The Judgment of Paris (29 page)

These rancorous attentions soon became too much for the Marquis de Chennevières. In the past, he and Nieuwerkerke had been forced to post guards in front of Ernest Meissonier's paintings to protect them from their crushes of admirers. At the 1865 Salon, Chennevières needed to deploy guards to protect
Olympia
from the malicious designs of indignant spectators. When even these precautions proved inadequate, the painting was removed from its original location and suspended high above the heads of the visitors—so high, in fact, that a critic for
Le Figaro
claimed that "you scarcely knew whether you were looking at a parcel of nude flesh or a bundle of laundry."
⁷
Olympia
thereby completed exactly the opposite trajectory of
The Spanish Singer,
which had earned such admiration four years earlier that on Chennevière's commands it had been lowered to eye level.

Almost equal to the fury of the public was the loathing of the critics. Théophile Gautier, once again, could find nothing good to say about Manet's work, accusing the painter of deliberately courting controversy: "Here there is nothing, we are sorry to say," he wrote after casting a disdainful eye on
Olympia,
"but the desire to attract attention at any price." From the pages of
La Presse
Paul de Saint-Victor snorted: "Art sunk so low doesn't even deserve reproach." Other critics seized gleefully on the figure of Victorine, variously lampooning her as a "female gorilla," "a coal lady from the Batignolles," "a redhead of perfect ugliness," and "a corpse displayed in the Morgue . . . dead of yellow fever and already arrived at an advanced state of decomposition."
⁸

The Morgue was one of Paris's more macabre sights, a special building on the southeast corner of the Île-de-la-Cite where unclaimed bodies, arranged naked on a counter and exposed to a stream of cold water to delay decomposition, could be viewed by family members searching for lost loved ones—or simply by curious members of the public wishing to enjoy cheap and lurid titillation. These same repellent fancies were being gratified, Saint-Victor distastefully observed, by Manet's
Olympia,
with Room M taking on, he claimed, the unwholesome and unedifying aspect of the Morgue.
⁹
Art had come a long distance from the days when painters had sought the
beau idéal
and concerned themselves with morally uplifting images.

If the public had found
Le Déjeuner sur I'herbe
merely ridiculous, a farcical jape that might, at its worst, bring a blush to the cheek of a young maiden,
Olympia
elicited far stronger responses. Along with their hysterical laughter, the onlookers exhibited, if the critic for
L'Époque
was correct, "anger and fear." For many Salon-goers in 1865, Victorine reclining on her bed was a threatening sight. Many people found her unspeakably and offensively ugly—a kind of female version of the cretinous-looking "Dumolard" in Millet's
Man with a Hoe.
One critic noted her "vicious strangeness," adding that she had "the sourness of someone prematurely aged." Another called her a "grotesque," while a third, in
Le Siècle,
proclaimed her "ugly" and "stupid" as well as cadaverous. Before the Salon was out, Victorine's supposedly repulsive demeanor had won for Manet the title "Apostle of Ugliness"
¹⁰
—the name by which Delacroix had once been known.

Victorine was thought filthy as well as ugly. The shadows on her hands and feet, crudely painted in comparison to the prevailing style, were mocked as the grime of the shop or factory, with some critics complaining, for instance, that she was "covered in coal"
¹¹
and others making speculations about her working-class origins. With Victorine's dirtiness and ugliness came a horror of moral contamination. Not a few onlookers regarded the painting as a shameful obscenity that should never have been put on public view. "Why does one find these paintings in the galleries of the Palais des Champs-Élysées?" asked one exasperated critic.
¹²
Not that Manet had given Victorine a pose that was sexually alluring:
Olympia
rehashed none of the aphrodisiac expressions—shot hips, bedroom eyes, emphatic breasts and buttocks—found in the nudes of Cabanel and Ingres. Much of the moral outrage and anxiety had to do, instead, with the position of Victorine's left hand, which to many spectators simply looked indecent. The customary
Venus Pudica
gesture appeared to have been transformed (as Twain thought it had been in Titian's
Venus of Urhino)
into an act of self-gratification. Various critics pointed out how Victorine's hand was, as one of them put it, "flexed in a sort of shameless contraction." One critic claimed that not all of her fingers were present and accounted for, suggesting a lewd act that he argued "cries out for examination by the inspectors of public health."
¹³

Olympia
therefore caused offense for various reasons, some having as much to do with aesthetics as with morality. But one issue in particular—a legal as well as moral one—may have created much of the horrified backlash against Manet's painting. At the exact time the 1865 Salon raged in the Palais des Champs-Élysées, French politicians and the police were busy trying to quell the spread of pornography, or what one observer had called "the facility of the photographic art in representing scandalous situations."
¹⁴
A lucrative trade in pornographic images had developed by the early 1850s as photographers who began their careers producing
académies
for painters soon branched out to supply a much wider market with what a book entitled
The Squalor of Paris
denounced as "cynical photographs boldly showing insolent details."
¹⁵
Moral outrage against this proliferating trade had been followed by legal sanctions as the Prefecture of Police established a special register to record the names of photographers and models arrested for producing these "street
académies."
Police crackdowns became ever more aggressive in the early 1860s, with 172 photographers and printsellers arrested in Paris between 1863 and 1865; those found guilty would spend as much as a year in prison. Even so, by 1865 the trade had grown so large that one police raid alone, on June 15, netted 15,000 pornographic images.

The 1865 Salon therefore took place against a background of police raids on suspected pornographers, angry petitions to the authorities (mainly by conservative Catholics), and heated debate on the floor of the Senate. This febrile atmosphere hardly made 1865 the most propitious time to unveil a work such as
Olympia.
The painting's nudity was far less explicit than photographs illicitly peddled in the streets and aimed unambiguously at scabrous tastes, but to many Salon-goers in 1865,
Olympia
must have appeared to owe as much to these street
académies
—many of which showed women reclining on curtained beds in exotic boudoirs—as it did to the
Venus of Urhino.

Manet grew increasingly angry and depressed as one appalling review followed another, with
Jesus Mocked by the Soldiers
receiving a press almost as atrocious as
Olympia.
And if the reviews themselves were not bad enough, caricaturists such as Cham and Bertall had a field day parodying
Olympia
in the satirical journals.
*
Both ridiculed Victorine as a grubby-looking artisan with large feet and a homely grin, and both gave special prominence to the black cat with its suggestively erect tail. Bertall punningly christened the painting "Manette," a clever blending of "Manet" and
"minette,"
which meant both "pussycat" and "young woman." Manet was mocked in the streets as well as in the newspapers. He became the butt of songs and jokes, "pursued as soon as he showed his face," according to one version of events, "by rumors and wisecracks, the passersby in the street turning to laugh at the handsome fellow, so well dressed and correct, who painted such filth."
¹⁶

Feelings ran so high that Manet even provoked fisticuffs. At the École des Beaux-Arts, where students were divided between admirers and detractors, discussions of
Olympia
frequently ended with exchanges of blows. One of these disputes was interrupted by the arrival of Jean-Léon Gérôme, who castigated his pupils not for fighting but for mentioning Manet's name. "Look here, gentlemen," he upbraided them, "why are you talking about Manet? You know quite well that it's forbidden."
¹⁷

One evening in May, in order to forget his troubles for an hour or two, Manet braved the streets to go with Antonin Proust for an ice cream at the Café Imoda in the Rue Royale, a street of florists and other fine shops running south of the church of the Madeleine. When the waiter as a matter of habit brought over the newspapers, Manet snapped at him: "Who asked for the newspapers?" The papers were removed but Manet, his appetite ruined, left his ice cream melting on the table. "He drank a whole carafe of water," Proust remembered, "and then, after a long silence, we went back to his studio."
¹⁸
That Manet still had the will to face his easel was perhaps something of a miracle.

For those able to fight their way through the jeering mobs to see them, more than a hundred other paintings were hung on the walls of Room M. Gustave Moreau showed two works,
Medea and Jason
and
The Young Man and Death,
that evoked the same vaporous dreamworld with its air of cryptic menace as his
Oedipus and the Sphinx
from a year earlier. His continued popularity with the critics ensured him another medal.

Ernest Meissonier was likewise present in Room M. Newspapers such as
L 'Artiste
had been reporting as late as April that he would be unveiling
Friedland at
the Salon of 1865,
^l9
but these forecasts were extremely optimistic given his working methods. In the end, the only appearance made by
Friedland
at that year's Salon was its fascinating cameo in Charles Meissonier's
The Studio.
If Charles's undeniable talent was not guarantee enough, the presence on the jury of
Le Patron
helped to secure his participation. Having reached the age of fifty in February, Meissonier appeared to be shaping the talents and nurturing the careers of a new generation of painters. Also accepted by the jury was a painting, likewise called
The Studio,
by Meissonier's other young pupil, the twenty-year-old Lucien Gros.

While Charles Meissonier included a portrait of his father in
The Studio,
Meissonier
père
returned the favor by exhibiting, in lieu of the unfinished
Friedland,
a work painted several years earlier called
The Etcher: Portrait of Charles Meissonier,
in which he showed his son, then about seventeen, at work on an etching. Meissonier had a particular interest in etchings, executing them throughout his career, and clearly he passed on his knowledge of the difficult technique to his son. Etching is a form of engraving in which the surface of a copper plate is coated with a ground (often a mixture of wax, mastic and bitumen) onto which the artist traces his design using a steel needle. Hydrochloric acid is then applied to the surface, where it eats away at the copper exposed by the needle (the word etching comes from the Dutch
etsen,
"to eat") and leaves behind grooves, which in turn leave their imprints after the ground is removed, the plate inked, and the paper run through a printing press.

For
The Etcher,
Meissonier made this workmanlike procedure appear to be, despite its wax pastes and bottles of acid, a gentlemanly occupation. He depicted the young man seated in an upholstered chair before a sunlit window, smoking a cigarette and wearing an embroidered red dressing gown and slippers as he oversaw the biting of his plate. Set in Meissonier's studio, the scene included a canvas adorning an easel and, on the back wall, a tapestry featuring Apollo and his muses on Mount Parnassus. The presence in the painting of Apollo, the god of poetry and music as well as the leader of the Muses, seems to bode well for the career of the young etcher, as if Meissonier were predicting future triumphs for his talented son.

The Etcher
glows with a sunlight that kindles on the open shutter on the left, spills through the mullioned window, defines Charles's face, and diffuses itself dimly throughout the room.
²⁰
Such a poetic treatment of the fall of light might easily have come from the brush (and the camera obscura) of Jan Vermeer.
The Etcher,
in fact, bears such an uncanny similarity to a pair of works painted by Vermeer in 1668 and 1669,
The Astronomer
and
The Geographer,
that it is impossible to believe Meissonier did not know these two canvases, or at least engraved reproductions of them. In fact, the painting depicted by Vermeer in the background of
The Astronomer,
an illustration showing
The Finding of Moses,
also appears to be represented in Meissonier's
The Etcher,
further suggesting Meissonier's emulation of the Dutch painter's style.
²¹

Whatever the case, the astonishing lesson in painting a fall of light conveyed in
The Etcher
only made Manet's apparently clumsy adumbration of Victorine's form—the shadows that reminded the reviewers of smudges of coal—look even more preposterously slipshod. Almost as impressive in this regard was Meissonier's second painting in Room M,
The End of a Gambling Quarrel,
which featured the two swordsmen sprawled on the floor. However, for the first time in his career Meissonier found his paintings eclipsed. A writer in
L 'Artiste
once claimed that the priority of the crowds on entering the Salon was to locate Meissonier's paintings—and then to gain access to them through the vigorous use of their elbows.
²²
In 1865, Room M was, as usual, the most popular destination in the Palais des Champs-Élysées, but the hordes, for once, were not bent on planting themselves before Meissonier's works: they had come, rather, to laugh and jeer at
Olympia.
Anyone interested in admiring Meissonier's works—or those of the many other painters in Room M—had to contend with the carnival atmosphere created by the raucous crowds exclaiming over Manet's canvases.