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What’s fascinating about Manet/Degas at The Met is the degree to which the work of each artist seemed to possess whatever the other lacked.

“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.

Barnaby Conrad III on the preferred potable of Paris’s avant-garde.

Once in a blue moon, an exhibition as enthralling as Manet/Degas comes along. You wonder why it’s never been done before. Currently, more than 160 paintings, pastels, drawings, and prints by these two Parisians are on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

James Panero on “Manet/Degas” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.