Giorgione in the House

THE NEW CRITERION, February 2024

Giorgione in the house

On “Bellini and Giorgione in the House of Taddeo Contarini” at Frick Madison, New York.

The arrival of a single painting in the United States is not often cause for a special exhibition. When the visitor, however, is a work by Giorgio Barbarelli da Castelfranco, better known as Giorgione (ca. 1477–1510), you make an exception. Only about ten paintings are attributed today to the enigmatic Venetian, and The Three Philosophers (ca. 1508–09), now on loan in New York for the first time from the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, is among his greatest achievements. So the appearance of this canvas at the Frick Collection’s temporary home of Frick Madison is cause for a very special exhibition indeed. That this painting has been reunited—for the first time in some four hundred years—with its pendant composition, Giovanni Bellini’s St. Francis in the Desert (ca. 1475–80), the masterpiece from the Frick’s own collection that in the sixteenth century occupied the same Venetian palazzo as the Giorgione, is also cause for jubilation. This reunion is the occasion for a revelatory one-room show, “Bellini and Giorgione in the House of Taddeo Contarini.”1

The loan is the result of a pursuit that bordered on obsession for Xavier F. Salomon, the Frick’s Deputy Director and Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator. The exhibition is also a tribute to the Frick’s outgoing director, Ian Wardropper, who has set his retirement for next year, and his high-minded use of the collection’s temporary digs on Madison Avenue—the former home of the Whitney Museum, onetime outpost of the Metropolitan Museum, and future headquarters of Sotheby’s auction house. On March 3, the Frick will vacate these galleries that have functioned like private viewing rooms for its collection and move back to its mansion at One East Seventieth Street.

Installation view of “Bellini and Giorgione in the House of Taddeo Contarini.” Photo: Joseph Coscia Jr.

The installation of the Frick’s permanent collection on Madison Avenue—and in particular the presentation of St. Francis—was the inspiration for Salomon’s dream of reuniting the Bellini with the Giorgione. To underscore the worthiness of the unprecedented loan, in the accompanying catalogue published by D Giles Limited, Salomon collects everything we could possibly imagine about the creation, meaning, and provenance of The Three Philosophers and its relationship with St. Francis in the Desert.

Three years ago, I wrote about the effect of seeing St. Francis in the Desert in the light of Frick Madison (see “Sublet with Bellini” in The New Criterion of April 2021). A raking illumination fills the scene from beyond the left frame—unseen by us, but fully apparent to Francis, who exposes the symbolic wounds of the stigmata on his hands and feet. Flora and fauna fill this vision of his rocky hermitage as the rays seemingly melt its icelike outcropping into a stream, watering a kingfisher below. Kenneth Clark noted how “no other great painting, perhaps, contains such a quantity of natural details observed and rendered with incredible patience: for no other painter has been able to give to such an accumulation the unity which is only achieved by love.”

Giorgione, The Three Philosophers, ca. 1508–09, Oil on canvas, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Photo: KMH-Museumsverband.

At Frick Madison, positioned in its own alcove, the painting has been lit by one of Marcel Breuer’s trapezoidal windows in a way that accentuates the work’s own luminous dynamics. Light and shadow, depiction and reality glow together. The Three Philosophers has now been hung on this alcove’s opposite wall, which had been left empty before the arrival of the Giorgione. Again we are presented with figures in a rocky landscape, this time three men in colorful robes, with two standing and one seated. The similarities in these compositions of roughly equal size are striking, especially as the two paintings can now be observed together. The hills in the distance share uncanny form, as do the designs of the distant towns with their arched construction. The stepped stones in the foregrounds seem like mirror formations. Even the tiny pebbles appear to have been quarried from the same source.

The two paintings interact the more you move around them and take them in. Are we looking at the same scene depicting two different periods of time? Or are these two sides of the same outcropping, with the stone floor of Frick Madison now running between them? While the direct lighting of St. Francis leaves little doubt of its divine origin, the illumination of the Giorgione is more elusive. A sun low on the horizon seems to be setting, but the figures appear to be lit with an unexplained glow. Those “three philosophers” may be seen carrying scientific instruments and tablets relating to the sun and moon, but the lighting of the composition is non-Euclidian and otherworldly. It is almost as if the radiance of the Bellini is now bouncing off of the Giorgione in mystical, lunar-like reflection.

Giovanni Bellini, St. Francis in the Desert, ca. 1475–80, Oil on panel, Frick Collection, New York. Photo: Michael Bodycomb.

As is often the case with Giorgione, the more we look into this young painter’s work, the less we understand it. Anyone who has tracked down Giorgione’s small painting The Tempest (ca. 1508) in Venice’s Gallerie dell’Accademia can likewise attest to the mystery of that strange and tender scene of a nursing mother, an idle man, and ruined architecture beneath a stormy sky. Who are they? Where are we? What are we seeing? The questions strike like a thunderclap emanating from the clouds above. Here is something more than just visual storytelling with known characters and stock symbols. Rather it is something absorptive, mysterious, and new.

The same goes for The Three Philosophers. The composition has warmed observers with its brilliance but also baffled scholars about its meaning since just about the time of its own creation. In 1525 a Venetian collector by the name of Marcantonio Michiel (1484–1552) was making a survey of art in the Veneto when he recorded a definitive account of these paintings together in what he titled his Pittori e pitture in diversi luoghi (Painters and paintings in different places). This manuscript was later published as his Notizia d’opere di disegno (Information on works of design).

In his account of the paintings “in the house of Messer Taddeo Contarini,” written in the Venetian dialect, Michiel lists ten works. One of them is “three philosophers,” he writes, a “canvas in oil of the three philosophers in the landscape, two standing and one seated who is contemplating the sun’s rays, with that stone finished so marvelously . . . begun by Giorgio from Castelfranco and finished by Sebastiano Veneziano.” Another is a “Panel of St. Francis in the Desert,” which Marcantonio Michiel identifies as an oil by “Zuan Bellini, begun by him for Messer Zuan Michiel, and it has a landscape nearby wonderfully finished and refined.”

Installation view of “Bellini and Giorgione in the House of Taddeo Contarini.” Photo: Joseph Coscia Jr.

Marcantonio Michiel’s account is significant for several reasons: for coining the titles of the two works (3 phylosophi and S. Francesco nel diserto); for its clear descriptions of the paintings (dui ritti et uno sentado che contempla gli raggii solari cum quel saxo finto cusi mirabilmente and un paese propinquo finito et ricercato mirabilmente); for information about their authorship and provenance (Fu cominciata da Zorzo da Castel Franco, et finita da Sebastiano Venitiano and Fu opera de Zuan bellino, cominciata da lui a Ms. Zuan michiel); and for describing them together in one private collection (In casa de Ms. Tadio Contarino).

Recorded some forty-five years after the creation of St. Francis, seventeen years after Three Philosophers, fifteen years after Giorgione’s death, and nine years after the death of Giovanni Bellini (ca. 1424/35–1516), Michiel’s survey is also revelatory for what it leaves out: the identity of those three philosophers, as well as the particular moment depicted in Saint Francis of Assisi’s life. Both have been sources of discussion and conjecture ever since. For St. Francis, most scholars now agree that the image depicts the saint’s stigmatization, not in the “desert” but rather at his Apennine retreat at La Verna. Still, two standard references are missing: the seraph delivering Christ’s wounds, and Brother Leo. An alternative interpretation is that we are rather presented with Francis composing his Canticle of the Creatures, that prayer to “Brother Sun, Sister Moon, Brother Wind, Sister Water, Brother Fire, Sister Mother Earth, and Sister Bodily Death.”

The Giorgione poses an even greater conundrum. “Apart from Giorgione’s Tempest,” writes Salomon in his exhibition catalogue, “very few Venetian Renaissance works have received as much attention and been as widely interpreted as The Three Philosophers.” The identification of those “three philosophers,” which was left unstated by Marcantonio Michiel even within two decades of its execution, has resulted in centuries of conjecture. Assuming the painting in fact depicts “three philosophers” from antiquity, the proposed combinations as collected by Salomon have included the following: Archimedes, Ptolemy, and Pythagoras; Aristotle, Averroes, and Virgil; Regiomontanus, Aristotle, and Ptolemy; Ptolemy, Al-Battani, and Copernicus; Aristotle, Averroes, and a humanist; and Plato, Aristotle, and Pythagoras. Alternatively, the figures might represent the Three Magi; or Marcus Aurelius studying with two philosophers on the Caelian Hill; or Abraham teaching astronomy to the Egyptians; or Evander and Pallas showing Aeneas the Capitoline Hill; or a meeting between Sultan Mehmet II and Patriarch Gennadios Scholarios in Constantinople; or Saint Luke, King David, and Saint Jerome; or King Solomon, King Hiram of Tyre, and the master craftsman Hiram of Tyre as they plan the Temple in Jerusalem; or perhaps even the painters Giovanni Bellini, Vittore Carpaccio, and Giorgione. For Xavier Salomon, the most convincing identification, as proposed by the scholar Karin Zeleny, is that of Pythagoras with his two teachers, Thales of Miletus and Pherecydes of Syros, “the first three philosophers of the Western tradition shown while at the Oracle of Apollo at Didyma.” I am more partial to the poetic approach proposed by the art historian Tom Nichols in his book Giorgione’s Ambiguity, in which he suggests that our interpretation is meant to remain free-floating and open-ended. Deliberate ambiguities, he writes, are Giorgione’s “visual traps set to capture the viewer’s curiosity and speculation.”

“Uncertain about authorship, patronage, dating, and the significance of both paintings,” writes Salomon, “when it comes to Giorgione’s Three Philosophers and Bellini’s St. Francis in the Desert, we know much less than we think we do.” What is certain is that these paintings occupied the same Venetian home soon after their creation, even if the specific location of Taddeo Contarini’s residence in the neighborhood of Cannaregio has been up for debate. Marcantonio Michiel writes that Bellini painted his St. Francis for Zuan Michiel, and the painting was then acquired by Taddeo Contarini (ca. 1466–1540) soon thereafter. It is possible that Giorgione’s Three Philosophers was a direct commission by this powerful and supposedly unscrupulous Venetian merchant—one even intended to complement the Bellini. While he may or may not have painted it for Contarini’s collection specifically, Giorgione most likely studied with Bellini, and so St. Francis might still have been front and center in his mind.

The last time these paintings were seen in one place was between 1556 and 1636. Like a flash of light of some divine rapture, their being brought together in this spectacular exhibition makes their connections manifest once again.

1.   “Bellini and Giorgione in the House of Taddeo Contarini” opened at Frick Madison, New York, on November 9, 2023, and remains on view through February 4, 2024.

A Study in Contrasts

THE NEW CRITERION, December 2023

A study in contrasts

On “Vertigo of Color: Matisse, Derain, and the Origins of Fauvism” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

I beg the reader never to forget when it is asserted of the phenomena of simultaneous contrast, that one color placed beside another receives such a modification from it that this manner of speaking does not mean that the two colors, or rather the two material objects that present them to us, have a mutual action, either physical or chemical; it is really only applied to the modification that takes place before us when we perceive the simultaneous impression of these two colors.
—Michel Eugène Chevreul, The Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colors (1839, translated by Charles Martel in 1854)

The accentuation of color has been one of modern art’s defining preoccuptations. Now, as we process life through illuminated screens, we might even say that amplified color has become a feature of modernity itself. The secret behind modern color’s dazzling power is contrast. From the pointillist painters to our pixelated monitors, complementary hues in close proximity can take a shimmering hold of the senses. Modern painters were among the first to explore these pyrotechnics by drawing on the innovations of nineteenth-century color theory.

Michel Eugène Chevreul (1786–1889) was one such theorist who had a profound effect on art history. A groundbreaking chemist with a remarkable life and range of accomplishments, Chevreul did not set out to change the course of art when he wrote De la loi du contraste simultané des couleurs et de l’assortiment des objets colorés. Yet through his book on the effect of contrasting colors, which he published in 1839 and which was translated into English in 1854, Chevreul was among those who planted the seeds for what became the lush garden of modern art.

Michele Eugène Chevreul, nineteenth century. Photo: Unknown.

Born just before the French Revolution, Chevreul lived over a hundred years to see the construction of the Eiffel Tower, on which his name was inscribed along with seventy-one other scientists in France’s modern pantheon. The honor was well deserved: Chevreul’s research on animal and vegetable fats led to innovations in candle- and soap-making; he was the first to identify the excess glucose excreted by diabetics and the first to discover and isolate creatine in muscle; and through his studies of natural compounds, he became a founding father of organic chemistry.

But it was an inadvertent discovery beyond the chemistry lab that influenced the future of art. In 1824, Chevreul became the director of the dye works at the Gobelins manufactory, the storied textile operation established in Paris in 1662 to supply tapestry for the royal court. An issue at the time of Chevreul’s arrival was the quality of its black thread, which was seen to shade into red under certain circumstances. By observing the black in isolation, Chevreul discerned that the effect was not a problem with the chemistry of the dye but rather with the proximity of the thread to other colors, in particular to blue. In other words, the effect was a matter of perception caused by optical interaction. In his subsequent book on this “harmony and contrast of colors,” which began as lectures at Gobelins, Chevreul expanded this research to reveal how certain hues appear dull when placed together, while others, in particular complementary colors from opposite ends of his color wheel, produce a sense of visual stimulation that exceeds the effects of the colors in isolation.

Through his study of contrasts, Chevreul found that while the mixing of complementary pigments would dull their effects, their juxtaposition in close proximity appeared to intensify their natures. By making a science of such contrasts, Chevreul suggested that the brightest colors were best mixed not on the canvas but in the palette of the mind, through what he called a “simultaneous impression.” He wondered, “What happens when two adjacent hues are complementary, like green and red?” Through an unexpected optical effect, “by the law of contrast, the two colors, being complementary, mutually strengthen each other; the green renders the red redder, and the red renders the green greener.”

Michele Eugène Chevreul’s color wheel

By considering the effects of color combinations on the observer, Chevreul’s study helped shift the focus of perception from representation to sensation. In his Principles of Color of 1969, Faber Birren called Chevreul one of the greatest names in the history of color. This was particularly true with respect to Chevreul’s influence on the Impressionists and Neo-Impressionists: “The pointillist style of painting, in which small dots or swirls of color are used to effect visual mixtures, was more or less founded in theory by Chevreul.” Camille Pissarro likewise reported that Georges Seurat sought the “modern synthesis with scientifically based means which will be founded on the theory of colors discovered by M. Chevreul.” As Birren concluded:

The painting schools of Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism were devoted almost entirely to the combination of pure color, tint, white. . . . Previously, most artists had employed ochers, browns, somber shades of green, maroon, blue. The Impressionists and Neo-Impressionists glorified the phenomena of light and used spots of color in an attempt to achieve luminous visual mixtures.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, the Neo-Impressionists had turned art into their own modern science, with set prescriptions of how they believed they could deploy contrasting pigments to maximum effect. Understanding the role of light in exposing such contrasts, many of these artists gravitated south, to work under the more direct summer sun. Here in the intense illumination of the Mediterranean, they found the light to explore and develop their ideas of color.

For Henri Matisse (1869–1954) and André Derain (1880–1954), a single such summer spent painting together in 1905, in the Mediterranean fishing village of Collioure, led to what we now know as Fauvism, the “beastly” next chapter of modern art’s exploration of color. “Vertigo of Color: Matisse, Derain, and the Origins of Fauvism,” an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, now gathers their paintings, studies, and correspondence from this remarkable stay.1

Of the two artists, Matisse was the older and more established. He had spent the previous summer of 1904 with Paul Signac and other Neo-Impressionists in Saint-Tropez. Luxe, Calme et Volupté, Matisse’s groundbreaking painting from that sojourn, now in the collection of the Musée d’Orsay, reflected Signac’s Divisionist principles of contrasting color while also revealing Matisse’s expressive style; “Vertigo of Color” includes a study for this work on loan from the Museum of Modern Art. As Matisse looked to continue these explorations, it was Signac, an accomplished mariner who first sailed to Collioure in 1887, who brought the remote village to the attention of Matisse and his family. “Contrasts and color relationships, here lies the secret to drawing and form,” Signac wrote as encouragement to Matisse, quoting Paul Cézanne.

Henri Matisse, Luxe, Calme et Volupté, 1904, Oil on canvas, Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

For all that he owed to Signac, Matisse was ready to move beyond the color precepts of Neo-Impressionism, or what he called the “tyranny of Divisionism. One can’t live in a household that is too well kept, a house kept by country aunts.” In Collioure, a Catalan fishing village fifteen miles north of the Spanish border, he found the isolation necessary to push his palette and paint application in new ways. Years later, he remarked how “color for me is a force. My paintings consist of four or five colors which clash with one another expressively. When I apply green, that does not mean grass. When I apply blue, that does not mean sky. It is their accord or their opposition which opens in the viewer’s mind an illusory space.”

In this isolated stretch of France’s Vermilion Coast, which had only been accessible by sea before the tunneling of the railroad, Matisse did not end up working alone. In mid-June he received a letter from André Derain, an ambitious young painter over ten years his junior: “You know that I am quite alone in my ideas, which is very painful now. . . . Send me a postcard in which you beg me to join you instantly, recommending that I do this for my work.” Matisse did just that: “I cannot insist too strongly that a stay here is absolutely necessary for your work.” Three days later, on June 28, Derain wrote back: “I’ll soon be with you. I think this will make you as happy as it does me. I’m really glad, for a terrible bout of neurasthenia was beginning to shut me down.”

As assembled by Dita Amory, the Robert Lehman Curator in Charge of the Met’s Robert Lehman Collection, and Ann Dumas, Consulting Curator of European Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, “Vertigo of Color” brings together for the first time sixty-five of the paintings, drawings, and watercolors these two artists created while together in Collioure and the surrounding countryside —many of which have rarely before been on public view. “That legendary partnership, organized quite by chance, would forever change the course of French painting,” write the curators in the exhibition catalogue:

their daring color experiments ultimately challenged reliance on empirical evidence; their brushwork abandoned Neo-Impressionism’s strict adherence to formulaic divisionism; and their art evolved from sensory experience and from a raw and passionate dialogue in search of a new beginning.

In Collioure, Matisse made fifteen paintings, forty watercolors, and nearly a hundred drawings as preparation for larger work back in his studio. Derain, determined meanwhile to return to Paris with as many canvases as he could carry, composed thirty paintings on site that summer, along with twenty drawings and some fifty sketches. It is the concentration of this work assembled here that makes the exhibition so revealing. Arranged in the lower level of the Metropolitan’s Lehman wing, the show intermixes paintings and studies by the two artists in a looping progression that suggests their own sense of discovery, all while lending itself to the “vertigo” of color promised by the exhibition title.

André Derain, Fishing Boats, Collioure, 1905, Oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Gift of Raymond Paul, in memory of her brother, C. Michael Paul and Purchase, Lila Acheson Wallace Gift, New York. © 2023 Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP Paris.

Both artists deployed dashes of bold, contrasting colors in their works, often leaving exposed light ground, but their palettes differed. Derain’s flaky surfaces of orange and blue appear baked in the Collioure sun. Matisse’s color choices—of lavender, peach, and green—are more sea-cooled. Matisse also comes off more at ease, as a painter willing to forego the illusion of depth for an intuitive sense of surface, while Derain holds onto the architecture of space, hammering away with his nails of color and light. Derain’s Fishing Boats, Collioure, from the Metropolitan’s collection, is a dense mosaic of orange, green, and blue. Meanwhile, Matisse’s Pier of Collioure, on loan from a private collection, is a windswept assembly of purple, pink, and teal.

André Derain, Henri Matisse, 1905, Oil on canvas, Tate, London. © 2023 Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris. Photo: Tate.

The portraits the artists painted of each other that summer, both on loan from the Tate, display their different color sensibilities while revealing the personalities of the other. Derain finds Matisse bearded and bespectacled, smoking from a pipe, his focused face rendered in orange and blue with a shadow cast in dense green. Matisse, meanwhile, captures Derain looking away, his thoughts elsewhere, in a loose application of light reds, greens, and blues.

André Derain, Woman with a Shawl, Madame Matisse in a Kimono, 1905, Oil on canvas, Private Collection, Courtesy of Nevill Keating Pictures, London. © 2023 Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris.

In addition to the port of Collioure, another subject the artists shared was Amélie Matisse. With her blue-and-white kimono, the painter’s wife sat for both artists, while also serving privately as a nude model for her husband. With its green background and red shadows, Derain’s Woman with a Shawl, Madame Matisse in a Kimono, from a private collection, is one of his most assured paintings in the exhibition. A year later, Matisse turned to the same composition himself, rendering Madame Matisse with Her Fan in pen and ink, in a work on loan from the Art Institute of Chicago. In Matisse and His Wife at Collioure, an ink on paper from the collection of the Met, Derain captured Henri painting a portrait of Amélie with an easel balanced on the rocky shoreline. The very portrait Matisse was composing that day, a study of colorful dashes and squiggles called La Japonaise: Woman Beside the Water, is also in this exhibition, on loan from the Museum of Modern Art.

Henri Matisse, La Japonaise: Woman beside the Water, 1905, Oil and graphite on canvas, Museum of Modern Art, New York. © 2023 Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris.

At Collioure, each artist took color in its own direction. For Derain, “Colors became sticks of dynamite. They were primed to discharge light.” In a July 28 letter to Maurice de Vlaminck, his studio-mate back home, Derain wrote that “this color has messed me up. I’ve let myself go with color for color’s sake. I’ve lost all my old qualities.” Matisse, meanwhile, settled into ever greater assurance as a colorist. As he remarked years later:

I applied my color, it was the first color of my canvas. I added a second color, and then, instead of making a correction, when this second color did not seem to accord with the first, I applied a third to create such an accord. Then, I had to continue in this way until I sensed that I had created a complete harmony on my canvas, and that I had discharged the emotion which had made me undertake it.

We can see this complete harmony in Open Window, Collioure, a painting on loan from the National Gallery of Art and a supreme example of simultaneous contrast. Looking onto the boats in port from an open window, Matisse unites inside and out, the refraction of sun and shadows, not through the distinction of light and dark but through the interaction of purple, green, and pink. Taken together, the colors unify the surface of the picture while also capturing the sensation of blinding light through an overwhelming sense of color. Here in his intuitive application of contrast, Matisse most successfully departs from his Neo-Impressionist influences—reflecting what the critic Louis Vauxcelles (who coined the term Fauvism) had advised him earlier that year: “Your gifts are too magnificent, mixing and balancing intuitive sensations and will, for you to lose yourself in experiments that are sincere but that go against your true nature.”

Henri Matisse, Open Windown, Coullioure, 1905, Oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Collection of Mrs. John Hay Whitney. © 2023 Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris.

Both artists returned from Collioure just in time to cause a sensation with their work at the 1905 Salon d’Automne, an exhibition that cemented both of their careers. Matisse knew he had achieved something important that summer. As he wrote to Signac in September, “It was the first time in my life that I was content to be exhibiting, for my things are perhaps not very important, but they have the merit of expressing in a very pure way my sensations. Something I’ve been working toward since I began to paint.” When Leo Stein saw Woman with a Hat, now in the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Art and not included in the current exhibition, he remarked it was a “thing brilliant and powerful, but the nastiest smear of paint I had ever seen.” The work served to introduce Matisse to Leo and Gertrude Stein, their brother Michael, and his wife Sarah. The Steins in turn introduced Matisse to the Cone sisters, the Baltimore collectors who soon bought several of his works and became lifelong patrons.

Despite his own lingering doubts, Derain experienced an equally impressive reception in Paris. The dealer Ambroise Vollard took up his cause and sold paintings from Collioure to the Russian collectors Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov. Vollard also commissioned Derain to paint fifty views of London, hoping to repeat the success of Claude Monet’s impressions of the Thames from a decade before. Derain was so critical of the London weather that he finished the works in his French studio. Nevertheless, by the summer of 1907, Vollard had purchased thirty of these compositions. Derain’s Palace of Westminster (1906–07), from the Met’s own collection, is included here along with Matisse’s Young Sailor ii (1906) and View of Collioure (1907), from the artist’s return to the village. These final works reveal the direction of both artists, and in particular Matisse, as they freed themselves to explore color without precondition—as Matisse said, “to reach that state of condensation of sensations which constitutes a picture.” All are a product of that summer of 1905. The collaboration of these two artists resulted in a simultaneous contrast that continues to shimmer.

1.   “Vertigo of Color: Matisse, Derain, and the Origins of Fauvism” opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, on October 13, 2023, and remains on view through January 21, 2024. The exhibition will next be seen at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (February 25–May 27, 2024).

An Inevitable Rivalry

THE NEW CRITERION, November 2023

An inevitable rivalry

On “Manet/Degas” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Manet Slash Degas. That’s the title of the double headliner now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.1 It might as well be a statement. A physical slash runs clear through the middle of the exhibition’s title wall, dividing the names of the two artists. Similar slashes appear in various corners of the show, digging beneath the paintings and even cutting openings into other galleries.

If “Manet/Degas” is a slasher show, another clue is one of the first works on display. Edgar Degas painted Monsieur and Madame Édouard Manet (1868–69, Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art) as a gift to his artist friend after one of their weekly salons. The portrait depicts Monsieur Manet reclining on a sofa as he listens to Madame at the piano. But what we see today is only a partial view of the pair. Unhappy with Degas’ depiction of his wife, Manet slashed the right side of the canvas. When Degas discovered the defacement, he took the painting back and returned his own gift from Manet, a small still life of a bowl of fruit, over the insult. Degas then displayed the damaged portrait in his home, eventually next to Manet’s The Ham (ca. 1875–80, Glasgow Life Museums); a carving knife rests prominently in the foreground of that still life. Manet Slash Degas.

Edgar Degas, Monsieur and Madame Édouard Manet, 1868–69, Oil on canvas, Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art, Japan.

More evidence can be found in the many prints that inform this extensive, penetrating exhibition on the creative—and cutting—relationship between Édouard Manet (1832–83) and Edgar Degas (1834–1917). Since about half of the one hundred sixty works on display come from the collections of the Metropolitan and the Musée d’Orsay, the two organizing institutions of “Manet/Degas,” the Met’s extensive collection of works on paper helps fill in around Orsay’s blockbuster loans.

Printmaking is itself a slashing art. To make an etching, a needle must dig into a copperplate coated with an acid-resistant ground. When the plate is then submerged in acid, the groove exposes the copper to the bath, incising a line beneath. With drypoint, another intaglio printmaking technique, a needle is directly slashed into the plate, leaving a burr of metal that results in a fuller, fuzzier line when inked and printed on paper. Manet and Degas used both methods, sometimes combining the two in a single print.

Edgar Degas, Monsieur and Madame Édouard Manet, 1868–69, Oil on canvas, Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art, Japan.

Manet first met Degas in a gallery of the Louvre as Degas was creating just such a printing plate based on a Portrait of Infanta Margarita Teresa, today attributed to the workshop of Diego Velázquez. Rather than printing from a preparatory study, as was customary, Degas was taking the radical step of drawing with his needle directly from observation, attacking the plate in a riot of zig-zagging lines. “How audacious of you to etch that way, without any preliminary drawing. I would not dare do the same,” Manet supposedly said to Degas.

The Irish novelist George Moore said the relationship between Manet and Degas—equally ambitious Parisian artists, nearly the same age, and from similarly wealthy and cultured backgrounds—was “jarred by an inevitable rivalry.” As they absorbed the history of art by copying in the public galleries of the Louvre, in particular the Spanish and Italian masters, their relationship first played out in print. Degas created drawings and prints of his friend, including a suite of portraits of Manet sitting, leaning, and brooding in two-thirds profile circa 1868. Their relationship on paper continued long after Manet’s untimely death at age fifty-one. As Degas outlived his friend by over thirty years, he became a foremost collector of his work, even amassing a near-complete run of Manet’s prints.

An illuminating arrangement of prints here from 1861–62 includes the very study by Degas of the infanta over which the artists met, with an impression now in the Metropolitan’s collection. Directly facing this print is Manet’s own version after Velázquez, also from the Met. The copperplate of Manet’s etching, on loan from Paris’s Bibliothèque de l’Institut national d’histoire de l’art, is displayed between them. It is telling that the two artists’ versions are reflections of one another, literally and figuratively. Degas’ direct etching process resulted in a mirror image when printed. Manet, who made his prints from studies, maintained the orientation of the original in his impressions.

Edgar Degas, Scene of War in the Middle Ages, ca. 1865, Oil on paper mounted on canvas, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. 

Through much of his career, Manet relied on printmaking to disseminate the images of his bold paintings and drawings. Degas, meanwhile, used the medium more as a space for experimentation. We can see the differences in these two infantas. Manet’s version looks like a reproduction, and a hasty one at that. Degas’ print goes off in its own unexpected direction. The free line of the needle takes on a life of its own. The lace of the infanta has been elaborated with an extra round of drypoint. That the Metropolitan has positioned the infantas on one of those slashed gallery walls underscores the central role of printmaking in the two artists’ relationship.

As the careers of the two artists developed in the 1860s, Degas had more to work through than Manet, who seems to have known what to do from the very start. Stephan Wolohojian, the Metropolitan’s John Pope-Hennessy Curator in Charge of the Department of European Paintings, has co-organized this exhibition’s stateside appearance along with Ashley E. Dunn, the museum’s Associate Curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints. In their joint introduction to the exhibition catalogue, the two call Manet and Degas “friends, rivals, and, at times, antagonists” who “worked in conversation throughout their careers, from the time of their first meeting in the early 1860s.” On the exhibition’s opening morning, Wolohojian downplayed their competition, or at least our inclination to declare a victor of the rivalry, saying,

Many visitors will try to figure out which of these two is the better artist. But this is not a competition between two of the greatest painters of the nineteenth century. There is no game. There are no rules. So there can be no winner.

And yet, out of the gate, Manet is the clear frontrunner. The exhibition’s lavender walls play to his brighter palette, while Degas’ subtleties get lost in the murk. Manet also pulls his paintings right to the surface, with public themes and shocking compositions, while Degas presents an interior world that requires deeper reflection. And Manet often went big when Degas kept it small. In some of the rooms, Manet comes across as having taken up nearly all the wall space, with Degas barely holding on to a corner.

Édouard Manet, Olympia, 1863, Oil on canvas, Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

These differences are most pronounced in the display of their two entries into the Paris Salon of 1865. For Degas, it was Scene of War in the Middle Ages (ca. 1865, Musée d’Orsay), a strange concatenation of nude women, flowing hair, burning towns, and trampling horses. For the figures, Degas made studies of classical anatomy. This work may be an allegory of the American Civil War, in which members of Degas’ extended family fought for the Confederacy. Yet the whole does not equal the sum of its parts. With all the action off to the sides and even cut off by the edges, the composition is downright bizarre—a harbinger of Degas’ experimental inclinations. For the audiences of 1865, just as for those of us at the Metropolitan today, this work could not hope to compete for attention against Manet’s entry in that same salon: Olympia (1863–65).

That painting of a courtesan and her maid was a scandal when presented in 1865. With its fraught dynamics of sex and race, it still causes palpitations in 2023. That the astonishing work has now traveled beyond the walls of the Musée d’Orsay is itself nearly unprecedented; seeing it in person reveals just how much gets lost in reproduction. We can observe how Manet subtly accentuated the contrasts of skin tones, of bedding and background. Olympia’s red hair flows over her left shoulder in a way that tends to disappear into the background of copies. In person the forceful expression of the maid, presenting Olympia with a bouquet of flowers and a sideways glance, also reveals a deep cognizance of the dynamics of the situation. As if there were any doubt of another, unseen figure in the room, the hissing cat with its back arched, staring straight out, makes the viewer the complicit third person in the scene. (A cat’s curving tail, queue in French, is also a slang word for a part of the male anatomy.) Compared to Manet’s Reclining Nude, a preparatory study composed in red chalk (1862–63, Musée d’Orsay), with its figure rotating away, here Olympia is tumbling forward into our own space, practically sliding off her disheveled silk cushions. Her modeled hands are all that holds onto her bright flesh, while her spare jewelry ties her back to the picture plane. The work seems immediate and raw but was, in fact, carefully crafted as an homage to Titian’s Venus of Urbino (the pose, the bedspread, the maid, even the pet is there). Manet set up the scene with models in his studio, with Victorine Meurent as Olympia and Laure as her maid. Both models reappeared in his later compositions.

Édouard Manet, The Dead Toreador, 1864, Oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Manet’s boldest paintings trafficked in this full-frontal treatment while tying his compositions to the masterpieces of art history. The figure in The Dead Toreador (probably 1864, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) lies in an abstract foreground, with his blood about to run off the dark canvas. Manet’s portrait of Émile Zola (1868, Musée d’Orsay) is practically collage, with the images on Zola’s wall—including a grisaille of Olympia—applied like stickers to the painting surface. For The Balcony (1868–69, Musée d’Orsay), a four-person portrait that includes Berthe Morisot and was inspired by Francisco Goya’s Majas on a Balcony, a green railing is all that holds the figures back from our own viewing space. Even Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe, which scandalized Paris two years before Olympia (here represented by a copy on loan from The Courtauld Gallery, ca. 1863–68), was based on studies of Giorgione and, in particular, an engraving of the Judgment of Paris by Marcantonio Raimondi after a lost original by Raphael.

And where was Degas during all this time? Making his own studies of Raimondi, for one. He was also creating his own portraits, based off of his studies from the Louvre, but they were often compositionally skewed, such as that of James-Jacques-Joseph Tissot (ca. 1867–68, Metropolitan Museum of Art), who appears to be sinking into the middle of the picture. Degas was also painting false starts—or at least, The False Start (ca. 1869–72, Yale University Art Gallery), one of his many images from the racetrack. As Manet painted the explosive instance, Degas looked to the odd moment. When the artists went to the races, Manet depicted the horses head-on, in The Races at Longchamp (1866, Art Institute of Chicago), while Degas observed them from behind in Racehorses Before the Stands (1866–68, Musée d’Orsay).

Edgar Degas, Cotton Office in New York, 1873, Oil on canvas, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Pau, France.

Manet’s figures tumble out of his compositions, while Degas draws us in. As his choice of subject matter turned from history and allegory to the realities of modern life, Degas’ work also became uniquely absorbing. His Cotton Office in New Orleans (1873) depicts both the dealings of the cotton trade and the family business. A descendant of the French diaspora, Degas was a Louisianian on his maternal side—his mother’s family had left Saint-Domingue after the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804)—while his father’s family owned the De Gas bank of Naples, Italy, having fled from France during the Reign of Terror. The New Orleans cotton office in the painting was his family’s own, observed firsthand when Degas himself left Paris in 1871 following the siege of that city in the Franco-Prussian War. (Both Degas and Manet had manned the artillery in its defense.)

Degas packed his New Orleans composition with a depth of mundane activity, accounting for the many facets of a busy cotton-factoring firm: counting the bales, manning the books, reviewing the operation. Cropped in the foreground, Michel Musson, Degas’ uncle, inspects the cotton’s fibers with his fingers. Meanwhile, sitting in a chair in the middle of the room, Degas’ brother René leans back and reads from The Daily Picayune. Good work if you can get it. It is appropriate that this painting of modern life became the first work by Degas to enter the collection of a French museum, when the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Pau acquired it in 1878. Degas had come into his own. (In an unexpected twist, the first museum to acquire a work by Manet was none other than the Metropolitan Museum of Art, when it accepted Boy with a Sword [1861] and Young Lady in 1866 [1866] as gifts from the American collector Erwin Davis in 1889. At the time, the Metropolitan exhibited these two works as by an “eccentric realist of disputed merit; founder of the school of ‘Impressionistes.’”)

There is no doubt that, between the two, Manet always remained the painter of action. You can just about smell the gunpowder smoke in his maritime painting of The Battle of the “Kearsarge” and the “Alabama” (1864, Philadelphia Museum of Art), of an engagement of the American Civil War that was waged off the coast of Cherbourg, France. The firing of flintlocks still rattles the composition in The Execution of Maximilian (ca. 1867–68, The National Gallery, London). Manet never saw these scenes in person but rather combined eyewitness accounts with the precedents of art history to great effect. In the case of Maximilian, the Habsburg heir installed by Napoleon III to become emperor of Mexico but soon deposed by loyalists to Benito Juárez, Manet directly quoted Francisco Goya’s Third of May 1808.

Édouard Manet, The Battle of the USS “Kearsarge” and the CSS “Alabama,” 1864, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania.

All the while, Degas looked ever deeper to the inside of life—revealing interior spaces along with what seemed to be the inner thoughts of his figures. In The Dancing Class (ca. 1870, Metropolitan Museum of Art), the intimate assembly of young figures appears to interact only with themselves as they become lost in a turnout, fixing a shoe, or bending at the barre in fifth position. As Manet stayed sharp, Degas leaned into a sense of distraction and ill-focus. On the surfaces of his work, he took to pastels and an innovative handling of color and line to give his paintings a new impression, leading the way for the movement that took this name. Many of his most lasting innovations were still to come, including his experiments in wax sculpture and staged photography, which fall outside the timeframe of Manet’s life and are therefore not included in the exhibition. But in such gauzy works as The Singer in Green (ca. 1884), Woman Bathing in a Shallow Tub (1885), and Woman Combing Her Hair (ca. 1888–90), all coming from the Metropolitan’s collection, we see the development of the same wavy line that first appeared in Degas’ print study of the infanta some two decades before.

Edgar Degas, The Singer in Green, ca. 1884, Pastel on light blue laid paper, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

This blurred, impressionistic vision gave the works of Degas a new intimacy. In this exhibition’s comparison between those two famous tippling figures, In a Café (The Absinthe Drinker) (1875–76, Musée d’Orsay) by Degas and Plum Brandy (ca. 1877, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) by Manet, both of which relied on the same artist model, Ellen Andrée, it is the work by Degas that takes top prize. The off-kilter perspective, the drooping eyes, and the distracted male companion all present a sense of isolation that Manet’s more sentimental portrait never could.

Edgar Degas, In a Café (The Absinthe Drinker), 1875–76, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. 

But this is not a competition, as the curator Stephan Wolohojian makes clear. Nor is it really a story of slash and burn. One of the final works here is Manet’s painting of Maximilian from The National Gallery, London. Like that portrait of Monsieur and Madame Édouard Manet at the start of the exhibition, this too is fragmentary. After Manet’s death, the large composition was slashed apart and broken up into smaller works. It was Degas who tracked down the pieces and brought them together again. Much as Degas added a portion of canvas to the damaged right side of Monsieur and Madame Édouard Manet, here he also dedicated himself after Manet’s death to his friend’s reparation. Whatever divide existed between them was also their bond. That slash was ultimately a stitch bringing these two masters ever closer together.

1.   “Manet/Degas” opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, on September 24, 2023, and remains on view through January 7, 2024. The exhibition was previously on view at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris (March 28–July 23, 2023).