Painting: The Fundamentalist

As the 19th century recedes into perspective, it becomes clear that the age was in every respect the equal of the great art epochs of the past and that among its greatest giants was Edouard Manet, one of the first artists to concern himself exclusively with modern times. “We laugh at Monsieur Manet,” wrote Emile Zola 100 years ago. “It will be our sons who go into ecstasies over his canvases.” Indeed, he is now ranked with Cezanne as one of the major precursors of 20th century painting. The problem is that his once scorned works are now so highly prized (a rare Manet at auction a year ago brought $450,000) that museums and collectors are loath to part with what have become their most precious possessions.

The best opportunity in nearly a century to scan Manet’s life work is the current exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Director Evan H. Turner has tapped 80 collectors and museums around the world, assembled 83 of Manet’s oils, rounded out the exhibit with many more sketches, lithographs, pastels and etchings (see color pages). Although the catalogue, by Anne Coffin Hanson, art history professor at Bryn Mawr, is a collector’s item for art scholars, the chronological exhibition itself will be seen again only at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Led Astray. The loss to the vast museum-going public in other cities is all the greater because Manet, perhaps more than any other painter, gains by the imposing presence and scale of the originals, 17 of which in the Philadelphia show have never before been exhibited in the U.S. The very characteristics that most bothered his contemporaries—his lack of glazes, his impetuous brush stroke, the warping of perspective and the often unfinished quality of his work—were daring risks knowingly faced and boldly taken. To savor Manet’s triumphs requires a quick, appreciative eye in the presence of the real thing.

Manet’s decision to turn upside down the stuffy, artificial traditions then in fashion in the official salons now seems less the act of a revolutionary, more the act of a man in love with reality and with his own time. He had schooled himself arduously by copying the greats

—Tintoretto, Rubens, Fra Angelico, Andrea del Sarto; his problem from the beginning was that he kept leaving off the halos. His taste for reality over illusion distressed his teacher, Academician Thomas Couture, whose 1847 uncostumed orgy, Romans of the Decadence, was the hit of the day. Manet’s mother, goddaughter of Jean Baptiste Bernadotte who became King of Sweden, could only explain it thus: “He could paint quite differently, but his friends led him astray.”

Threat to Morals. Manet’s scruffy friends were none other than the novelist Zola, the poets Baudelaire and Mallarme, the painters Monet, Degas and Renoir. He owed them all a debt, but most of all he trusted his own vision. “One must be of one’s time,” he said, “do what one sees without worrying about the fashion.” Mallarme stated their common goal succinctly: “To paint not the thing, but the effect it produces.”

To further inform his own way of seeing, Manet drew from all the enthusiasms and movements of his day, from the realism of Courbet to the clarity of the camera, from the sketches of Renaissance masters to Japanese prints. But though his natural allies were the impressionists, he refused to run with the renegades who were slightly younger, preferred instead to challenge the painting establishment on its own grounds—the official painting salons.

As a result, Manet’s professional life often reads like an endless scandal. The all-too-earthy goddess Olympia, which he painted in 1863, rocked an art world accustomed to nymphs and satyrs, emperors and gladiators: it was obvious from the bouquet of flowers carried by her Negro maid that a lover had just arrived. And when Manet combined Giorgione’s Arcadian pastoral with postures from a corner of Raphael’s Judgment of Paris, and then transformed them into all-too-contemporary figures, one of them in the buff, picnicking on the banks of the Seine, Napoleon III considered the painting, Le Déjeuner sur I’herbe, a threat to public morals. Both it and Olympia today hang in the Louvre.

The Brilliance of His Brushes. Art as an expression of alienation from society is a concept that Manet would have found ridiculous. He thoroughly enjoyed the life of the race track and cafe, dressed as a bit of a dandy, even hankered after, and got, that ultimate mark of bourgeois respectability, the Legion d’honneur. -Manet’s approach to painting was to become so embued with and immersed in life that he could safely detach himself from it to heed the higher imperatives of his own particular way of seeing. He served life in order to better serve his art.

There is no question, for instance, but that he enjoyed women; indeed, his portraits of them are among the most glowing tributes in the Philadelphia exhibition. Yet as portraits, they have a certain detachment. Faces are fuzzy; full-length figures pose before blurry backgrounds almost devoid of perspective; details of decor are slighted at will. Even the deep-dip decolletage of his 1882 pastel of a young girl is erotic seemingly by accident.

Precision and finish were the qualities prized by the academicians. Manet settled for a painting “if it only presents a suitable arrangement of patches.” And the impressionists who followed him agreed. He could become as engrossed in still lifes as in a tumultuous battle scene, investing neither in sentimentality nor romantic bravura. He sought to bring to nature only the brilliance of his brushes. By so doing, he brought a new realization of art as form rather than commentary, a fundamental concept that artists still attempt to follow to this day.