Manet's Landscape of the Heart
by Phyllis Tuchman
SEPTEMBER 3, 2009 TAGS:
On his way to becoming the father of modern art, Edouard Manet had a lot in his favor. He was talented, ambitious, charming, confident, well educated, a dandy. About his colleague, Impressionist Paul Signac once declared, “What a painter! He has everything, an intelligent mind, an impeccable eye, and what a hand!”
Manet revered the Old Masters, especially their subject matter. And he expressed himself with an avant-gardist’s panache, applying bold brushstrokes and assertive color combinations to his canvases. Then too, the painter of Olympia and Dejeuner sur l’Herbe had the poet and critic Charles Baudelaire in his corner.
Baudelaire’s influence on Manet cannot be overestimated. It was enormous. Besides having championed Eugene Delacroix and his dramatic style of Romanticism, the author of Les Fleurs du Mal was a friend of Realist Gustave Courbet. Ten years older — Baudelaire was born in 1821 and Manet in 1832 — the poet had been, since their meeting in 1859, an ideal guide to the art world of mid-19th-century Paris. As Sotheby’s Charles Moffett, the American curator of the spectacular Manet retrospective of 1983, recently put it, “Manet was profoundly affected by Baudelaire’s essay, The Painter of Modern Life, both as it affirmed some of his thinking and encouraged him to pursue what we admire most about his art. It probably saved him years of work on his own.”
Throughout his career, Manet heeded Baudelaire’s assertion that, for the modern painter, “The crowd is his domain, just as the air is the bird’s, and water that of the fish.” Following the poet’s advice, the artist recorded the epic in everyday life and from the transitory distilled the eternal.
Early on, Manet painted Spanish-themed work as well as a remarkable group of nudes, which brought him notoriety. Wanting the validation of exhibiting in the official Salons, he often made large-sized pictures that were practically selection committee prerequisites.
After the deaths in September 1862 of his father, a distinguished judge, and in August 1863 of the painter Eugene Delacroix, whose funeral he attended with Baudelaire, Manet embarked on a new series of works. They revealed his thinking about mortality, as they all involved aspects of death. And they show the influence of Baudelaire’s essay, because now they deal with the contemporary world, touching on religion, sports, and current events, including the American Civil War and the French presence in Mexico.
When Manet exhibited Dead Christ with Angels, based on the Gospel of St. John, at the Salon of 1864, the critics dismissed it. Even someone who recognized in Manet “the qualities of a true painter,” thought the solemn work resembled “the preliminary sketches of a master.”
But Manet’s art aged well. Henri Matisse, for one, was impressed when he saw Dead Toreador, which the artist cropped from Episode from a Bullfight, which also was exhibited at the Salon of 1864. About this magnificent prone figure in black and white, Henri Matisse in 1932 noted, “I saw it … among Rembrandts and Rubenses, and I marveled at the masterful fashion in which it stood up to its neighbors.”
For his part, Baudelaire, in March 1864, wrote to the curator who would be installing the canvases at the Salon, “You will see what marvelous talent is revealed in these paintings, and [wherever] they may be placed, do your best to position them well.”
That June, in France, off the coast of Normandy, the Kearsarge, a United States Navy warship, sank the Alabama, a vessel belonging to the Confederacy. From this unusual encounter far from the shores of America, Manet transformed an event ripped from the headlines into a contemporary history painting, not to mention a stirring seascape. Twenty-six days after the battle, the artist exhibited his canvas of bobbing boats, swelling waves, and smoke-filled sky.
And shortly after reading about the execution of the Emperor Maximilian in Mexico on June 19, 1867, Manet again was inspired to turn a current event into a modern, Salon-style painting. Over a period of two years, he executed several stirring versions of the scene, replete with uniformed soldiers, a trio of martyrs, spectators, and an outdoor setting.
While Manet was working out his initial ideas for the Execution of Emperor Maximilian, Charles Baudelaire died on August 31, 1867, in a clinic near the Arc de Triomphe. After suffering a stroke in March that left him partially paralyzed and speechless, he’d been transferred to Paris from Brussels, where he’d been living since April 1864. Manet and his wife were constant visitors. An accomplished pianist, Suzanne Manet played for the poet music by the German opera composer Richard Wagner.
Manet first painted a portrait of Baudelaire in 1862 in the foreground of Music in the Tuileries. The two friends, according to a third, had strolled the imperial gardens almost daily. During this period, Manet also began a series of five portraits of the poet on etching plates. In two, he wears a top hat. The others are based on a photograph taken by Nadar, the Karsh of his day.
To honor his friend, Manet painted Baudelaire’s funeral. When the relatively small, unfinished canvas was found in his studio following his own death on April 30, 1883, no one realized it related to the poet’s demise. Based on its style, art historians eventually decided the work was executed in 1867 and that Baudelaire’s cortege was the likely subject
The poet’s funeral was held on Sept. 2, a day falling in the annual summer lull. As one friend wrote that week, “The time of year was against us, because many people were away from Paris, and since we had to distribute the [funeral] announcement on Sunday many people did not receive it until the next day when they returned from the country.”
About 100 mourners, including Nadar, poet Paul Verlaine, and the painters Henri Fantin-Latour, Alfred Stevens and Manet, attended Baudelaire’s church service; 60 or so went to the burial site. Manet depicted about a dozen figures accompanying the cortege.
Baudelaire was buried in the Montparnasse cemetery. Yet Manet depicted a scene in another part of town, which has puzzled art historians for years. But an answer lies within the canvas. Manet celebrated his friend’s life by rendering a setting worthy of Baudelaire’s criticism. He painted the fringes of a city, with a grove of trees, a valley, hills, even a river, along with a few industrial buildings.
As the actual cortege made its way to the cemetery, the sky was threatening and there was even a clap of thunder. Manet depicted the rain clouds, but he also included some blue sky. Though it is sketchy, he clearly deployed a hearse on a carriage drawn by a white horse.
As for the bereaved, they’re mere shadows. Huddled together, they resemble divine mourners in Elysian Fields -- except for the grenadier of the Imperial Guard in red pants. He brings up the rear and establishes the scene as taking place before the end of the Second Empire in September 1870. At the crown of the canvas, Manet planted the Pantheon.
Of course. This is an emotional landscape, a scene of the heart’s judgment. To his grieving friend, Baudelaire had earned his place among the great French writers of all time: Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Victor Hugo, Emile Zola, Alexander Dumas, and Andre Malraux. And the canvas he painted captures not just his love but also his loss.
Manet revered the Old Masters, especially their subject matter. And he expressed himself with an avant-gardist’s panache, applying bold brushstrokes and assertive color combinations to his canvases. Then too, the painter of Olympia and Dejeuner sur l’Herbe had the poet and critic Charles Baudelaire in his corner. Baudelaire’s influence on Manet cannot be overestimated. It was enormous. Besides having championed Eugene Delacroix and his dramatic style of Romanticism, the author of Les Fleurs du Mal was a friend of Realist Gustave Courbet. Ten years older — Baudelaire was born in 1821 and Manet in 1832 — the poet had been, since their meeting in 1859, an ideal guide to the art world of mid-19th-century Paris. As Sotheby’s Charles Moffett, the American curator of the spectacular Manet retrospective of 1983, recently put it, “Manet was profoundly affected by Baudelaire’s essay, The Painter of Modern Life, both as it affirmed some of his thinking and encouraged him to pursue what we admire most about his art. It probably saved him years of work on his own.”
Throughout his career, Manet heeded Baudelaire’s assertion that, for the modern painter, “The crowd is his domain, just as the air is the bird’s, and water that of the fish.” Following the poet’s advice, the artist recorded the epic in everyday life and from the transitory distilled the eternal.
Early on, Manet painted Spanish-themed work as well as a remarkable group of nudes, which brought him notoriety. Wanting the validation of exhibiting in the official Salons, he often made large-sized pictures that were practically selection committee prerequisites.
After the deaths in September 1862 of his father, a distinguished judge, and in August 1863 of the painter Eugene Delacroix, whose funeral he attended with Baudelaire, Manet embarked on a new series of works. They revealed his thinking about mortality, as they all involved aspects of death. And they show the influence of Baudelaire’s essay, because now they deal with the contemporary world, touching on religion, sports, and current events, including the American Civil War and the French presence in Mexico.
When Manet exhibited Dead Christ with Angels, based on the Gospel of St. John, at the Salon of 1864, the critics dismissed it. Even someone who recognized in Manet “the qualities of a true painter,” thought the solemn work resembled “the preliminary sketches of a master.”
But Manet’s art aged well. Henri Matisse, for one, was impressed when he saw Dead Toreador, which the artist cropped from Episode from a Bullfight, which also was exhibited at the Salon of 1864. About this magnificent prone figure in black and white, Henri Matisse in 1932 noted, “I saw it … among Rembrandts and Rubenses, and I marveled at the masterful fashion in which it stood up to its neighbors.”For his part, Baudelaire, in March 1864, wrote to the curator who would be installing the canvases at the Salon, “You will see what marvelous talent is revealed in these paintings, and [wherever] they may be placed, do your best to position them well.”
That June, in France, off the coast of Normandy, the Kearsarge, a United States Navy warship, sank the Alabama, a vessel belonging to the Confederacy. From this unusual encounter far from the shores of America, Manet transformed an event ripped from the headlines into a contemporary history painting, not to mention a stirring seascape. Twenty-six days after the battle, the artist exhibited his canvas of bobbing boats, swelling waves, and smoke-filled sky.
And shortly after reading about the execution of the Emperor Maximilian in Mexico on June 19, 1867, Manet again was inspired to turn a current event into a modern, Salon-style painting. Over a period of two years, he executed several stirring versions of the scene, replete with uniformed soldiers, a trio of martyrs, spectators, and an outdoor setting.
While Manet was working out his initial ideas for the Execution of Emperor Maximilian, Charles Baudelaire died on August 31, 1867, in a clinic near the Arc de Triomphe. After suffering a stroke in March that left him partially paralyzed and speechless, he’d been transferred to Paris from Brussels, where he’d been living since April 1864. Manet and his wife were constant visitors. An accomplished pianist, Suzanne Manet played for the poet music by the German opera composer Richard Wagner.
Manet first painted a portrait of Baudelaire in 1862 in the foreground of Music in the Tuileries. The two friends, according to a third, had strolled the imperial gardens almost daily. During this period, Manet also began a series of five portraits of the poet on etching plates. In two, he wears a top hat. The others are based on a photograph taken by Nadar, the Karsh of his day.
To honor his friend, Manet painted Baudelaire’s funeral. When the relatively small, unfinished canvas was found in his studio following his own death on April 30, 1883, no one realized it related to the poet’s demise. Based on its style, art historians eventually decided the work was executed in 1867 and that Baudelaire’s cortege was the likely subject
The poet’s funeral was held on Sept. 2, a day falling in the annual summer lull. As one friend wrote that week, “The time of year was against us, because many people were away from Paris, and since we had to distribute the [funeral] announcement on Sunday many people did not receive it until the next day when they returned from the country.”
About 100 mourners, including Nadar, poet Paul Verlaine, and the painters Henri Fantin-Latour, Alfred Stevens and Manet, attended Baudelaire’s church service; 60 or so went to the burial site. Manet depicted about a dozen figures accompanying the cortege.
Baudelaire was buried in the Montparnasse cemetery. Yet Manet depicted a scene in another part of town, which has puzzled art historians for years. But an answer lies within the canvas. Manet celebrated his friend’s life by rendering a setting worthy of Baudelaire’s criticism. He painted the fringes of a city, with a grove of trees, a valley, hills, even a river, along with a few industrial buildings.
As the actual cortege made its way to the cemetery, the sky was threatening and there was even a clap of thunder. Manet depicted the rain clouds, but he also included some blue sky. Though it is sketchy, he clearly deployed a hearse on a carriage drawn by a white horse.As for the bereaved, they’re mere shadows. Huddled together, they resemble divine mourners in Elysian Fields -- except for the grenadier of the Imperial Guard in red pants. He brings up the rear and establishes the scene as taking place before the end of the Second Empire in September 1870. At the crown of the canvas, Manet planted the Pantheon.
Of course. This is an emotional landscape, a scene of the heart’s judgment. To his grieving friend, Baudelaire had earned his place among the great French writers of all time: Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Victor Hugo, Emile Zola, Alexander Dumas, and Andre Malraux. And the canvas he painted captures not just his love but also his loss.
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