There can’t really be many people who look at art with any regularity who continue to confuse Manet with Monet. But there are those who still think that Manet was an Impressionist, because so many of his friends and contemporaries were members of the group. In fact, Manet kept his distance and steadfastly refused to exhibit with them. His was an urban, studio-based art, not given to plein-air effects of atmosphere and local colour. He looked instead to the dazzling bravura of Franz Hals’s portraits, and the sombre and often majestic originality of Velázquez and Goya. Edouard Manet (1832–83) was a painter on the cusp of tradition and Modernism, and although he is today widely credited with the invention of modern art, such simplistic generalisations only serve to disguise this fact. He took as much from the past as he did from the present: the synthesis he created was a unique interpretation of the human predicament in his own lifetime, but it continues to have wide relevance today.
The Royal Academy’s exhibition, Manet: Portraying Life, concentrates on the artist’s portraits, and would thus seem to give less emphasis to him as a painter of modern life — except that his portraits were of course of modern people; and particularly of modern women. Manet was very good at painting women, quite obviously loved and appreciated them (perhaps too well: he was to die aged only 51 from tertiary syphilis), and was one of the first artists to portray them on an equal footing with men. Indeed his most famous paintings, of the courtesan Olympia and the suggestive clothed/unclothed picnic of ‘Déjeuner sur l’Herbe’, give women a more prominent and even confrontational role than had previously been allowed them. But if his subject matter often shocked and horrified the haute bourgeoisie, his style alienated them still further, for Manet was a radical in form as well as content.
The show is arranged thematically, comprising some 50 oil paintings, together with a handful of pastels and a single etching, spread out through the RA’s main galleries. There is thus plenty of space between exhibits and in the second room, ‘Music in the Tuileries Gardens’ (1862), borrowed from the National Gallery, is hung on its own with a banquette in front of it, so that the visitor may sit and contemplate it, crowds permitting. Room 3 is a study room and contains no art but is papered with documentary material to provide period context. So far the exhibition feels a bit sparse: the first room is devoted to the artist and his family, and inevitably contains a certain amount of early work. It starts with a rather assertive self-portrait from 1878–9, hands thrust in the pockets of a slightly awkwardly cut tan smoking jacket, skullcap on, eyes shadowed, contending pose. The paint is broadly brushed, and many looking at this picture will think it unfinished. Certainly it is one of several paintings in this exhibition that were never exhibited in the artist’s lifetime.
The problem of finish recurs throughout the exhibition because Manet — in the modern manner — made no attempt to harmonise his paint surfaces in an academic way, but left brush strokes vibrantly visible. This can be very exciting visually and emotionally, but sometimes it also seems unsatisfactory — half-hearted, incomplete, even uncommitted. Undoubtedly, Manet’s emphatic mark-making was intended to convey the pace of modern life and to stir up the complacent, shocking viewers out of their preconceptions. Yet he also wanted to be a great success at the Salon, bastion of the traditional. In his best paintings, Manet reconciles his conflicting desires to be of the moment and yet part of the great tradition of western art, and manages to make something that still seems modern to us now or, at its highest peak, timeless.
He was drawn to a painterly flatness, to placing his figures in shallow pictorial space, posed against a neutral backdrop. (This accentuates the shape of the figure — the silhouette.) In the portraits he often adds props to help locate and contextualise his figures, but these attributes rarely seem an essential part of the composition, often looking incongruous or added in. Look at the little table, for instance, in the right foreground of ‘Portrait of Theodore Duret’. Duret was a writer, connoisseur and supporter of Manet’s painting. Here he is depicted as an elegant man about town. Manet was himself just such a flâneur, a man of high style and dandyish detachment, the idler with a sharp eye for his surroundings. It’s an impressive portrait — but would it be better without the table still-life?
In Room 4, a marvellous small painting of the poet Stéphane Mallarmé hangs next to the famous large portrait of Emile Zola. Although the Zola is a kind of manifesto image, featuring a Japanese screen, a print of Manet’s own scandalous ‘Olympia’ and a print by Velázquez, summing up the influences and achievements of Manet’s art, the smaller painting is altogether more beguiling. Poet and painter were friends, Mallarmé describing Manet memorably as ‘a virile innocence in beige overcoat, beard and thin blond hair, greying with wit’. The nearby portrait of George Moore, from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, is neither declarative nor informal, but rather muzzy and unfocused. A pity the crisp and evocative line painting of him, or the more resolved head and shoulders portrait, both in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, could not be borrowed.
On the opposite wall is the wonderfully alluring and dynamic painting, ‘Berthe Morisot with a Bouquet of Violets’, one of several portraits of this painter, but for me the finest. It was Morisot’s own favourite, perhaps because it depicted her as a fashionable Parisienne rather than an artist with paint in her hair. A strikingly direct image, yet its boldness is gentled by the subtlety of characterisation. Black is the key, and Manet even darkened Morisot’s green eyes to heighten the fervour of the image. By no means all the paintings in the exhibition are of this quality, but there are enough to make visiting a remarkable experience. Note the similarities between ‘Portrait of Georges Clemenceau’ and the figure paintings of R.B. Kitaj, soon to arrive in this country in a major retrospective. Or look at Manet’s delicious portrait of the ultra-fashionable horsewoman ‘The Amazon’. The last room is full of tremendous and perennially surprising paintings: the smaller version of ‘Déjeuner sur L’Herbe’, ‘Street Singer’ and the magnificent and awe-inspiring clarity of ‘The Railway’. Revealingly, Manet’s best work still looks extreme. After his death, Degas admitted, ‘He was greater than we thought.’ I’m impatient to go back for another look
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