Visiting NYC this week, Steve and I made a beeline to Manet/Degas, the Met’s new blockbuster exhibition of two giants of 19th century French art and their complicated friendship and rivalry.
The galleries were crowded enough that I decided not to bother reading all the labels and played a game instead, trying to guess which painting came from whose brush. Seen that way, the entire show emerged as a conversation in pastel, oil and ink. When Degas painted a pensive woman drinking absinthe in a café, Manet painted the same woman, sadder and with a plum brandy. When Manet painted horses racing at the Longchamp track, Degas sketched the jockeys and spectators. They competed over how to pose women – bathing, dressing and combing their hair; in profile and from behind; backs bent, arms raised, torsos twisted. The relationship broke into outright hostility just once, when Degas painted a portrait of Manet and his wife Suzanne relaxing at home and gave it to them as a gift. For some reason – which remains a mystery – Manet took a knife to the canvas and sliced off Suzanne’s face and most of her body. Degas reclaimed the mutilated painting and kept it for the rest of his life: frenemies till the end.
To walk among these paintings is to see the world that Manet and Degas shared – their circle of friends, daily lives, pleasures and amusements, political causes. It got me thinking about how many ways there are to tell the story of a life. Here at TTBOOK, we’ve been experimenting with biographical shows lately. Maybe you caught our recent rebroadcast about David Foster Wallace, or my long-form profile of philosopher Nancy Fraser. This week, we’ll rebroadcast Charles Monroe-Kane’s episode on Native American sports icon Jim Thorpe. And Shannon Henry Kleiber is working on a show about the possibly soon-to-be canonized Catholic social worker and journalist Dorothy Day. Who else? Is there someone you’d like to hear us profile? Write to us at listen@ttbook.org. We’d love to know your thoughts!
Listen well,
– Anne