Jordan Kantor at Artforum:
“MANET/DEGAS,” the fall blockbuster at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, begins with an unabashed, double-barreled bang: Édouard Manet’s last great self-portrait, paired up alongside one of Edgar Degas’s first. The juxtaposition provides a thrilling object lesson in the stolid compare-and-contrast curatorial methodology that defines the exhibition, but if it’s meant to show the two artists on an equal footing, it doesn’t stage a fair fight. Forty-six years old when he executed Portrait of the Artist (Manet with a Palette), ca. 1878–79, Manet is at the height of his painterly power, looking backward and forward at once. In an act of supremely confident artistic self-identification, his pose explicitly recalls the Diego Velázquez of Las Meninas, 1656, his lodestar and confessed maître, while his bravado brushwork nods to the advanced painting of the day (Impressionism) and beyond. Degas—two years younger than Manet on the calendar, but a tender twenty in his 1855 Portrait of the Artist—is, on the other hand, just at the beginning of his career. He, too, casts a historical glance, but to local tradition embodied by J.-A.-D. Ingres, and does so more timidly. Charcoal holder in hand as if ready to start (drawing coming before painting in any artist’s education at that time), Degas pictures his aspirations more than his accomplishments. Nevertheless, a piercing gaze already portends the intense psychological depths he would plumb over the next half century. This coupling alone makes a visit to the Met worth the trip.
more here.