get in loser, we’re taking in some culture
Manet/Degas (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2023)
Yesterday, I managed to get to the Manet/Degas exhibit at the Met. This was one of my goals for my trip and the primary reason I spent so much time on the exercise bike over the past couple months—“working out so I can go to a museum” sounds like a joke but honestly… walking around a museum can really take it out of you! Especially if you’ve been a frail little curly-headed waif for the last year.1
Truthfully, my knowledge of this era in painting probably begins and ends with a children’s biography of Monet that I once read. I picked up a few books on the subject, among them Sue Roe’s The Private Lives of the Impressionists and Camille Laurens’s Little Dancer, Aged Fourteen, but didn’t really have the chance to look into them. So instead I read two essays from Julian Barnes’s Keeping an Eye Open, which were about Manet and Degas (separately) on the subway ride up to the museum—and then I read the chapter on the two of them (together) in Sebas…