“There must be a salon of realists…”: Action and Collaboration in Edgar Degas’ Avant-gardism

In art-historical literature, French nineteenth-century painters Edouard Manet and Edgar Degas are often portrayed as high-bourgeois artists, close in class allegiance and urbanity. However, they were two very different kinds of bourgeois and they went about their art in very different ways. Manet wanted and could afford to remain alone in his heroic struggle for success, promoting himself as a solitary genius, or “temperament,” as Zola called it. Degas, instead, was a bohemian almost all his life, working within the rebellious Parisian culture of solidarity among artists.