Portraying Modern Paris, 1870's style

I caught the Royal Academy’s Manet show at the very end of its run and have been musing on what to say about it ever since- especially as in some respects it was a bit disappointing.   I was certainly glad that, as a Friend of the Academy, I didn’t have to pay the rather inflated price for admission.   While I’ve sometimes complained in the past about overly cramped hangs and galleries so crowded with exhibits that one can’t appreciate them properly, this show went to the opposite extreme.  Less than sixty canvases were on display, which made for an awful lot of arty gaps between items when spread out over the Academy’s main galleries.  While it’s quite interesting to see the locations associated with Manet and his art mapped out on a plan of Paris and its surroundings in the 1860’s and 70’s, the space devoted to this sort of contextual information was a bit excessive even for my historically-inflected tastes.    The exhibition had started out in Toledo, Ohio and close examination of the catalogue revealed an unusually high proportion of works which were only shown in one of the versions rather than both.   In a few cases the catalogue indicated potentially interesting juxtapositions which had never been realised (Manet’s portrait of his fellow artist Carolus-Duran was on show in London only, Carolus-Duran’s one of Manet only appeared in Toledo).   I can’t help wondering whether there were issues over the organisation of the exhibition which limited the number of works crossing the Atlantic and left it struggling for critical mass.

The sub-title for the show was “Portraying Life”.   This was meant to leave a deliberate ambiguity- Manet as portraitist shading into Manet as painter of contemporary life.  Manet is of course frequently brigaded in with the Impressionists in the latter role.   This is slightly misleading as Manet was never a card carrying member of the Impressionist group.  He was certainly sympathetic with their aims and something of a patron of their works but he never showed his own paintings (as opposed to works by others which he owned) in any of the Impressionist exhibitions.   He was slightly older and, for all the controversy which surrounded some of his works, he never turned his back on the “official” art world represented by the annual Paris Salon- indeed he was very determined to ensure that his work was shown there and was very pleased when he eventually qualified for automatic hanging rights.  Admittedly not all Impressionists totally bought into the slightly ostentatious rejection of the mainstream which was the group’s party line- Renoir, perhaps the Impressionist closest to Manet, had a very similar approach to him- but in theory the divide was clear .   In artistic terms too Manet never entirely bought into the scientific theories of colour and vision which supposedly underpinned Impressionist art.

A point to bear in mind when looking at Manet’s works is that he didn’t actually need to paint for a living and could therefore ignore any negative impact that the controversy which often attended his works might have had on sales.   Though he did do commissions, he came from a well-off family and well connected family- his father was a judge, his mother came from a family of senior diplomats and civil servants.   Going into art was something of a rebellion on his part- as was marrying the family music teacher Suzanne Leenhoff, with whom he had a long standing relationship well before he made an honest woman of her.   None of this apparently impaired his long term relations with his family, who make regular appearances in his paintings (and presumably not just as a way of saving money by using them as unpaid models).   If anything he seems to have nudged the family towards the artistic world- the glamorous lady at the top of this piece is Berthe Morisot, a talented painter herself who married one of Manet’s brothers and figures in several Manet paintings.

Manet’s active painting career was relatively short- little more than twenty years in the 1860’s and 70’s.  He was self taught to some degree and took some time to establish himself in the art world at the start of his career.  This in turn was somewhat curtailed because he didn’t live all that long- he was only in his early fifties when he died and had been in poor health for several years before his death.   It’s ironic that he was killed by an almost stereotypical artist’s disease- syphilis, probably picked up in a Brazilian brothel during a short period of service at sea in the French merchant marine- given that he lived a life of impeccable bourgeois respectability with Suzanne and, despite clearly having an eye for attractive women and a fondness for painting them, did not do the classic artistic thing of sleeping with his models or pupils.  The only slight mystery surrounds Suzanne’s son Leon, who was never recognised by Manet as his offspring but was clearly very much part of the family- the show included an unfinished portrait of the teenager perched precariously on a primitive ancestor of the bicycle and he regularly appears in Manet’s compositions.

One sub-text of the exhibition was the way in which Manet’s paintings of his nearest and dearest slip into wider genre conventions.  Are portraits of Suzanne playing the piano (she was apparently a talented performer) or cuddling her cat to be seen as portraits of the artist’s wife or as more generic depictions of contemporary feminine domesticity?     The men in what was (and still is?) perhaps Manet’s most controversial work, “Dejeuner sur l’herbe”, are Suzanne’s brother and a kind of composite portrait of his two brothers- does this in any way affect how one reads the picture (which has always struck me as about the most far fetched depiction of “contemporary life” imaginable- how often did 19^th century women strip off in public)?   Elsewhere he slotted himself and his associates into pictures of Parisian entertainment venues in a way reminiscent of Renaissance artists putting themselves into Nativities or Crucifixions.  Other cases are more complex.  The woman in the rather enigmatic “The Railway”   below was one of his regular models, Victorine Meurant, but the little girl (who is clearly finding the trains running in and out of Gare St Lazare vastly more interesting than whatever her mother/nurse/teacher/elder sister is up to over and above pretending to read a book) was probably borrowed from a neighbour and the work is set in the recently-built and very exclusive Quarter D’Europe just north of the station where Manet himself lived.   It’s tempting to see it as some kind of comment on the anomie and loneliness of big city life- but if so it’s literally very close to home indeed. 

The attempt to portray contemporary life sometimes looked a bit phoney; the supposed café singer in the piece shown below is far too well dressed and well nourished looking for someone supposedly making a living in such a precarious way, even if the whiff of sexual availability implied by the way she swishes her skirts might suggest that music isn’t the only source of her income.

Manet belonged to the first generation of artists who came to artistic maturity in a world where photography had become established as a way of fixing images- and Paris was one of the creative centres of early photography, with figures like Nadar rapidly emerging as celebrities in their own right.   The potential impact on portrait painting was considerable.   The show included a number of photographs of Manet himself as well as of his portrait subjects.   The inter-relationship between painting and photographs was complex.  There are considerable convergences between how individuals let themselves be photographed and how Manet painted them- though this tended to reflect issues of the sitter’s self image (for instance, a leading actor of the day would want to be painted as well as photographed in his “signature” role) rather than necessarily implying that Manet copied the photographs.  Manet is however known to have made some use of photographs to get a sense of a sitter’s characteristic poses and gestures and occasionally as a way of reducing the number of sittings which busy people like politicians had to go through.   At times, though, he subverted the photographic image; his portrait of  Pertuiset the explorer and lion hunter plays off the rather pompous photographic image of the man in full pose, dressed in exploring kit, carrying a gun and surrounded by hunting trophies to create a faintly absurd figure set in a less than convincing jungle gazing pop-eyed out of the canvas as if slightly overwhelmed by what he’s just done to the dead lion behind him.

Manet’s portrait style rather shifted over time.  Initially he was heavily influenced by prestigious models from the 17^th century (Hals and Velasquez in particular) and his ability to do a “well done” conventional portrait never went away (especially when it came to painting glamorous ladies).  Latterly, probably under Impressionist influence, he moved towards a much looser and more sketchy style, perhaps particularly well suited to men of action- or those who liked to think of themselves in that light.

One aspect which emerged very clearly from the show for all its weaknesses was just how far Manet sat in the middle of a complex web of connections which spanned the worlds of culture and politics.   He was on friendly terms with leading writers like Emile Zola (he did the portrait at the bottom of this piece as a kind of “thank you” to Zola for sticking up for him when his work came under fire in the press) and Stephane Mallarme (subject of an engagingly louche portrayal).   Politically Manet’s sympathies lay with the Republican centre left.   This made him an oppositional figure in the 1860’s, under the Second Empire on Napoleon III.  Indeed he ran into some trouble for the overt criticism of Imperial foreign policy embodied in his three successive versions of the execution of Maximilian of Mexico (a well meaning Habsburg Archduke persuaded to take on as Emperor of Mexico under promises of French support and left to his fate when Napoleon came under pressure to withdraw his troops after the end of the American Civil War).    No doubt he rejoiced in the fall of the Empire during the Franco-Prussian War and he joined the Parisian National Guard during the siege of the city in 1870-1.   Unlike most National Guardsmen, however, he was well enough off to be able to leave the city immediately after the French capitulation and rejoin Suzanne and Leon in the south western seaside resort of Arcachon (subject of another one of his domestic interiors which hovers between genre and portraiture- see below).  This meant he was safely at the other end of France during the Paris Commune and didn’t have to take sides in the brief brutal civil war which ravaged the city as the national government regained control- the wrong choice could have seen him facing a firing squad.  

 His subsequent alignments suggest a discreet sympathy with the Communards in line with the position adopted by the Republican movement in the 1870’s engaged in a slow process of turning a nominal republic headed by a monarchist President whose long term aim was to bring the Bourbon monarchy back into the real thing.   One of his brothers went into politics and a close family friend Antonin Proust (no relation to the writer) was briefly minister for fine arts and used his position to award Manet the Legion d’Honneur.   He wanted to paint a portrait of the Republican leader Gambetta but never succeeded- the great man was unable to make the time for the necessary sittings (a reminder of the constraints of traditional portraiture).   On the other hand he did create the wonderfully sketchy and dynamic image of Georges Clemenceau (then a rising youngish figure in Republican politics- as well as a genuine enthusiast for contemporary art) below and a marginally more conventional one of the Communard journalist and renegade marquis Henri Rochefort (beneath Clemenceau).   If he had lived longer he might well have become a quasi-official painter of the new Republican elite as they consolidated their power after seeing off the threat of a Restoration.

Then again, for all the pain of his final years, Manet did at least die before the gloss had entirely come off the Republic he supported.  Within a few years of his death in 1883 the Republic was bogged down in corruption scandals and under increasing challenge from left and right over its perceived failure to provide political stability and economic welfare.  Proust, caught up in financial scandals linked to abortive plans to build a Panama Canal, blew his brains out.   By the mid 1890’s, the milieu Manet had been so comfortable in had fractured beyond repair over allegations that an obscure army captain called Dreyfus had been spying for Germany.   The Affaire which followed saw Rochefort, now an ultra-nationalist and anti-Semite, baying for the blood of Zola, who had taken up the cudgels for the captain.  Clemenceau, having attained ministerial rank, would be detested on the left for his willingness to deploy troops against striking workers and distrusted on the right as an unscrupulous opportunist.   It’s naturally tempting to assume Manet would have been on the side of the angels in this turmoil but we can never be sure- there was no inevitable link between progressive artistic practice and Dreyfusard convictions.   The Manet exhibition turns a spotlight on a world which turned out to be more fragile than it imagined.