As he got older, the French artist Édouard Manet leaned away from the plainness of his scandalous youth to paint flowers, fruit bowls and fashionable women, in a lighter, pleasanter key. This mellow phase of his life is at the centre of a new show, writes Jason Farago.
I wonder how often he thought back on it: the outrage, the reproaches, the shame, the folly. In 1865, two years after they rejected his Déjeuner sur l’herbe, the gatekeepers of the Paris Salon accepted two paintings by Édouard Manet into Europe’s most prestigious exhibition. One was a slablike, Spanish-influenced religious scene of Christ mocked by Roman legionaries. But it was the other that eclipsed more than 3,500 other works in the Salon, and set off a scandal that makes the recent brouhaha at the Whitney Biennial look as stately as a Noh drama.
Visitors shouted and bawled in front of Olympia, a radically flat depiction of a common prostitute, her servant and her cat with pitiless candor. Art students threw punches. Security guards had to be called in. The newspapers published brutal caricatures of Manet and his models, and art critics savaged it as “vile,” “ugly,” “stupid,” “shameless,” a work that “cries out for examination by the inspectors of public health.”
A more bohemian artist might have relished the hatred. Not Manet. He was a bourgeois Parisian, hungry for public approval and civic honours, even as he painted works of such frankness that they kept him outside the establishment. He had struck the first blows for modern art, but it came at a punishing social cost. And as he got older, he leaned away from the plainness of his scandalous youth to paint flowers, fruit bowls, and fashionable women, all in a lighter, pleasanter key that found favor even in the hidebound Salon.
This is the great paradox of the 19th century’s greatest painter, and it’s the crux, too, of the exhibition Manet and Modern Beauty, on view at the Art Institute of Chicago, which focuses on the art of Manet’s last six or seven years before his early death in 1883, at age 51. Fresh, charming, a bit evasive and almost too stylish, Manet and Modern Beauty sticks up for these later portraits, genre scenes and still lifes—which the last century’s art historians, enraptured by Olympia and her ilk, tended to dismiss with the three Fs: frivolous, fashionable and (worst of all) feminine.
Manet and Modern Beauty has a further mission: to pump up the reputation of one of Manet’s last paintings, Jeanne (Spring),which the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles acquired in 2014 after more than a century in the shadows. Painted in 1881—and first exhibited in the 1882 Salon with the much more famous A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (not on view here)—Jeanne depicts a fashionable Parisienne lost in thought as she walks through a garden.
Its forthright cheerfulness comes as a challenge to those of us still hung up on the brawnier, more shocking image of modernity Manet forged two decades earlier with Déjeuner and Olympia.(The show will travel to the Getty in October; it’s been organised by Gloria Groom, the Art Institute’s chair of European painting, and the Getty curators Scott Allan and Emily Beeny.)
Manet had always been an adept of women’s fashion, and Manet and Modern Beauty looks carefully at how clothing and accessories work to signal modernity in the artist’s late work.
In the large, tight, equivocal In the Conservatory (circa 1877-79), a woman on a bench stares impassively into the middle distance, while a man leans down in silent vexation. Their left hands, each sporting a wedding band, dangle near each other but do not touch. What compounds the painting’s ambiguous force—is this a flirtation? a breakup? a reconciliation? —is the woman’s up-to-the-minute outfit: a form-fitting gray dress with an accordion-pleated train, set off with a silk belt and bow and enlivened with a hat, glove and parasol in jasmine yellow. The picture is as open as Olympia is blunt, and Manet captures it all with indefinite, flowing brush strokes that give it a startling freshness.
Manet and Modern Beauty owes a lot to feminist scholarship on the artist over the last 30 years, and even the curators’ choice of walls of muted rose and dusky lilac signals their embrace of the “feminine” epithet that opponents of the late work once hurled. But there have always been many Manets, and even the later, tenderer Manet coexists with an artist of deep political engagement and historical sweep. The glaring absences in this exhibition—even more than the Bar—are Manet’s 1881 portrait of the exiled Communard Henri Rochefort, as well as his two late great seascapes, both titled Rochefort’s Escape and painted in 1880-81. As Allan writes in the catalogue, Manet’s last years coincided with “an epochal political shift leftward” in France, and these maritime paintings with a political prisoner form the last act in Manet’s long interweaving of historical painterly styles and current events.
I suspect those works are not here so as to leave the last word to Jeanne, the Getty’s prize, who also appears on the catalogue’s cover and on posters all over Chicago. May the gods of French painting forgive me, but Jeanne is a banal and overly refined picture, and its marriage of fashion and foliage tips exhibits a vulgarity wholly unlike the cool, careful In the Conservatory. The curators make hay from the fact that in 1882, visitors and critics at the Salon preferred the bright, pleasant Jeanne to the darker, stranger Bar. But I’m not sure why the same contemporary critics who slimed Olympia now get to have the definitive word on which Manets matter most.
I made three passes of Manet and Modern Beauty, and between the second and third I went upstairs to see the Art Institute’s most prized Manet: the pancake-flat Jesus Mocked by the Soldiers, which survived the outraged crowds of the 1865 Salon. Its blank background and disdain for illusion are miles away from the floral profusion of Jeanne. And I tried to shake my conviction that Jesus Mocked—a masterpiece of candor, so proud to be a two-dimensional slab of oil and canvas—counts for more than the fashionable scenes below.
Why do I value this early Manet so much more? It is only because I think art has a higher vocation than delivering joy?
Or is it because, poor modern boy that I am, I have been trained by more than a century of artists and writers to be suspicious of beauty—that ruse, that luxury, that feminine thing? The received history of modern Western painting, over which Manet looms like our great bourgeois Allfather, can feel like a succession of attacks on beauty by generations of arrogant men, each more certain than the last that their art would at last redeem an ugly society. But Manet knew that there is as much rebellion and insight in a dress, a bouquet or even a pile of strawberries if he could see past their surfaces to the richness within. That is another path to modernity, grounded in what his dear friend Baudelaire, in The Painting of Modern Life, called “beauty, fashion and happiness.”
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