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“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.

James Panero on “Elie Nadelman: Sculptor of Modern Life” at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Karen Wilkin on “Robert Motherwell: Pure Painting,” at the Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth.

The retrospective exhibition of Robert Motherwell’s paintings currently at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth is exhilarating. I came away with the sense that he has lived in totality, and that an infinite reservoir of awareness is in service for him at the moment of creation.

Prudence Peiffer’s “The Slip” is a group biography of six visual artists and the work they created on the edge of Manhattan in the 1950s and ’60s.