The Judgment of Paris (64 page)
Claude Monet was also absent from the Palais des Champs-Élysées. After returning from London he had moved with Camille to Argenteuil, a picturesque town directly across the Seine from Gennevilliers. Here sails could be seen scudding along the river and chimney stacks puffing their clouds of smoke into the sky—all of which Monet painted over and over again. He had finished nearly sixty canvases in 1872, thirty-eight of which he found himself able to sell, fetching a total of 12,000 francs and putting his income for 1872 on par with that of doctors and lawyers. Gone were the days when he could no longer afford a fire for his kitchen. With these sales to his credit, he did not require exposure at the Salon, and so in 1873 he once again declined the humiliating ritual of sending work before the jury.
14
Most other members of the Batignolles group likewise abstained. More significantly, Pissarro, who had sold a number of his canvases to Paul Durand-Ruel, was setting in motion plans for an alternative exhibition that would bypass the Salon jury altogether. He had already been recruiting potential exhibitors in the autumn of 1872. A painter friend named Ludovic Piette, a former pupil of Couture, summed up the sentiments of many fellow artists when he wrote to Pissarro in December: "If a certain nucleus of painters plans not to exhibit at all in the Salon of 1873, above all if Courbet is excluded, and if the jury is still composed of reactionaries or Bonapartists, I would also join with pleasure."
15
However, one notable
actualiste
did appear at the 1873 Salon, as he had the previous year. Both of Manet's submissions,
Le Bon Bock
and
The Repose,
his 1868 portrait of Berthe Morisot, were accepted by the jury of "reactionaries." Ten years after the original Salon des Refusés, Manet would be the only member of the Generation of 1863 still flying the flag in the Palais des Champs-Élysées.
"The annual Salon has been opened," an English correspondent reported from Paris in the first week of May, "with a somewhat disappointing result. . . . Very few out of the 1,500 pictures exhibited call for any special notice."
16
As in 1872, the critics were distinctly underwhelmed, with the English reviewer registering his disappointment that nothing by Ernest Meissonier was on show—"a fact much commented upon."
17
So many pieces of soft-focus eroticism hung on the walls that another English reviewer, the correspondent for
The Times,
observed disapprovingly that each room included "from six to eight examples of staring nudity."
18
Landscapes by Corot and Daubigny were also present, the latter taking a merciless critical drubbing for the supposedly sketchy and unfinished look of his
Effect of Snow.
When the reviews for
The Repose
appeared in the papers, Berthe Morisot found herself stepping into Victorine's role as the most ridiculed and reviled woman in the Salon as the canvas received abuse all too familiar to Manet. The portrait was denounced as a "horror"; it was dubbed "Seasickness" and "The Woman Who Squints"; it was lampooned as a portrait of a woman resting after having swept the chimney; and it was said to depict "the goddess of slovenliness." A critic in the
Revue des deux mondes
summed up the portrait by declaring it "a confusion defying all description."
19
These insults, together with the fact that her own works had been rejected by the jury, seem to have convinced Morisot that her future lay not in the Salon but with the "nucleus of painters" taking shape around Pissarro.
Nonetheless, in 1873 Manet was in for an even bigger triumph than he had enjoyed with
The Battle of the U.S.S. "Kearsarge" and the C.S.S. "Alabama" a
year earlier. Sending a painting of a drinker to the Salon may have looked unwise in 1873 given how alcoholism and working-class insurgency had become virtually synonymous in the public mind since the end of the Commune. The term
alcoolisme
had been coined as a diagnosis as recently as 1865, and the French Temperance Society was founded immediately after the suppression of the Commune with a view to battling this perceived problem—one thought by many to have explained not only the outrages of the Commune but also the French defeat by the Prussians.
20
However, the public and the critics saw no indication of working-class dissent in Émile Bellot's contented beer-drinker, and
Le Bon Bock
quickly became the most popular painting in the entire Salon. Praise flowed from all quarters. The front page of
Le Soir
declared the painting "a marvel of life and color . . . amazing and excellent."
Le Gaulois
called it "an indisputable success," announcing that "Manet has found a curious and interesting style, and the public will follow his new efforts with pleasure." Even critics normally hostile to Manet found themselves charmed by the work. "This supposed demon come forth from the pit to frighten women and children is in fact an interesting painter," wrote Paul Mantz in
Le Temps,
"and a peaceful and distinguished man." Like many spectators, he saw something soothingly nostalgic in the work, which seemed to feature a sturdy Frenchman blissfully unruffled by the multiple horrors of the previous few years. "In our present troubled times," wrote Mantz, "this placid drinker symbolizes eternal serenity. . . . His rosy cheeks and portly frame say so well that he knows no sadness." Even Albert Wolff was able to find words of approval, avouching that Manet "has put water in his beer. He has renounced his violent and outlandish effects to explore a more pleasing harmony." "Water?" quipped Manet's friend Alfred Stevens after reading the review. "It's pure Haarlem beer!"
21
Stevens was correct. The way for Manet's merry drinker had been paved by Frans Hals and the generation of Haarlem painters who followed him—men who did quaint and humorous scenes of sloshed, stuporous peasants. But someone else besides Manet had been inspired by this genre and paved the way for the success of
Le Bon Bock.
Even before his visit to Holland in 1850, Ernest Meissonier had been busily conjuring to life his own little pipe-smokers and beer-drinkers. He exhibited a work called
A Smoker
at the 1842 Salon,
A Man Smoking
in 1849, and in 1854 he painted
A Smoker in Black,
a portrait of a young man puffing on a long-stemmed pipe in the corner of a tavern, a glass of beer at his elbow. Meissonier's exalted reputation had been built on precisely this sort of scene, and the congenial reception accorded
Le Bon Bock
no doubt had much to do, ironically, with a taste for bibulous
bonshommes
formed by Meissonier a quarter of a century earlier.
Le Bon Bock
gave Manet an unaccustomed celebrity. His fame increased as a newspaper reported in the middle of June that an offer of 120,000 francs had been made for the painting—an incredible sum that Meissonier alone could command. Alas for Manet, the report proved to be a typographical error. Two weeks later the paper described how Manet had come to the newspaper's offices demanding to know "the name of the madman offering 120,000 francs." The report, admitted the sheepish editor, "should have read 12,000."
22
In the end, the painting would be sold for a more modest sum of 6,000 francs, though this price was nevertheless double that paid by Durand-Ruel for any of Manet's previous works. The buyer was a famous baritone named Jean-Baptiste Faure, the Professor of Singing at the Paris Conservatoire and a well-known connoisseur of painting.
The impact of Manet's painting was nothing short of sensational. "You are as famous as Garibaldi," Degas told Manet that summer, surveying the astonishing success of the painting.
23
Its fame radiated outward from the Palais des Champs-Élysées as Paris was swept by a "Bon Bock" craze. Reproductions of the painting went on sale in bookshops and tobacconists. A shopkeeper in the Rue Vivienne, beside the Bourse, displayed in his window what he claimed was Manet's palette, beside which he placed a mug of beer; and a restaurant in the Latin Quarter, in a clever bid to increase its custom, changed its name to Le Bon Bock. But the greatest beneficiary of this fame, besides Manet, was Émile Bellot, who reveled in his own newfound celebrity and developed a reputation as a connoisseur of beer. Two years later he would capitalize on this reputation by founding the Bon Bock Society, a social club for artists and intellectuals that hosted boozy, boisterous dinners each month in Montmartre. Active for almost fifty years, the society would do much to make Montmartre, before then a suburb known for windmills and working-class radicalism, into a center of Parisian cultural life.
Manet was finally enjoying the popular, critical and financial success that had eluded him for so long. But had the public and the critics matured in the years since
Le Déjeuner sur I'herbe
and
Olympia,
or had Manet changed his style? Only three years earlier, Gautier had written that Manet was determined to die impenitent; but suddenly the troublingly provocative pictures had given way to a cuddly
bonhomme
in an otter-skin cap deemed fit to adorn shop windows and tavern signs; to sell beer and tobacco; to becalm and amuse a tormented nation. Accused in 1863 of terrorizing the bourgeoisie, a decade later Manet appeared to be enchanting them in the style of Meissonier or Gérôme.
Yet one critic in particular could appreciate
Le Bon Bock
for something other than the jolly charms of Émile Bellot—a discerning twenty-four-year-old reviewer named Marie-Amelie de Montifaud, who wrote under the masculine pseudonym Marc de Montifaud. A budding novelist, historian, feminist and art critic, Montifaud had just published her first book,
The History of Héloïse and Abélard,
and her study of the poetry of Anatole France was forthcoming in October. In 1873 she reviewed the Salon for
L 'Artiste,
and her comments on
Le Bon Bock
were almost singular in their perspicacity. While most people admired the painting for its content, she concentrated on its technique. Manet's loose brushwork and broad patches of pigment, maligned by so many critics, were actually an attempt, Montifaud recognized, to use shape and color to compose an entirely new visual experience by means of a kind of optical fusion. "One perceives at a first glance in his
Bon Bock,"
she wrote, "colored areas laid one next to the other with a crude simplicity and without any shading. But stand back a little. Relations between masses of color begin to be established. Each part falls into place, and each detail becomes exact."
24
A more acute insight into the aesthetic effects of the École des Batignolles had never been produced.
T
HE UNIVERSAL EXHIBITION of Arts and Industry in Vienna was not a disaster, but neither did it bear comparison to the Great Exhibition in London in 1851 or the Universal Exposition in Paris in 1867. The enormous Rotunda and its adjoining galleries had been finished on time, providing almost twenty acres of exhibition space—amazingly, some four times as much as had been available in Paris. But many displays were not actually in place by the middle of June, let alone for the grand opening in May. A few days after the opening, on May 9, the Vienna stock market collapsed in what became known as
Der Krach.
And, to cap it all, the weather was atrocious. The grand opening took place amid chilly showers, and the ankle-deep quagmires of mud in Prater Park were succeeded by dust storms as downpours throughout May turned to a stifling heat in June. The adverse conditions kept the visitors away, as did the high prices charged by Vienna's innkeepers, who had greedily doubled their rates. Then, in July, a cholera outbreak was reported. The exhibition's Director-General, Baron Wilhelm von Schwarz-Senborn, eventually slashed the admission charge in half.
The Vienna Exhibition was therefore a less than perfect forum for the French to restore their international reputation—and for Ernest Meissonier to unveil
Friedland.
Still, France's display was widely regarded as by far the most impressive in the entire exhibition. The French had been given more than 6,000 square meters of exhibition space, or almost an acre and a half, second only to the Germans; and their galleries were filled with elegant attractions such as Aubusson and Gobelins tapestries, fans by Duvelleroy, silks from Lyon, and such crowd-pleasers as photographs by Nadar and a Bible illustrated by Gustave Doré. "France has reason to feel satisfied with the results of her efforts," wrote an English correspondent, "for her display at Vienna is a surprise even to those acquainted with the energy of her people and the resources of the country."
1
The standard of their goods was so high that, incredibly, the French were awarded a quarter of all the prizes, easily eclipsing those of any other country, Germany included.
The French truly surpassed themselves, however, in the Fine Arts Gallery. Housing some 6,500 works of art, this building was opened by Emperor Franz Josef on May 15, in a ceremony performed beneath Alexandre Cabanel's
The Triumph of Flora,
an oval-shaped mythological scene finished a short while earlier. Painters and sculptors from twenty-six countries had sent works of art to Vienna, but the French, with 1,527 pieces on display, comprised a quarter of the entire exhibition. Eight rooms in the gallery, as well as half the central hall, were dedicated to the finest examples of French art—sculptures by Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, canvases by Ingres, Delacroix, and Théodore Rousseau. The effect was overwhelming. Most critics and spectators were agreed that the French outclassed the opposition in quality as well as quantity. France, one English critic proclaimed, "carries off the palm"; another made a welcome comparison between the French and the Germans, praising the "fidelity to nature" shown by the former and castigating the "harsh coloring and severe drawing" of the latter. Even an Italian visitor, the architect Camillo Boito, grudgingly admitted that the French were "ever so far ahead in the disciplines of beauty"
2
