The Judgment of Paris (69 page)
In 1882 Manet exhibited the remarkable
A Bar at the Folies-Bergère,
one of the finest works in his entire
oeuvre,
but found himself disillusioned, as ever, with the bewildered public reaction. It was to be his final Salon. He was seriously ill by this time, having finished the painting despite suffering pains and problems with his physical coordination caused by a syphilitic infection contracted many years earlier. In April 1883, his gangrenous left leg was amputated below the knee. He died less than a fortnight later, on April 30, at the age of fifty-one, almost twenty years to the day after
Le Déjeuner sur I'herbe
was first revealed at the Salon des Refusés. He was buried at the Cimetière de Passy, with Émile Zola and Claude Monet among the pallbearers. Edgar Degas, walking behind the coffin, expressed sentiments that much of the rest of France needed some time to appreciate: "He was greater than we thought."
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Manet was indeed greater than many people thought—greater, in particular, than the critics and the Fine Arts administrators of the 1860s and 1870s had dared to consider. As early as eight months after his death a retrospective exhibition of his work was mounted at, of all places, the École des Beaux-Arts—the institution in which, twenty years earlier, Gérôme had tried to ban all mention of his name. This "Exposition Manet" was treated to the sort of favorable reviews that the painter had so often been denied during his lifetime. Then, in February 1884, a large selection of his work, including ninety oil paintings, went to auction. A respectable if unspectacular 116,000 francs was raised.
A Bar at the Folies-Bergère
was one of the pricier lots, going to a friend, the composer Emmanuel Chabrier, for 5,850 francs. But the most expensive—to the guffawing of many spectators at the auction—proved to be
Olympia,
which was purchased by Manet's brother-in-law Ferdinand Leenhoff for 10,000 francs.
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The fortunes of
Le Déjeuner sur I'herbe
and
Olympia
served as barometers for Manet's reputation in the decades after his death. The latter canvas, easily the most notorious painting of the nineteenth century, became, surprisingly, the first of his works to enter the Louvre, albeit not without the usual controversy. The painting's museological beatification occurred only thanks to the untiring efforts of Claude Monet. In a feat of almost unexampled selflessness in an artist, Monet spent the entire year 1889 organizing a public subscription to purchase the canvas from Manet's family for installation in the Louvre. Nearly 20,000 francs was raised from subscribers who included Degas, Pissarro, Renoir, Fantin-Latour, Antonin Proust and Philippe Burty. However, the work was sent by the government not to the Louvre but to the Musée du Luxembourg—the "Museum of Living Artists." Here it was joined in 1897 by two more of Manet's works, including
The Balcony,
which had been bequeathed to the nation by the Impressionist painter, patron and collector Gustave Caillebotte. However, two more of Manet's works from Caillebotte's collection,
Croquet at Boulogne
and a small sketch of racehorses, were refused by the Luxembourg, whose curator, Léonce Bénédite, would later publish a biography of Meissonier. From the same bequest Bénédite turned down some thirty paintings by Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, Degas and Sisley.
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Olympia
was consecrated by the French artistic establishment only in 1907, when it entered the Louvre on orders of Georges Clemenceau, at the time the President of the Council of Ministers as well as a long-standing friend of Monet (and the subject of an 1880 Manet portrait). The work was afforded the honor of hanging on the wall beside Ingres's
Grand Odalisque,
another work that had once been savaged by the critics.
Coincidentally, also in 1907 Pablo Picasso, then twenty-six, painted
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon,
his first Cubist painting, which featured a stunning new approach to representing the nude female form. Two years earlier, a number of other young artists, including Henri Matisse and Maurice de Vlaminck, outraged the French public with works whose flat compositions and splodges of vivid, clashing color—a shocking style that won them the pejorative nickname
les Fauves
("the Wild Beasts")—recalled the Wild Boar of the Batignolles. And
Olympia
entered the Louvre two years before Filippo Martinetti published his "Futurist Manifesto"
in Le Figaro,
praising "courage, audacity and revolt," and asserting—in art history's ultimate tribute to modern life—that a speeding motorcar was more beautiful than the
Winged Victory of Samothrace.
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A generation after his death, Manet had left behind a vibrant cultural legacy, not simply through scandalizing the public—an option that artists of the past century have found all too expedient—but by recasting artistic tradition in his own idiosyncratic vision in order to forge entirely new forms. Within this context, Charles Oulmont, a professor at the Sorbonne, was able to declare, as early as 1912, that
Olympia
"marks a momentous date in the history of nineteenth-century painting and art generally."
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Or as a more recent art historian, Professor T. J. Clark, has written,
Olympia
is "the founding monument of modern art."
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Le Déjeuner sur I'herbe,
meanwhile, has staked its own claim as a foundation of modern art. Few serious artists have managed to escape its spell. It inspired Claude Monet's own
Le Déjeuner sur I'herbe
as well as Cézanne's numerous paintings of male and female nudes bathing in streams and lounging on riverbanks. Most transfixed of all, though, was Picasso, who was born just eighteen months before Manet died.
Le Déjeuner sur I'herbe
inspired him more than any other painting. "One can see the intelligence in each of Manet's brushstrokes," he once wrote to a friend.
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Ultimately Picasso would produce some 200 versions of the work: 150 drawings, twenty-seven oil paintings, and even a number of cardboard models from which thirteen-foot-high statues were created from sand-blasted concrete and sent to adorn the sculpture garden of the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. He was attempting to dissect this most enigmatic of paintings, probing at it from every angle with his pencil and brush, repeatedly taking it apart and putting it back together in a struggle to divine the secrets of its power and mystique.
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Picasso had first seen
Le Déjeuner sur I'herbe
in 1900, when it was shown at the Universal Exposition in Paris, in a room in the Grand Palais that the Fine Arts administration grudgingly dedicated to Impressionism. The seventy-six-year-old Gérôme had tried to prevent Émile Loubet, the French president, from entering the room by exclaiming: "Stop, sir, for in there France is dishonoured!"
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Thirty-seven years after its appearance at the Salon des Refusés, paintings by the members of the École des Batignolles still had the power to provoke and offend.
Le Déjeuner sur I'herbe
had a much longer wait than
Olympia
for its consecration. It had first been bought in 1878, for 3,000 francs, by Jean-Baptiste Faure, the singer who had acquired
Le Bon Bock
five years earlier for double that price. Two decades later it was purchased for 55,000 francs by the collector and art historian Étienne Moreau-Nélaton, who willed the work to the French nation in 1906. The canvas was deposited not in the Louvre proper but rather—in a bizarre act that revealed lingering official hostilities—in a room in the Louvre then occupied by the Ministry of Finance. Not until 1934 did the officials of the Louvre see fit to place
Le Déjeuner sur I'herbe
in the part of the building concerned with the fine arts rather than fiscal policy. Both works were subsequently moved, in 1947, to what became known as the "Impressionist Museum," the Musée du Jeu de Paume, situated in the northwest corner of the Jardin des Tuileries, in a building Napoléon III had constructed to house tennis courts. This new museum was, as the Louvre's Chief Conservator declared, a "triumphant temple" to a style of art that by then had gained a worldwide popularity.
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In that year an admiring American art historian, Robert Goldwater, declared of
Le Déjeuner sur I'herbe:
"No other painter of the century managed to get so much into a canvas."
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In 1986 the two paintings were again moved, this time to another newly founded "Impressionist Museum," the Musée d'Orsay. By this time, dozens of Manet paintings had found themselves into museums all over the world, from Russia and Poland to Australia and Japan, and in every corner of America. Most spectacular, perhaps, had been the entry of ten of his canvases into the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1929, as part of the bequest of Louisine Havemeyer. Prices for Manet's paintings have risen in accordance with his collection in museums. As early as the 1920s examples of his work were selling for more than 400,000 francs; by the 1950s a number of his canvases had exceeded a million francs; and by the 1970s they had surpassed a million U.S. dollars. In 1983 a work painted in the early 1880s,
La Promenade,
showing a woman strolling in a park, sold for $3.6 million; six years later it fetched $14,850,000. More recently, in May 2004, Sotheby's in New York sold
The Races in the Bois de Boulogne
—the canvas for which Barret paid 3,000 francs in 1872—for just over $26 million. But the record price for a Manet painting is still the $26.4 million paid in 1989 by the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles for
The Rue Mosnier with Flags,
a street scene that Manet painted in 1878 from the window of his studio in the Rue de Saint-Petersbourg. Anyone managing to locate one of Manet's lost paintings, especially
Croquet at Boulogne
—a far more exemplary work once described by a connoisseur as a "delicious painting"
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—could reasonably expect to receive a good deal more.
Manet's vital statistics have been equally healthy on the turnstiles of the world's museums. Three major shows featuring his work were mounted in the year 2003 alone.
Manet at the Prado,
in Madrid, averaged almost 6,000 visitors per day, or more than 439,000 altogether, making it the second most successful exhibition ever staged at the museum.
Manet/Velázquez,
at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, drew more than 553,000 viewers following an equally impressive outing at the Musée d'Orsay. Finally, an exhibition dedicated to his maritime painting,
Manet and the Sea,
opened at the Art Institute of Chicago before traveling to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In 2004 it moved to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, where, in the country of Suzanne Manet's birth, it proved the most successful exhibition of the year. A poll conducted by BBC Radio 4 in the summer of 2005 testified to the widespread appeal of Manet's work, with
A Bar at the Folies-Bergère
(in London's Courtauld Institute of Art) attracting the third-highest tally of votes for the public's favorite painting in a British museum. Only works by twin titans of British art, Constable and Turner, finished higher.
"Time gives every human being his true value," Ernest Meissonier once wrote. "The real worth of a man cannot be gauged until he is dead, until the clamor of friendship dies down over his ashes, until the farewell speeches, official or kindly, have been delivered. Then the edifice either crumbles away, or endures in glory, flooded with light and fame."
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Few artists can have brooded over their posthumous reputation as much as Meissonier. After dominating his own era so completely, nothing remained for him but the conquest of future generations. His obsession with mural painting was a symptom of his anxieties about this rendezvous with posterity. In the end, though, despite his grand designs, he would not spread a single brush of paint on his wall in the Panthéon. A man who took an entire decade to paint a few square yards of canvas was never going to be a good bet to finish a colossal mural, plans for which did indeed prove—as the skeptics had predicted—an "absurd fantasy." This failure nonetheless did little to undermine his cosmic preeminence. In 1878 he showed sixteen paintings at the third Universal Exposition held in Paris, and for the third time he was given the Grand Medal of Honor—an award that simply reconfirmed his stature as Europe's most celebrated painter. Then in 1889 he became the first artist ever to receive the Grand Cross, the highest order of the Legion of Honor.
Two years after its unveiling in Vienna, Meissonier had finally completed
Friedland
more or less to his own satisfaction, signing "EMeissonier 1875" in black paint in the lower left-hand corner. He was suitably compensated for the snub by Sir Richard Wallace when, in 1876, another buyer was found: Alexander T. Stewart, an Irish-born American dry-goods millionaire known as "The Merchant Prince." The single largest taxpayer in America, Stewart paid 380,000 francs for
Friedland,
almost double the price originally offered by the Marquess of Hertford. The work was shipped to America early in 1876—though not before Meissonier, on the eve of its departure, scraped down and then repainted the central group of horsemen. Once in New York,
Friedland
became one of the grandest trophies of the Gilded Age, adorning the sky-lit picture gallery in Stewart's $1.5 million mansion on West Thirty-fourth Street. Henry James would exult in
The New York Tribune
that Stewart had claimed one of "the highest prizes in the game of civilization."
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