Whatever Degas’s opinions of Manet’s political thinking — he referred to him once him as “more vain than intelligent” — his belief in the importance of his art held firm, and may even have grown stronger after Manet’s death from syphilis at 51. And if gestures of tribute speak louder than words, Degas made a powerful one. In his increasingly reclusive later years he set about assembling a personal collection of Manet’s work, a sampling of which, in a section called “Degas after Manet,” concludes the show.
Degas acquired, as they came to market, a significant group of Manet’s drawings, a nearly complete set of his prints, and eight oil paintings, several of which are here. Most are small: a penumbral portrait of a grieving Berthe Morisot is one; a high-color likeness of a smiling “Gypsy With a Cigarette” another. (Bizet’s “Carmen” was a popular hit at the time.) The outstanding picture, though, is a monumental but strangely fragmented image of an act of political violence.
Titled “The Execution of Maximilian,” it depicts the firing-squad death in 1867 of an Austrian archduke whom Napoleon III had set up as a straw man ruler in Mexico and then, when colonization failed, abandoned to his fate. The painting was so polemically pointed that Manet had to keep it hidden in storage. At some point someone, probably a family member, cut the canvas up and sold off pieces. Gradually, ardently, Degas rounded up and preserved some of them. (In 1992 the present owner of the fragments, the National Gallery in London, mounted the pieces on backing in a partial restoration of the original composition.)
Degas and Manet, at the start of their careers, first met in the galleries of a grand public museum. In the end, they kept company in a small private one, the shadowy rooms of Degas’s Paris apartment. That object-stuffed home-museum might seem, to some of us, very unmodern. It was a shrine, a reliquary, a devotional site, overseen by a monkish artist who is personally hard to like and aesthetically hard to track, one who is a distinctly second-place presence in the Met’s great show, yet who emerges from it, in the end, a torchbearer hero.
