Legros [a fellow artist, resident in London] what day we’ll be arriving so that he can act as our interpreter and guide.”

  In truth, Manet was close to desperate. “I’ve had enough of rebuffs,” he complained to Fantin-Latour around the same time. “What I want to do today is to make some money. And since I think, as you do, that there is not much to be done in our stupid country, in the midst of this population of government employees, I want to exhibit in London.”

  He made the same point, in a more comradely spirit, to Degas: “I think we should explore the terrain over there, since it could provide an outlet for our products.” He enclosed a list of departure times, and suggested they try to leave on the afternoon of August 1—a Saturday. That way, he explained, they could embark the same evening on the midnight boat.

  “Let me know by return,” he signed off, “and keep the luggage to a minimum.”

  —

  MANET’S REASONS FOR GOING to London went beyond the prospect of making sales. He and Degas were both Anglophiles. Degas had come back from the Exposition Universelle of 1867 raving about the English paintings he had seen. Manet, a habitué of the Café de Londres in Paris, admired English sporting prints, which he drew on for his occasional depictions of the racetrack. Both men loved the English tradition of caricature.

  London was also, of course, the birthplace of dandyism, that special attitude toward dress and demeanor that expressed an individual’s relationship to the world—a relationship that was at once independent and nonchalant, stylish and original, avoiding overdiligence. Manet and Degas were both attracted to dandyism, which had first e
merged in early-nineteenth-century London in the figure of Beau Brummel and was reincarnated in, among others, the carefully cultivated persona of Manet’s and Degas’s friend James Whistler. Manet had every expectation they would see Whistler in London.

  All this feels relevant only because, around this time, Degas jotted in his notebooks an observation that fed into his painting of Manet in his waistcoat and pointy shoes, draped nonchalantly across the couch. “There are some people who are badly turned out well; and some who are well turned out badly,” he wrote. Manet, you feel sure, was in the first category; he had the kind of effortless attitude toward dress and demeanor that someone like the overfastidious Whistler could only envy. Degas seemed to be homing in on this special quality in Manet when he added, in the same notebook, a quotation from the midcentury dandy Barbey d’Aurevilly: “There is sometimes a certain ease in awkwardness which, if I am not mistaken, is more graceful than grace itself.”

  Both quotations were surely in his head when he painted Manet’s marriage later that year. Manet might have been flattered. Except that Degas didn’t fail to include in his depiction of Manet another ingredient, the flip side of the dandy’s nonchalance, which touched directly on Manet’s relationship with Suzanne: Ennui. Boredom. Indifference. A hint, even, of contempt.

  —

  IN THE END, DEGAS declined Manet’s plea to make the voyage to London. No one knows why. It may have been simply that the timing was inconvenient. More likely, however, it was because Degas was finally beginning to sense the need—and the opportunity—to establish his own artistic independence from Manet. Trailing along as Manet’s junior sidekick in London—where Manet would doubtless impress everyone as more convivial, seductive, and charming than he, and where he was certainly more notorious—was not in his interests.

  And so Manet ended up going to London alone. He found the English capital “enchanting,” he told Fantin, and he was welcomed warmly wherever he went. Only Whistler’s absence—he was out of town on someone’s yacht—disappointed him. All in all, he came away feeling once again hopeful about his prospects: “I believe there is something to be done over there,” he wrote; “the feel of the place, the atmosphere, I liked it all and I’m going to try to show my work there next year.”

  What he could not understand was why Degas, who was by now most likely plotting his painting of Manet and Suzanne, hadn’t joined him. “De Gas was really silly not to have come with me,” he wrote to Fantin. In a follow-up letter, two weeks later, he was still brooding: “Tell Degas it’s about time he wrote to me, I gather from Duranty he’s becoming a painter of ‘high life’; why not? It’s too bad he didn’t come to London…”

  —

  DEGAS WAS RIGHT TO sense that if he wanted to conquer London, it would be better for him to do it on his own terms. As it turned out, that’s exactly what he did. Three years later, he made his own trip there—without Manet—and within a year of that first visit, he was selling pictures through the Bond Street dealer Thomas Agnew. By the 1880s, Degas was a celebrity in England. He was known as the “chief of the Impressionists” and acclaimed for his “interesting, brilliant, and vivacious” pictures. Walter Sickert, chief among Degas’s many English protégés, described him as “the one great French painter, perhaps one of the greatest artists the world has ever seen.” And a generation later, Sickert’s heirs, Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, were also Degas devotees. Bacon kept reproductions of Degas nudes in his studio, and was obsessed by Degas’s ability, through drawing, not just to reflect but to “intensify reality”—exactly what he aimed for in his own art. Freud, meanwhile, owned two Degas sculptures, which he kept in his Notting Hill home and used to caress absentmindedly…

  As his friend Manet was being savaged in the press and pilloried by the public, Degas quietly worked away in his shadow. He never yearned for recognition in the way Manet did. He held officialdom more or less in contempt.

  “You, Degas, are above the level of the sea,” Manet said later, “but for my part, if I get into an omnibus and someone doesn’t say ‘Monsieur Manet, how are you, where are you going?’ I am disappointed, for then I know that I am not famous.”

  Although Degas did intermittently submit work to the Salon throughout the 1860s, he did so with a reluctance quite at odds with Manet’s somewhat naïve enthusiasm. Manet may have perceived that Degas’s contempt for the Salon, for critics, and even for most of his peers, masked a secret pride. Where Manet seemed happy to take praise from wherever it might come, Degas detested the idea of being soiled by the appreciation of people he didn’t respect. There is “something shameful about being known,” he wrote in a notebook years later.

  —

  DEGAS SUBMITTED WORK TO the Salon for the last time in 1867, the year before he painted Manet and Suzanne. Curiously, the painting he put forth was also the portrait of a marriage. Now regarded as Degas’s early masterpiece, The Bellelli Family, as it is called, shows Degas’s beloved aunt Laura standing with her two daughters, Giulia and Giovanna. Their father, Gennaro—Laura’s husband—is seated in a leather chair, facing away from the viewer but looking to the side, so that his bearded face, with its reddish hair and blond eyelashes, is seen in profile.

  Coolly executed yet strangely unnerving, The Bellelli Family reveals, as Paul Jamot wrote in 1924, Degas’s “taste for domestic drama.” It also hints at his penchant for uncovering “hidden bitterness in the relationships between individuals.”

  Degas had completed the painting almost ten years earlier. He had labored over it for several years, both in Florence, where he had been living with family members for two years, and back in Paris. It was ambitious both in size and conception, and its creation had been a source of unceasing anxiety to him. He had planned it back then as his Salon debut. But, unable to complete it to his satisfaction, he put it aside in order to work on various historical and mythological canvases more in keeping with the Salon jury’s—and his father’s—expectations. The canvas became an albatross, a symbol of all the difficulties he had had at the start of his career.

  It was close to his heart. And only now, after a gap of many years, did he feel ready to show it to a large audience. In preparing it for the 1867 Salon, he did some last-minute retouching, and was soon informed that it had been accepted by the jury. But when he came to the exhibition itself, he saw that it had been hung in such an out-of-the-way place that very few people saw it, and no one—not a soul—commented on it.

  Degas was enraged. The painting had cost him so much, he had put off exhibiting it for so long, and now, after it had finally made its debut, it had been sabotaged. Degas undertook never to submit himself to the humiliation of the Salon again. Once and for all, he rejected the official path to fame and fortune. When the Salon ended, he retrieved the picture from the Palais de l’Industrie and brought it back to his studio. He kept it there, rolled up in a corner, for the rest of his life.

  It’s a very beautiful picture—lavishly upholstered, fastidiously composed, flecked with gorgeous color. Psychologically, however, it is fraught with tension. Dressed in voluminous white pinafores, the two young Bellelli daughters adopt stiff but somehow unsettled poses in front of their mother, while between Laura and Gennaro you sense an alienation that borders on loathing. And so there was. At the time Degas painted his aunt Laura, she was feeling hopelessly trapped in what she described, in letters to Degas, as “a detestable country” and with a husband she found “immensely disagreeable and dishonest.” He was a man, she wrote, “without any serious occupation to make him less boring to himself.” She was close to despair. She had recently lost a child in infancy, her health was fragile, and she was also mourning her own father (whose recent death explains her mourning dress, and the portrait of him on the wall behind her). She genuinely feared for her own sanity. “I believe you will see me die in this remote corner of the world, far from all those who care for me,” she wrote. The young Degas, whom she loved, was her only consolation and support.

  L
iving with the Bellellis had been Degas’s only firsthand, close-up experience of married life, and it was not a happy one. The experience dovetailed with his own natural inclinations to convince him that a serious life in art was not compatible with marriage.

  —

  AS WELL AS BEING the portrait of a marriage, Degas’s ill-fated picture was also a painting about music. Degas’s decision to portray Manet listening to Suzanne at the piano was no accident. Since becoming a regular at the Manet home on the rue de Saint-Pétersbourg, Degas had come to know Suzanne well. A devoted lover of music himself, he would have appreciated her musicianship. She was reputedly brilliant. She not only played for the guests herself but also introduced their social circle to other musicians, including the four Claes sisters, who formed their own string quartet and were frequently invited to perform. Composers like Chabrier and Offenbach hovered on the edge of the circle.