—
HAVING LOST HIS MOTHER EARLY, Degas was raised overwhelmingly in the company of men. There was his widower father, obviously, but he also had two widower grandfathers, and no fewer than four uncles who were bachelors. Bachelorhood was regarded with considerable suspicion in Second Empire France. Linked by the medical profession with nervous disorders, it was seen most often as a moral failing—an indication of homosexuality, libertinism, or—just as bad—impotence brought on by syphilis. In the 1870s, as the new constitution of the Third Republic was debated, attempts were even made to deprive bachelors of the vote.
Despite these wider social strictures, a failure to marry was common both in Degas’s family and in the wider circle of bohemian artists with whom he had begun to associate. Almost all the artists in what became the Impressionist group, for instance, avoided early marriage. When they eventually did wed, it tended to be to mistresses of many years’ standing, frequently well after they had fathered children.
In Italy during his youth Degas had toyed with the idea of a monastic life. He chose art instead. But it’s clear that the monastic mindset stayed with him. “The most beautiful things in art,” he said, “come from renunciation.”
—
SOON AFTER THEIR FATEFUL 1861 encounter in the Louvre, Manet and Degas were seeing each other several times a week. There were natural affinities between them—not least social and class factors marking them out from most of their bohemian artist peers. But Manet must also have recognized in Degas something brilliant and inimitable.
As a student, Degas had worked tirelessly at drawing. He had a stupendous aptitude for it, one that far outstripped Manet’s. But he was also disciplined. He had taken to heart the advice of his hero, the formidable neoclassicist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, whose home he had visited as an awestruck student in 1855. Ingres told him: “Draw lines, young man, and still more lines, both from life and from memory, and you will become a good artist.”
For Degas’s generation, Ingres’s name signaled a proud and unswayable authority. That authority was rooted in his admiration for the restrained, linear art of ancient Greece and Rome, which tipped over into fervor. It had something semi-mystical about it: “The ancients saw all, understood all, felt all, depicted all,” said Ingres. Line, in Ingres’s conception of art, was supreme—and not just in a technical sense. There was a moral aspect to his conviction, reflected in sayings of his, such as “Drawing is the probity of art,” that are still routinely repeated in art schools. Clinging to tenets like these, Ingres upheld notions of propriety and steadiness. Enduring values.
Ingres was wilder and more audacious than his reputation suggests. But he carried forth an idea of art that was academic: It depended, that is, on established standards and disciplined training. Also, on the idea that things should be difficult, not easy.
Ingres represented everything Manet was instinctively kicking against. But for Degas, it was different. Ingres’s strict, disciplined, and ideological view of art not only met with Degas’s father’s approval but also answered to something deep down in Degas’s own temperament. Where Manet seemed increasingly set on achieving a look of spontaneity and freedom (he wanted his paintings to have the brevity, the sudden acceleration, of wit), Degas—perhaps as a result of his father’s influence—seemed almost to require the feeling that he was overcoming obstacles in order to feel serious about what he was doing.
“I can assure you,” he said years later, “no art is less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of reflection and study of the great masters.”
Ingres was one of those great masters for whom things really were immensely difficult. His nudes and society portraits radiate calm; but to attain this calm, he experienced genuine torments. He had endless problems bringing things to completion. “If only they knew the trouble I took over their portraits,” he said of the commissioned work he notoriously resented, “they would have some pity for me.” He was forever making preparatory studies. He frequently abandoned conceptions after months and even years of work. And then, as if haunted by the idea of perfection, he would return to the same subjects again and again over the course of his long career.
All of this made Degas Ingres’s true heir. He, too, cultivated difficulty. For each new composition, he produced dozens of drawings. His paintings, elaborately conceived, were constantly being revised and reworked. Unlike Manet, who seemed to dash off paintings almost as afterthoughts, and who gleefully disregarded conventional notions of “finish” (his pictures struck many people as no better than sketches), Degas experienced tremendous difficulty even approaching the point where he might call a picture finished.
Degas never abandoned his reverence for Ingres. But in Italy, where he spent two years at the end of the 1850s, he came under the influence of Gustave Moreau. And it was Moreau—an experimentalist in technique and a true eclectic in his tastes (he would later be Henri Matisse’s teacher)—who turned Degas on to Delacroix, Ingres’s great rival. Delacroix, by now an old lion, was in many ways a conservative in person. But he was perceived—or he had been, back in the 1820s and ’30s—as a radical, the representative of a new force in art, Romanticism.
Delacroix had no time for Ingres’s neurotic obsession with the discipline of drawing. He was taking calculated aim at such piety when he claimed that there were “no lines in nature.” He was making the point that things in the world were three-dimensional, picked out by patches of colored light, modulated by the atmosphere around them and by conditions that were constantly in flux. Neoclassicism, he believed, in trying to get at eternal things, too often ended up imposing stasis on the world. For Delacroix, life, myth, and history were in motion.
Not surprisingly, his philosophy caught on with the younger generation, including Manet, who embraced Delacroix’s love of color, his visible brushstrokes (in contrast with Ingres’s smooth-licked surfaces), and his attempts to express dynamic movement.
Delacroix had voted for the inclusion of Manet’s The Absinthe Drinker (his shadowy portrait of an alcoholic ragpicker named Collardet whose turf was the streets around the Louvre) in the Salon of 1859. Unfortunately, Delacroix’s was the only vote, and the painting was rejected. But Delacroix seemed interested in the young Manet’s progress, and willing to offer his support.
—
MUCH OF WHAT DELACROIX SAID—especially his ideas about color and movement—made sense to Degas. And so, in the face of his father’s skepticism, he, too, began experimenting with looser brushwork, stronger color, and more dynamic compositions. Degas was determined to find a way to marry these two opposing philosophies—the neoclassicism of Ingres and the Romanticism of Delacroix.
His impulse in this regard was hardly original: Many artists at midcentury were trying to steer a middle path between the poles of Classicism and Romanticism. But Degas wanted a synthesis that was all his own. And so for many years, he plotted large-scale canvases illustrating willfully obscure episodes from history and mythology in an idiom that combined the two styles. He brought great (and still underappreciated) originality to these attempts. But it was all a terrible struggle. He was depressed, indecisive, and pent up, and in all his efforts he continued to feel thwarted. He had terrible trouble getting his paintings to where he wanted them to be, and the ideas jostling for supremacy in his mind were so incommensurate that, aesthetically speaking, his work simply fell between stools. He worked on paintings like Young Spartans for two years, beginning in 1860, but was still not satisfied. (He returned to it, completely overhauling it, eighteen years later.) He made dozens of drawings—including some of the most beautiful figure drawings of the nineteenth century—in preparation for another painting, Scene of War in the Middle Ages, but the finished canvas, which was presented to the Salon of 1865, has a fake, stilted feel, like an over-elaborate and slightly preposterous museum diorama. He worked on another painting, The Daughter of Jephthah, his largest and most ambitious history painting, for more than two years—just as Delacroix�
�s influence over him was peaking. And yet he left it abandoned, unfinished.
—
DEGAS’S ENCOUNTER WITH MANET could not have happened at a better time. It had the simple effect of shaking things up for the struggling young artist. Manet had natural charisma. He seemed to combine a kind of boyish impunity with adult manners that moved so fast and fluently, they won you over before you had even registered them. His face, in which Émile Zola detected “an indefinable finesse and vigor,” was animated, expressive. He was one of few men, said one acquaintance, who knew how to talk to women; he knew, that is, how to listen: He would signal attentiveness with repeated nods of his head, and when something earned his admiration, his tongue would click approvingly—a soft sound emitted through a blond beard, flecked with red.
He had a limber, flowing gait and slender feet. He spoke in a drawl that mimicked the argot of working-class Parisians, and yet his clothes were beautifully cut. He wore jackets nipped at the waist, light-colored trousers, sometimes English jodhpurs, and a tall silk hat. In his vest he wore a gold chain, and in his gloved hand he carried a walking stick. But he wore this uniform insouciantly, adopting, wherever he went, a carefully careless manner, a kind of nonchalance.
In the eyes of his admirers, Manet seemed to have perfected a certain idea of civilized life in Second Empire Paris. Out in the city, he epitomized the midcentury figure of the flâneur. After lunching each day at the Café Tortoni, the very center of boulevard society, he and Baudelaire would wander in the Tuileries. Manet made rapid sketches as they went. He had imbibed the romance of Velázquez’s position as court painter to Spain’s King Philip IV—noble, aloof, austere—and so styled himself, with mischievous élan, the “Velázquez of the Tuileries.” In the afternoons, returning to the Café Tortoni, between five and six o’clock he was usually surrounded by admirers heaping praise on the day’s sketches.
In more private settings, disdaining formality, he liked to sit cross-legged on the floors of his hosts’ homes. He would hunch his body, wringing his hands and narrowing his eyes into an appraising squint.
This same disdain for formality underpinned his painting. He slapped vivid colors straight onto the canvas in large, brushy blocks—no conventionally painstaking buildup from darker layers to light. He favored frontally lit subjects (which flattened them out further); free handling in the manner of Frans Hals or Delacroix; and rich blacks that set off an otherwise light palette, nonchalantly disregarding intermediary tones. You felt that everything he painted he loved, and in his very nonchalance there was something not just erotic but briskly violent—as if one way of thinking of love was as a kind of glancing blow.
Manet also had a playful streak—a gentle, mocking side. His conversation was laced with needling ironies; little jabs that could arouse resentment only in the prickly or paranoid. When, for instance, years later, Zola sent him the preface he had written to the second edition of his controversial novel Thérèse Raquin, Manet wrote to congratulate him: “Bravo, my dear Zola, it’s a splendid preface, and you are standing up not only for a group of writers but for a whole group of artists as well.” And then, signing off, the characteristic little parry: “I must say that someone who can fight back as you do must really enjoy being attacked.”
Manet never seemed to envy the success of his fellow artists. He “always approves,” said his friend Fantin-Latour, “of the painting of people he likes.”
—
ENCOURAGED BY THE SUCCESS of The Spanish Singer, Manet proceeded to turn out one utterly fresh masterpiece after another. His Boy with a Sword of 1861 (a portrait of his son Léon in costume) was followed in quick succession by Young Woman Reclining in Spanish Costume, The Street Singer, Mlle V…in the Costume of an Espada, Music in the Tuileries, Lola de Valence, and a whole series of etchings, all produced in 1862. These pictures were cheeky, bright, drenched in appetite. They hummed with life. Manet had a sense at this point that he could pull off almost anything. He dressed up his brother as a toreador and painted a full-length portrait of him; and then—since she was his new favorite model—he did the same with a fresh-faced young woman called Victorine Meurent, even sketching in a bullfight behind her. It didn’t make sense. It didn’t need to. Manet’s instincts and infatuations were in perfect harmony with his technique and abilities; he had the inner conviction that his ideas, no matter how outlandish, would somehow win through—just as The Spanish Singer had in 1861.
“Manet has his admirers, quite fanatic ones,” observed the critic Théophile Gautier. “Already some satellites are circling around this new star and describing orbits of which he is the center.”
Degas would never submit to being anyone’s satellite. But in the midst of his own struggles, he must have watched the beginnings of Manet’s creative explosion with astonishment and more than a little envy. While Manet was improvising his way to notoriety and positively bursting with confidence, Degas was laboriously copying crucifixions by Andrea Mantegna, devoting years of his young life to reworking elaborately conceived set pieces, and going to inordinate lengths to incorporate the latest discoveries by Assyriologists into paintings such as Semiramis Building Babylon—paintings that came into the world, despite all the labor he put into them, stillborn.
While Manet was enjoying his first successes with an attitude toward the past—even to heroes and role models such as Velázquez and Delacroix—that was casually playful and insouciant, Degas was still earnestly pitting himself against the great painters of times gone by. “Our Raphael,” his father observed, “is still working but has completed nothing so far, yet the years march on.” And two years later, in another letter: “What can I say about Edgar? We are waiting impatiently for the opening of the exhibition. I have good reason to believe he will not finish in time.”
As he labored over his own unfinished canvases, Degas couldn’t help but be impressed by the ease and seeming impulsiveness with which Manet, “whose eye and hand are certainty itself” (as Degas himself sighed), committed his impressions to canvas. “Damned Manet!” he later complained to the English artist Walter Sickert. “Everything he does he always hits off straight away, while I take endless pains and never get it right.”
He probably felt similarly envious as he watched Manet perform socially. And yet there were many compensations. Just as Francis Bacon’s effect on Lucian Freud was to enlarge his world—to enhance the pleasure he took in new people, new situations, new forms of social and aesthetic potential—Manet helped pull Degas out of himself. His example made Degas realize what could be achieved through sheer temerity. It was Manet’s underlying sense of conviction that was perhaps the most impressive part of him at this point. It made Degas conscious of the need to cultivate a similar boldness in himself.
—
IN THE YEARS THAT FOLLOWED their first meeting, Degas abandoned history painting and allegory altogether. He turned his sights instead on life as it was lived in Second Empire Paris—the same life that so captivated Manet. Drawn out of himself and his own hermetic obsessions, he entered Manet’s intoxicating social world and fell in love with the spectacle of the city. He became “a veteran first-nighter, stroller, and café man,” wrote his biographer, Roy McMullen. More important, he acquired a larger, more flexible notion of what he wanted to achieve in his art.
There were stimulants other than Manet, of course—most obviously Courbet, whose headlong painting style and abrasive personality had done so much to shake up French painting over the previous decade. Degas’s colleagues, Whistler and Tissot, were also influences in the 1860s. But it was Degas’s relationship with Manet that was the most fertile, the most fruitful, the most consequential of his career.
—
A LIFELONG BACHELOR, Degas stared at the marriages he knew—including the marriage between Manet and Suzanne—with a kind of dismay, tinged at the edges with rancor. Part of him envied those who seemed to have found happiness in marriage. In his youth, he had confided to his notebook a sentimental hope for future
conjugal contentment: “Couldn’t I find a good little wife, simple and quiet, who understands my oddities of mind, and with whom I might spend a modest working life! Isn’t that a lovely dream?” But at the age of thirty-five, he already struck one friend as an “old bachelor, embittered by hidden disappointments.”
Relations between men and women, both within the institution of marriage and outside it, preoccupied him as a subject in his art. He had a gift for sniffing out disharmony and tensions between the sexes, and an obsession with capturing these tensions on canvas. In one early painting after another—most notably in Young Spartans Exercising and Scene of War in the Middle Ages—a woman or group of females on the left is placed in an antagonistic relationship with a man or group of males on the right. By the end of the 1860s, when he came to paint Manet and Suzanne, a specific preoccupation not just with conflict between the sexes but with marriage itself was rising to a kind of crescendo in his work.
Degas’s feelings about women were nothing if not complicated. Deeply moved by female beauty, charmed and even seduced by intelligent female company, he nonetheless had a classically chauvinist nineteenth-century aversion to feminine “softness”—a silent, abiding fear of woman’s potential to soothe, unman, enfeeble. Among artists and writers, his attitude was by no means unusual. In Cousin Bette, Balzac had described the destruction of a talented sculptor by the sapping effect of his marriage. In their 1867 novel Manette Salomon, the Goncourt brothers’ fictional artist, Naz de Coriolis, believed that celibacy was the only state that left artists with their liberty, their strength, their brains, and their consciences. It was because of wives, believed Coriolis (who was based in part on Degas), that so many artists slipped into weakness, into complacent modishness, into concessions to profit-making and commerce, and into denials of earlier aspirations. And marriage, of course, eventually involved paternity, which turned artists even further away from their true vocation. The painters Corot and Courbet avoided marriage, lamenting what they saw as the dissipation of creative energy that any committed relationship with a woman entailed. “A married man is a reactionary,” Courbet said. And even Delacroix became uncharacteristically agitated when a young painter told him of his plans to marry: “And if you love her and if she’s pretty, that’s the worst of all,” he said. “Your art is dead! An artist should know no other passion than his work, and sacrifice everything to it.”
The Art of Rivalry Page 11
