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The _Manet / Degas_ catalogue of the exhibitions at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and the Metropolitan Museum in New York, March 2023-January 2024, is exceptionally handsome and reveals

striking parallels between the two artists.  But the editors have missed a great opportunity by failing to supply descriptions of the paintings—and by including 22 large blank pages—opposite

the 160 plates.  The chapters on Manet’s and Degas’ etchings, politics, relations to the poet Paul Valéry and Degas’ fine collection of Manet’s works are competent but rather disappointing.

  And the chapter by the Met curator Denise Murrell on their Black subjects and the artists’ relation to the mixed-race playwright Dumas fils makes several dubious claims and deserves

dissection. In her short chapter Murrell asserts three times that the Parisian middle class felt “racial anxiety”, but she does not define this malaise nor explain how Manet and Degas

suffered from it.  In fact, Manet slept with Black women and Degas admired them in New Orleans.  She uses the younger Alexandre Dumas as an example of racial anxiety and emphasizes his

“profound sense of outsider status.”  But she also contradicts herself by stating that this affluent and successful dramatist “moved freely in elite social circles” and “circulated at the

apex of Parisian society” — as indeed he did. In a radical scholarly failure, Murrell first makes wild speculations without providing evidence, then repeats them as if they were facts.  She

asserts, but does not show, how the racial portrayals by Manet and Degas “emanate” from Dumas’ critique of society.  In attempting to connect Dumas to Manet she claims, again without

convincing facts, that Manet’s _Olympia_ was named after a character in Dumas’ _La dame aux camélias.  _She then tortuously adds that Olympia and her Black maid represent “a clearly

delineated binary that oversimplifies the fluidity of the boundaries between disrepute and respectability.”  But she ignores the fact that a fellow-artist, not Manet himself, named his

painting _Olympia_. _Contra_ Murrell, Manet and Degas minimise rather than emphasise the origins of their biracial subjects.  Manet’s portrait of Baudelaire’s mistress Jeanne Duval lightened

her skin color.  Her red coral earrings—worn in portraits of the Empress Josephine and many other 19th-century women—do not mark her as biracial, and her stylish white dress is exactly the

same as the gowns worn by upper-class white ladies.  Unlike Duval’s blonde maid, the maid in _Olympia_ is Black, her features are obscured and she almost fades into the dark background.  The

features of the biracial acrobat in Degas’ _Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando_ are not portrayed but completely obscured, and Murrell does not mention her similarity to the acrobat wearing

the same high-laced boots who dangles over the balcony in Manet’s _Masked Ball at the Opéra._  Murrell has a worthy subject, but her fair notion is fatally flawed. Murrell notes that “the

turned-away stance of the maids in Titian’s _Venus of Urbino _(1538) is a major precedent for _Olympia_”, but she doesn’t analyse the painting. Titian’s maidservant, seen from the back and

kneeling over a chest, is not merely turning around and putting away clothing. A heavily dressed maid is rolling up her sleeve, extending her right arm and towering over her.  Their unusual

pose suggests that the maid in white has done something wrong and angered her mistress.  She’s kneeling  penitentially while being admonished or scourged by the disproportionately tall maid

in a red skirt.  Titian’s real drama has nothing to do with _Olympia_. The Introduction to the catalogue contrasts the two painters: “Manet, elegant and social, as quick and confident as his

brush, continued to seek official recognition through his devotion to the Salon; Degas, reserved and fiercely independent, struck out on a fresh path” and exhibited with the Impressionists.

  Manet was charming, with a richer, warmer, more responsive personality.  The unsociable, caustic Degas was guarded and hostile.  Their friend Renoir observed the ironic contrast in their

careers: “Manet, who was so mild and gentle, was always controversial, while Degas, bitter, violent and intractable as he was, was from the start recognized by the official Institute, the

public and the revolutionaries.” Though hostile to the French government and over military age, both Manet and Degas did their patriotic duty by serving with the National Guard during the

Franco-Prussian War in 1870, and sympathised with the fate of the massacred Communards.  In another important opposition, noted by a contributor, “Manet, a committed republican, conceived

and exhibited works linked to events that affected or incensed him as a citizen. . . . Degas whose opinions can be described as conservative in everything except his art, always left current

events out of his public work.” It is useful to provide descriptions of the important paintings that readers of the _Manet / Degas_ catalogue expected to find there but the editors left

out.  In 1864 the Emperor Napoleon III installed the dreamy and idealistic Archduke Maximilian, brother of the Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph, as Emperor of Mexico.  Three years later

Maximilian was defeated by the Mexican revolutionaries.  Charged with attempting to overthrow the legitimate government, he was tried by court martial and convicted of treason.  In June 1867

Maximilian and two of his generals were executed by a firing squad who were only three paces away from the victims and shot them point-blank. Manet’s pictorial, almost cinematic drama _The

Execution of Maximilian,_ is immediate and intense.  The victims—together, not separate—hold hands in a gesture of fraternal support.  The rifles almost touch their chests, yet the execution

is bloodless.  The executioners’ shots are serial, not simultaneous.  The dark-skinned, clean-shaven Mejía, struck by the fatal bullets, falls backwards but has not yet collapsed on the

ground.  The bearded Maximilian and Miramón stand upright and bravely await their imminent death.  The casual indifference of the sergeant on the right, loading his rifle to finish off the

victims, increases the horror of their sacrifice. The Execution of Emperor Maximilian of Mexico, by Édouard Manet, June 19, 1867 In _Berthe Morisot with a Bouquet of Violets_—Manet’s most

Spanish, most attractive and most powerful portrait— Morisot confronts the viewer directly and close to the frame of the picture.  Her face is half in shadow, half in light; her brown irises

are unusually large, her nose delicate, her lips inviting.  Violets, reflecting their intimacy, symbolise the love of truth and truth of love.  _Berthe Morisot in Mourning _(for her father)

portrays the artist with dramatic intensity.  She wears a tall black hat and is shrouded in a large black garment, with a black ribbon wound around her bare white arm, a black gloved hand

resting on her chin.  Her hair is loose on her forehead, her eyes are troubled, and the expressionistic slashes of paint on her face reinforce her sorrow and anguish.  Degas owned this

stunning portrait, which demonstrates Manet’s extraordinary sympathy for her grief. Berthe Morisot With a Bouquet of Violets, 1872 by Edouard Manet The confused contributors call Degas’

_Scenes of War in the Middle Ages_ both “large and ambitious” and “modestly scaled”.  They emphasise the complexity of the  “mysterious” and “difficult to decipher” painting, but do not

attempt to explain it.  His last historical work and most horrific picture portrays sexual violence in late medieval France.  Three men on horseback appear on the right side of the

painting—two with draped headdresses and belted tunics, one bare-headed and in armour.  The mounted bowman who dominates the centre has an angelic face, the second man looks backwards, the

third has an evil countenance and abducts a naked victim.  All three have raped and murdered four women, whose ghastly naked corpses lie abandoned on the ground.  The red clothes of the

rapists and red hair of the bent-over woman match the flames of the burning city and emphasise the themes of bloodshed and conflagration. The historical sources of the painting are Joan of

Arc’s 1429 triumphs in the Hundred Years’ War and Jules Michelet’s description of her feats in his influential _Histoire de France _(1844). _Interior: The Rape _– sad, brooding and

brown-toned — is Degas’ most fascinating and enigmatic painting.  On the right the bearded young man, fully dressed in dark clothing, his face in shadow and eye glittering, leans against the

door of a cosily decorated but rather claustrophobic hotel room.  On the left the half-dressed, bare-shouldered, disconsolate woman, separated from the coldly indifferent man by a glowing

table lamp, turns away from him and weeps.  The domestic touches suggest that the man has paid for and entered her room as well as her body.  Though responsible for the woman’s pain and

grief, he does not sympathise with nor attempt to comfort her.  The visual clues and body language of this dramatic picture transform an act of physical aggression into a moment of

unbearable psychological anguish. Interior: The Rape, by Edgar Degas – www.philamuseum.org, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1170064 In the leisurely, static,

even idle _Cotton Office in  New Orleans,_ the clouds of cotton seem to have softly descended from the sky and fallen onto the long table.  The office looks like a theatrical stage as the

curtain rises on the all-male cast.  The floor is immaculate, and in the centre foreground  Degas’ uncle Michel Musson examines a sample of cotton.  But at least five of the fourteen figures

in the painting are doing precisely nothing.  The two young men near the open rear door seem to be awaiting cotton orders that may never come.  Degas’ brother Achille, the top-hatted man on

the far left, lounges against the open window frame.  Seated in the centre, his brother René scans the local paper for useful tidbits.  Degas attributed the pervasive idleness to the

unbearably hot summer climate.  In fact, the inefficiently run business collapsed and went bankrupt while he was working on the picture. Cotton Office in  New Orleans, by Edgar Degas –

Painted in 1873 in NewOrleans. Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17359225 Degas’ _The Absinthe Drinker_ (1876) and Manet’s  _Plum Brandy_ (1877) provide the most

striking comparison.  Degas’ shadowed woman, a gloomy addict and social outcast, has a full cloudy glass and drained bottle on her marble table.  Unnaturally thin, narrow-shouldered and

concave-chested, she wears a drab dress, cheaply decorated shoes and a wavy hat that ludicrously crowns her roughly fringed red hair.  She stares straight ahead, with heavy-lidded eyes, as

if trying to forget the past and unable to face the future.  Manet’s woman, with white-trimmed hat and untidy red hair—also sitting at a marble table in a café—is not nearly as shabby, sad

and grim as Degas’ stupefied drinker.  Manet’s woman is prettier, more pensive and more attractively dressed in a pink, white-ruffled frock.  Wide-eyed yet dreamy, charming and appealing,

seen close-up in a bright light, she rests her pale face on the back of her hand.  Delaying the pleasure of her potent drink while waiting for her companion, she holds an unlit cigarette and

stares contentedly over her untouched plum soaked in brandy—a modern woman solidly on her own.  These two paintings reveal the difference in their character and art.  Degas is harsh, Manet

is gentle: both are brilliant. Edouard Manet – The Plum – National Gallery of Art _Jeffrey Meyers, FRSL, has published 5 books on art: Painting and the Novel, The Enemy: A Biography of

Wyndham Lewis, Impressionist Quartet, Modigliani: A Life and Alex Colville: The Mystery of the Real. _ A MESSAGE FROM THEARTICLE _We are the only publication that’s committed to covering

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