Berthe did not pose for the picture alone. The Balcony’s other models were the viola-playing Fanny Claus (Suzanne’s closest friend; her presence was intended most likely as a check on Manet’s behavior), the painter Antoine Guillemet, and Léon, who was now sixteen, and whose obscured face can just be made out in the interior gloom of the picture. (The picture’s composition was based on a painting by Goya much admired by Manet.) The modeling sessions, which probably coincided with Manet’s and Suzanne’s sittings for Degas, took several months, months that came to seem interminable to Berthe. All the while, Berthe’s mother, acting as chaperone, sat with her embroidery in a corner of the studio, scrupulously observing not only her daughter’s unsettled feelings but also Manet’s obvious agitation. He was full of optimism and vitality one moment, hobbled by paralyzing doubts the next.
It’s clear that, however deftly it was handled socially, the mutual attraction between Manet and Morisot was a source of private confusion in both. Berthe had her sisters and mother for moral support. But when, toward the end of the year, Edma broke ranks and married a naval officer, Berthe fell into a depression. Now she was not only frustrated but also alone. Even as she was trying to forge ahead with her own painting, she was reduced to fending off her family’s intrusive attempts to find her a husband. She appears in Manet’s best portraits of her as at once agitated, cross, and full of secret yearning.
Unfortunately for Berthe, Manet’s interest in her was briefly diverted by a talented younger Spanish painter called Eva Gonzalès. Gonzalès was twenty. She was an immediate hit with the Hispanophile Manet. She persuaded Manet to take her on as a student—something Morisot had scrupulously avoided—and before long he was painting her portrait. When Berthe’s mother, Mme Morisot, paid Manet’s studio a visit on the pretext of returning some books, she found Gonzalès there posing, and reported back to Berthe: “At this moment,” she wrote, “you are not in his [Manet’s] thoughts. Mlle G[onzalès] has all the virtues, all the graces.”
This can’t have helped Berthe’s mood. Mme Morisot may have liked Manet as much as everyone else, but the situation, she knew, was unhealthy. She was concerned for her daughter. She wrote to Edma about having found Berthe “in bed with her nose against the wall, trying to hide her weeping…We have finished with our tour of artists,” she wrote. “They are brainless. They are weathercocks who play ball games with you.”
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BUT EDMA WAS NOT quite convinced. She wrote to tell Berthe that her own “infatuation with Manet” was over (she was married now, after all) but that she continued to be intrigued by Degas. He was different, she said. She was drawn to him, his intelligence, his way of seeing through pretense and cant. “The commentary on Solomon’s proverb must have been very pretty and piquant,” she told Berthe. “You can think I’m foolish if you want to, but when I reflect on all these painters, I say to myself that a quarter of an hour of their conversation is worth a lot of more solid things.”
It’s not easy to read back through such letters and understand their veils of irony and wit, or, conversely, to know when true things are being plainly stated. We cannot know what Degas might have intended with his little commentary on Solomon’s proverb, nor how serious he was about courting Berthe. Like many artists, he was generally more comfortable communicating through images. So it’s interesting to note that at around this same time, early in 1869, he presented Berthe with a fan. On it, he had painted a strange scene: the Romantic writer Alfred de Musset (famous for his many liaisons with women, including George Sand) was shown, guitar in hand, serenading a dancer, in among a troupe of Spanish dancers. The imagined scene is sprinkled with men prostrate or on their knees before women, entreating them to love.
Morisot cherished the gift for the rest of her life. And in a moving double portrait she made at the time, shortly after Edma’s marriage, she painted herself and Edma, wearing identical white dresses with frills and dots, with black ribbons around their necks, on a floral sofa in their own home. Prominent on the wall behind them is Degas’s decorated fan.
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WHILE MANET WAS PAINTING Eva Gonzalès, Degas was spending more time at the Morisot home than ever. He had persuaded Berthe’s older sister, Yves, to sit for a portrait, which gave him the perfect excuse to be there every day. For Manet, who was not allowed to spend time with Berthe without multiple chaperones, all this may have been galling. Did he somehow warn Degas off Berthe? Being married, he had little right. But he did wield influence over Berthe. And he knew Degas well enough to know where he was weak. So he did what he could. Conversing with Berthe, he offered (“in a very droll way,” according to Berthe) the devastating judgment that Degas lacked “naturalness,” and, worse, that he was “not capable of loving a woman, much less of telling her that he does or of doing anything about it.”
The remarks were clearly an attempt to influence Morisot—and on the face of it they were successful. Morisot reported the conversation to her sister Edma, evidently in a spirit of agreement: “I definitely do not think that he [Degas] has an attractive character,” she wrote. “He’s witty, and that’s all.”
Had Degas heard the judgment, there can be no doubt he would have been wounded. “Droll” or otherwise, Manet’s comments were too close to the truth for him merely to shrug them off.
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PERHAPS THE SAME WAS TRUE of Degas’s portrait of Manet and Suzanne? A portrait, after all, is a reading of someone. A double portrait of the kind Degas attempted in 1868–69 is the reading not just of two individuals but of a marriage. And Manet was in too exposed and vulnerable a state simply to shrug off what this marriage portrait seemed to be saying.
A marriage, of course, is never just a relationship between two people. And Manet’s marriage, at this point, was unusually crowded. Manet liked crowds. (If they were masked balls, all the better.) But he also loved privacy. He had his secrets, and he wanted to keep them. What may have irked him about Degas’s portrait of his marriage was not, perhaps, anything as tepid, or as literal, as Degas’s supposed failure to flatter Suzanne, the explanation traditionally given for his attack on the canvas. It was more likely the culmination of a gathering threat.
Degas, quite simply, was getting too close to Manet’s marriage and the secrets it veiled. If the portrait of Manet and Suzanne expressed Degas’s feelings about marriage in general (feelings he had already conveyed in The Bellelli Family and Interior), they also expressed a judgment on Manet’s marriage in particular. With cool deliberation, Degas had depicted Suzanne absorbed in her music-making, facing away from her disaffected husband. He is off in his own world, dreaming, one could infer, of someone else. Of Berthe Morisot, perhaps.
Manet’s lashing out at the picture may have been motivated in part, then, by anger at Degas’s unwanted intrusion into the delicate situation with Morisot. It may also have been fueled by his underlying suspicion—enhanced by the aborted proposal to go to London together—that Degas was no longer either protégé or friend but a genuine rival, a threat—someone who was thriving even as he, Manet, was sinking into a quagmire. Degas was someone, what’s more, who had come to know too much about him, was too perceptive, and loomed too large in his life.
And then, of course, there is also the possibility that Manet’s anger may have been stoked by marital frustration. It was the specific image of Suzanne, after all, at which he had cut away. Was it because Degas’s portrait seemed to be reminding him of something dismal, something hastily cobbled together and vaguely shaming about their union? Was Manet’s slashing of the canvas perhaps even triggered by a terrible fight with Suzanne? As a couple, they may have been compatible enough. But their marriage had been laced with deceit and hypocrisy from before it had even commenced. In the midst of his creative slump, and of his thwarted infatuation with Morisot, Manet may well have entertained a growing suspicion that Degas’s bias against marriage was in some way justified: Wouldn’t he, he may have wondered, have had a freer hand to create and invent and generally d
o as he pleased if he didn’t have to maintain the front of his marriage to Suzanne?
Beyond even this, there was the fact that Degas’s eye, his way of looking—although more and more artistically compelling—was so mercilessly detached and analytical! Degas dissected the world in front of him. Rather than seeing relations intuitively, and whole, enhanced by feeling and imagination, as Manet saw the world, he pulled them apart, the better to see what they were made of. But in the process he tore at the invisible threads that connected them. Staring at Degas’s portrait of his marriage, Manet might have seen the distinction between his own view of the world and Degas’s etched more starkly than ever, and found it—however briefly—intolerable.
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BUT ALL THIS IS to see the incident only from Manet’s point of view. What about Degas’s perspective? After all, it was his painting that was vandalized. The question then becomes: Did he know what he was doing with this painting? Was he doing it deliberately, calculatingly? Was he trying to cause damage?
Probably not. Such things tend to be more complicated, less conscious. The poet James Fenton once wrote of the complex relationship between Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. He noted Coleridge’s reverence for Wordsworth, his sincere belief in the older poet’s primacy. Of course he, Coleridge, was also brilliant—and very ambitious, too—but Wordsworth’s self-regard overwhelmed all potential rivals. He was, in this sense, like Ingres, the immense and jealous artist who “could not live under the hypothesis of a rival.”
For whatever reason, Coleridge didn’t quite see this side of Wordsworth, and so he was dismayed by the older man’s meanness about his, Coleridge’s, creative efforts—especially his mockery of “Kubla Khan.” Nonetheless—and here is the extraordinary thing—when Coleridge later wrote his two-volume Biographia Literaria, he devoted an entire chapter to enumerating the defects in Wordsworth’s poetry—the defects!—and he did this, contends Fenton, without ever quite realizing “what he, Coleridge, was up to.”
“He couldn’t manage to fall out of love” with Wordsworth, concluded Fenton. “He couldn’t leave him alone.”
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SOON AFTER SLASHING DEGAS’S PICTURE, his anger having subsided, Manet made his own, much softer and more sympathetic portrait of Suzanne at exactly the same piano. It was as if he wanted to say, Watch. This is how it should be done.
But also, perhaps, as if he were apologizing.
He had painted Suzanne earlier, in 1865, dressed in white, seated on a sofa upholstered in white, against white lacy curtains. Her blue eyes, fair hair, and pert features seen head-on give her the delicate appearance of a porcelain doll. (When he repainted the picture, in 1873, he added the figure of Léon, now fully grown, standing behind the sofa reading a book.)
But now, after slicing the figure of Suzanne from Degas’s double portrait, he determined to portray his wife again in another, fresher image. He omitted himself, focusing exclusively on her. The painting shows her in profile (as in the original Degas), dressed in a deep black, her pale white face a picture of absorption as she reads the sheet music and her fingers move over the keys. Reflected in a mirror on the wall behind is a clock, which was presented to Manet’s mother by her godfather, the Bernadotte king of Sweden, Charles IV, as a wedding gift in 1831. The picture evidently gave Manet some trouble. The silhouette of Suzanne’s nose is pretty enough, but it has been worked and reworked, and it still bears the traces of Manet’s efforts to get it right. It mattered—it mattered deeply—that he get it right.
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MANET AND DEGAS’S FRIENDSHIP remained intact. So did their rivalry. Throughout the 1870s, after the watershed of the Prussian siege of Paris, when both artists had fought together to defend the city, and the ensuing Commune—which marked the demise of the Second Empire—they often addressed the same subjects in what seemed like a competitive spirit: milliners’ shops, women’s fashions, café concerts, courtesans, the racetrack. The two needled each other about who had been the first to address certain modern subjects. They mocked each other’s attitudes toward public recognition. And each was occasionally heard muttering pointed things about the other’s personality. But by and large, their rivalry grew less fraught.
When they were jousting, there were as many veiled compliments as criticisms. “Manet is in despair,” Degas once said, “because he cannot paint atrocious pictures like [Carolus-Duran], and be feted and decorated.” Another time, in the middle of an argument with Manet about official honors, Degas suddenly interjected, with disarming sincerity: “We have all, in our minds, awarded you the medal of honor, along with many other things even more flattering.”
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BOTH PAINTERS CONTINUED RAPIDLY to evolve. In some sense, their styles grew closer together in the 1870s as they each embraced a look of spontaneity and the sketchy, unfinished style associated with Impressionism. But Degas never again toyed with narrative, as he had in Interior. He gradually dropped his preoccupation with facial expressions, too. Within ten years, when ballet dancers, horses, and female bathers were established as his signature subjects, faces were conspicuous only by their absence. Women’s backs he found much more interesting.
He did not paint a married couple again for almost forty years.
Manet, meanwhile, let his infatuation with fake, studio-based realism—with cross-dressing, and role-play, and hammy re-creations of past paintings—fall by the wayside. Under the influence of Monet, he took to plein air painting, letting more and more light into his pictures. There were no more proposed trips to London, no more proposals to sit for each other. The friendship remained, but the intensity was missing, and the sense of somehow being in it together had waned. Still, according to George Moore, who knew them both, Manet remained “the friend of [Degas’s] life.”
Certainly, Degas’s admiration for Manet never waned. He just liked to keep it under wraps. A mutual friend reported on a visit he made to Manet’s studio: “Degas looked at the drawings and pastels. He pretended that his eyes were fatigued and that he could not see very well. He made almost no comment. Shortly afterward Manet met the friend, who said, ‘I ran into Degas the other day. He was just leaving your studio and he was enthusiastic, dazzled by everything you had shown him.’ Manet said, ‘Ah, the bastard…’ ”
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BERTHE MORISOT’S FEELINGS FOR Manet never waned, either. But the situation, as was clear from the beginning, was impossible. When Manet encouraged her to marry his brother Eugène, it seemed sensible for her to comply; it was the next best thing to marrying Manet. But it was also the worst: Eugène was not Édouard. “My situation is unbearable from every point of view,” she wrote as she weighed her options. She eventually consented, and when she did, Degas was there (as always) to mark the occasion by painting Eugène’s portrait.
Berthe and Eugène had a daughter, Julie Manet, whose companionship Berthe treasured all her life.
Manet died in the spring of 1883. He suffered for years from locomotor ataxia, brought on by untreated syphilis, and spent his final six months in unremitting, splintering pain. In the early spring of 1883, gangrene developed in his left foot, so the leg was amputated. The operation was in vain. Eleven days later, he died.
Degas was one of many who missed him acutely.
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AFTER MANET DIED, NOT a single work by Degas was found in his private collection. When Degas died, on the other hand, in 1917, an extraordinary trove of Manets was revealed to the world: eight paintings, fourteen drawings, and more than sixty prints.
Degas’s great art collection, which at one time he had considered turning into a museum, had been assembled in the 1890s, more than a decade after Manet’s early death. It was then that Degas had begun earning enough money to indulge what quickly became an obsession. Along with the dozens of Manets (some of which he already owned), he acquired paintings and drawings by his heroes Ingres, Delacroix, and Daumier. He also acquired works by members of the younger generation, including Cézanne and
Gauguin; prints and pastels by Mary Cassatt; paintings by Camille Corot; and more than one hundred printed pictures, books, and drawings by Japanese artists.
Twenty years later, by the time of the Great War, this astonishing collection was a rumor, at most. Degas had ended his life virtually blind and notoriously reclusive, so hardly anyone had seen it for years. When it came on the market after Degas’s death in 1917, it hit the art world with the force of a revelation. “The event of the season” is how the journal Les Arts described the series of three Paris sales in March and November 1918. (Five further sales were held to disperse Degas’s own unsold works.) American collectors, such as Louisine Havemeyer, and institutions, like the Metropolitan Museum in New York, sent bidding instructions across the Atlantic to their agents in Paris. The Louvre, too, was a heavyweight contender—all the more so because the overwhelming majority of the artists Degas collected were French. But the most substantial share of the collection went to London. The renowned economist and Bloomsbury associate John Maynard Keynes, convinced of the collection’s quality by his friend, the critic Roger Fry, sensed a special opportunity. He persuaded the British Treasury to award the cash-strapped National Gallery in London a one-off grant of £20,000 to bid for the paintings.
War was raging when Keynes went to Paris. The city was under attack. The dull thud of bombs could be heard from inside the salesroom, in the Galerie Roland Petit, getting uncomfortably close. After one such explosion, according to Keynes’s friend and traveling companion Charles Holmes, “there was quite a considerable rush to the door,” as most of the bidders fled to safety. The majority of those who fled failed to return, and as a result, many of the sale’s finest pictures came under the hammer that afternoon before a greatly diminished audience. Keynes and Holmes stayed on; the British public reaped the benefit.
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COLLECTING—EVEN IF YOU ARE an artist yourself—is a sublimating activity, a way of turning pleasure into control, chaos into order. It is a classic outlet for the proud and lonely man of passion. It is also a method by which to repair, restore, retrieve.
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