Born in Paris just two years apart, Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas were arguably the most influential French Impressionists. Their paintings, radical in subject matter and rejected by the Salon, heralded a new era of modern art in Europe. This exhibition at the Met places their art side by side, examining the parallels and divergences between their bodies of work while presenting a lively aesthetic dialogue. Olympia, Manet’s painting of a nude courtesan—it caused an uproar at the Salon of 1865—leaves Paris for only the third time. The painting, and the exhibition at large, embodies a watershed moment for European art—the shift from Old World values to modernism. —Paulina Prosnitz