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The sense of detachment is perhaps the dominant expressive element in Manet's art. His is the considered appraisal, the distant contemplation. Influenced by Goya, by Courbet, and by his own contemporaries, the Impressionists, Manet differs radically from all of them. Not for him was Goya's dark sensuality, or Courbet's blunt force, or Renior's pagan abandon, or Claude Monet's massive effects, or Pissarro's modest intimacy, or Sisley's aerial charm. he was close to the Impressionist circle, yet he did not exhibit with them. Although the most stylish of all the great painters of the nineteenth century, he did not live to see the public recognize him as one of the major recorders of the Parisian life of his time. His very detachment was a barrier to recognition.
Of all the artist whom Manet resembles, Edgar Degas, two years his junior, is the closest in time; and Valasquez, though of the seventeenth century, is the closest in impact. Neither Degas nor Manet can be thought of apart from the city of Paris. Both were aristocrats by temperament, though not by birth. Manet's father, a magistrate, and his mother were altogether bourgeois, as his early portrait of them makes abundantly clear.
The detachment that marks both Degas and Manet found its expression in an extreme aesthetic sensibility. However impressive they may have been as illustrators of the life of their time - nd here Degas surpassed Manet - they both insisted on fitting what they saw of the brilliant passing show into a language of pattern, of attenuated shape, of infinitely subtle color relationships disengaged from a particular moment in time. At heart they were both - to use a modern term - abstract artists. While they responded to the elegant aspects of Parisian life, Manet was almost never caustic, as Degas so often became. Unlike Manet, who accepted charm with enthusiasm, Degas explored the beauty of ugliness. For him the rhythm of the ballet and the rhythm of two women ironing were a similar experience, and in neither case were the protagonists physically attractive. Manet, on the contrary, sought out elegance wherever it could be found, not only in the world of fashion and the demimonde, but even in the naked body of a prostitute. "Olympia" was his title for her, no doubt to suggest that he wished to idealize her, despite his uncompromising projection of her shamelessness. Critics who missed the elegance of Olympia's posture, the beauty of texture and pattern, the sophisticated repeat of minor accents, compared her to a stripped fowl.
Portrait of Emile Zola | |
Among the examples of Degas' influence on Manet, we may cite the connection between his painting, The Collector of Prints, dated 1866, and the Portrait of Emile Zola which Manet painted two years later. It is clear that Manet borrowed Degas' compositional scheme, especially in the arrangement of the background details. The interpretations differ, however; Manet elevates Degas' homely directness to a plane of social distinction, even though Zola himself hardly provided the occasion for such a metamorphosis. manet's portrait of his friend Antonin Proust, even more than the Zola portrait, strikes Manet's own pose of the boulevardier. As we shall show in the comment on the Zola portrait, such portraits by Manet were to ca considerable degree self-portraiture.
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A self-portrait done by Manet in 1878 provides evidence for these conclusions, as do several informal pencil portraits which Degas did of him, three of them now in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Degas, however, refuses to flatter his friend and eliminates all the glitter. Indeed, he made an etching of Manet which emphasizes a rather fierce expression, something Manet never disclosed in his self-portraits.
Over a period of several years, until he went to Spain in 1865, Manet painted a series of "Spanish" pictures. He attended performances by Spanish dancers in Paris, sought their acquaintance, and made paintings of them, both in groups and individually, Lola de Valence, in the Louvre, is the finest. He dressed his brothers, his friends, and his models in Spanish costume, and painted pictures that rival Valasquez in splendor. he imagined bullfights, but with none of Goya's gore. Victorine Meurend, who posed for the Olympia and the Luncheon on the grass, masquerades as an espada in the arena. In one of his compositions, the figure of a dead toreador stretched out in the foreground had so little connection with the surrounding scene that Manet, yielding for once to the protests of the Salon critics, cut it out as a separate picture. This figure, now in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, recalls one by Valasquez which he may have seen at a dealer's in Paris. A part o the upper section of the original picture is now in The Frick Collection, New york.
It is significant that Manet stopped painting "Spanish" pictures after he went to Spain. A Spain which he knew only through literature and the museums and through itinerant dancers could and did become the means of his early detachment from the life around him. Later, when reality broke the spell of romance, he could join his friends, the impressionists, in their enthusiasm for themes of contemporary life, and yet at the same time maintain that aesthetic distance form his subject which was so essential to his own expression.
It is also significant that Manet chose to emulate Valasquez, among Spanish painters. Valasquez had been rediscovered by Goya after a century or more of neglect, first drew Manet's attention to him. Original oil paintings by Valasquez were rare in the Paris of Manet's day, but it is a cardinal rule of art history that artists of the same spiritual family manage to discover one another despite the most difficult obstacles. What attracted Manet to Valasquez was the language of texture and of pattern, of subtle tonalities of gray and black, and the completely impersonal air. What henri Focillon has said of Manet can also be applied to Valasquez: he saw contemporary life "less with abandon and sympathy than with a kind or cruel charm."
Luncheon on the Grass
A Bar at the Folies-Bergere | |
The development of Manet's art over a period of about twenty years, from the early Luncheon on the Grass (1863), to his last important work, the Bar at the Folies-Bergere, is studied in some detail in the comments which follow. If space had permitted, we should have said something of Manet as a painter of history, in which he is not outstanding, and as a painter of flowers and of landscape, in which he is. We should also have considered Manet's constant but unfulfilled desire for recognition by the public at large, which partly explains his refusal to exhibit with the circle of Impressionists and his persistence in submitting paintings to the annual Salon despite the most hostile reception. On one occasion he yielded to the pressure of public taste, and in a spirit of rivalry with Frans Hals, painted Le Bon Bock, now in the collection of Carroll S. Tyson, philadelphia.
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Typical of Manet's turn of mind was the half-factious Latin pun which he made on his own name: Manet et manebit ("He remains and will remain"). He was a good prophet. His work has lasted well, so well that Paul Jamot could write of him, on the occasion of the great retrospective exhibition in Paris which marked the centennial of his birth: "Manet understood instinctively that art, since it is our surest and even our sole means of conquering death, seeks for permanence. Even when the taste and the preoccupations of the day were influencing painters to analyze what is fugitive and to capture what is evanescent, a great artist was able to transform the ephemeral according to the measure of things which are changeless. To the things of this earth where noting lasts, he brought the sign of eternity."
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