Manet: Three Paintings from the Norton Simon Museum

MANET THREE PAINTINGS FROM THE NORTON SIMON MUSEUM DAVID PULLINS

THE FRICK COLLECTION

CONTENTS

6

Director’s Foreword

9

Acknowledgments

11

Introduction

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42

62

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“PURE PAINTING” Manet’s Fish and Shrimp “MANET PASTICHEUR” Manet’s Ragpicker “OF A TRANQUIL BOURGEOIS” Manet’s Madame Manet Provenance, Literature, and Exhibition Histories

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Bibliography

91

Index

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Photography Credits

“PURE PAINTING” Manet’s Fish and Shrimp

fig. 8 Édouard Manet Fish and Shrimp 1864 Oil on canvas 17 5⁄8 x 28 3⁄4 in.

(44.8 x 73 cm) Norton Simon Art Foundation, Pasadena (M.1978.25)

Most of Manet’s still lifes were produced in two brief periods. The first, between 1864 and 1866, began with three ambitious paintings that include the Norton Simon Museum’s Fish and Shrimp (fig. 8); the second, during Manet’s final years between 1880 and 1883, displayed an entirely different manner inflected by Impressionist technique.1 Superficially, these works offer innocuous visual pleasures when compared to the unprecedented figure subjects that so bewildered Manet’s contemporaries.

But these paintings played a crucial role in the artist’s reception. In 1867, in an article that described Manet’s “new manner of painting,” Émile Zola announced that despite the public’s reluctance to accept the young artist, his still lifes “begin, happily, to be masterpieces for everyone … Even the most vocal enemies of Édouard Manet’s talent admit that he paints inanimate objects well.”2 A year later, Odilon Redon, who had just begun his own career as a painter, claimed, “Manet, who appears to us especially well equipped for still-life painting, should limit himself to that, which is not of an inferior order when it is treated with such talent.”3 By directing attention from representation to facture, these paintings allowed early critics to focus on Manet’s masterful manipulation of his medium. Broad brushstrokes outlined the contours of simplified forms in compelling color juxtapositions. His paint retained a lively, viscous presence atop the canvas, the bare surface of which often showed through. Neither paint nor canvas was disguised by the tone gradations and glazing typical of nineteenth-century academic finish. By the time of Manet’s posthumous 1884 retrospective, in which Fish and Shrimp hung prominently below The Absinthe Drinker and Luncheon on the Grass, Zola would praise Manet as “one of the most energetic instigators of

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pure painting.”4 In the twentieth century, when Manet’s revolutionary subjects had lost much of their charge, these features allowed art historians to position him at the origin of abstract painting. Manet seemed to legitimate the focus of twentieth-century artists on paint itself rather than on convincing illusionism. For Clement Greenberg, writing in 1960, “Manet’s became the first Modernist pictures by virtue of the frankness with which they declared the flat surfaces on which they were painted. The Impressionists, in Manet’s wake, abjured under-painting and glazes, to leave the eye under no doubt as to the fact that the colors they used were made of paint that came from tubes or pots.”5 This clean teleology to non-representational abstraction has been largely debunked, if only because its anachronism and determinism ignore Manet’s time and place—paintings like Olympia and Luncheon on the Grass were, unavoidably, about political and social issues specific to Napoleon III’s France. As one of Manet’s most magnificently preserved, unlined paintings, however, Fish and Shrimp offers a compelling lens for seeing this artist as “one of the most energetic instigators of pure painting” and for appreciating his most basic, material means: oil on canvas.

The spring of 1864 was marked by Manet’s Salon submission of two large-scale figure subjects depicting profane and sacred mortality, respectively: Incident at a Bullfight and Dead Christ with Angels (both 1864; Metropolitan Museum of Art).6 Their fate speaks insightfully to Manet’s situation at this time and, in turn, to the role of still-life painting in his practice. Both paintings were accepted, but neither fared well. Critics described them as, respectively, “a wooden bullfighter killed by a horned rat” and “Christ, or The Poor Miner Raised from the Coal Mine.”7 Critiques of Incident at a Bullfight were so forceful that Manet cut the painting in two, ending confusion over the drastic shift in scale and the lack of a middle ground.8 Manet’s successes seemed to lie not in depicting space or portraying elevated subjects, but in his manipulation of paint.

Théophile Gautier pointed to Manet’s painterly skill in Dead Christ with Angels, writing, “But one shouldn’t, for all that, assume that Manet is devoid of talent; he has it, and a great deal of it. Like M. Courbet, but in another sense, he possesses the true qualities of a painter. He attacks each part boldly and he knows how to preserve the greater unity of the local colors.”9 Once detached from its background, the fallen toreador from Incident at a Bullfight garnered immediate praise as “the most complete symphony in black major ever attempted,” and Pierre Matisse ranked it among Manet’s most beautiful works.10

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fig. 9 Édouard Manet Peonies in a Vase on a Stand 1864 Oil on canvas 36 ¾ x 27 ¾ in.

(93.2 x 70.2 cm) Musée d’Orsay, Paris (RF 1669)

While Manet endured the anxious period of submitting Incident at a Bullfight and Dead Christ with Angels to the Salon jury and the vehement reaction of the press, he was simultaneously engaged with less controversial, inanimate subjects—namely, peonies. Manet’s fidelity to this species, which typically blooms in May and June, allows us to date a group of oil paintings to the months immediately before Fish and Shrimp.11 The largest, Peonies in a Vase on a Stand (fig. 9), represents eleven blossoms overflowing from a bulbous vase against a monochrome ground. A pile of petals is strewn below, each described by a single brushstroke that would be nearly impossible to identify out of context. In March 1865, Manet wrote to Baudelaire, “I was quite surprised these last days: M. Ernest Chesneau bought a painting from me, two flowers in a vase, a nothing [un rien]. It might bring me luck.”12 For the critic Chesneau, however, Manet’s peonies were only a respite: he had recently deemed Luncheon on the Grass “corrupted by a love for the bizarre” and shortly thereafter named Olympia an “inconceivable vulgarity.”13 The success of this flower painting, however, was indicative of a broader phenomenon.

Manet would offer compositions of peony stems and pruning shears as gifts to Champfleury and Théophile Thoré in appreciation for their support in the press—albeit, probably tongue in cheek given his inclusion of the garden implements—and they were some of Manet’s first commercially successful works.14

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fig. 10 Édouard Manet Fruit on a Table 1864 Oil on canvas 17 3⁄4 x 28 3⁄4 in.

(45 x 73 cm) Musée d’Orsay, Paris (RF 1670)

fig. 11 Édouard Manet Fish 1864 Oil on canvas 28 7⁄8 x 36 3⁄8 in.

(73.5 x 92.4 cm) Art Institute of Chicago; Mr. and Mrs. Lewis Larned Coburn Memorial Collection (1942.311) fig. 12 Édouard Manet Eel and Red Mullet 1864 Oil on canvas 15 x 18 1⁄8 in.

(38 x 46 cm) Musée d’Orsay, Paris (RF 1951 9)

Fernand Lochard’s photograph of Fish and Shrimp, taken as part of a posthumous 1883 survey of Manet’s studio, is annotated “Peint à Boulogne sur Mer” and dated 1864.15 Juliet Wilson-Bareau and David Degener have reconstructed Manet’s holiday visits to Boulogne-sur-Mer with remarkable precision. On July 16, 1864, Manet, his mother, wife, younger brother Gustave, and another Leenhoff family member (perhaps a sister-in-law) subscribed for one month’s access to the city’s principal bathing club. The Manets had presumably just arrived and gave their address as the centrally located 10 rue de l’Ancienne Comédie, a house they probably rented.16 Depictions of Boulogne-sur-Mer from the 1860s suggest that the Manets experienced anything but quiet, idyllic seaside; this was a busy port filled with steamships, cargo shipments, and throngs of leisure seekers. Indeed, Manet’s summer was bracketed by his remarkably un-picturesque but dramatic paintings of the U.S.S. Kearsarge and C.S.S. Alabama on this same water.17 If Fish and Shrimp was begun in the summer context of Boulognesur-Mer, it was completed by mid-February 1865, when Manet wrote to Louis Martinet that eight works would arrive for an exhibition at the dealer’s gallery on the Boulevard des Italiens. These included the cut-down Dead Toreador and the aforementioned flower painting purchased by Chesneau, as well as “Poissons, etc. Nature morte” and “Poissons—fruits (pendants).”18 The pendants were Fish and Shrimp and Fruit on a Table (fig.

10). “Poissons, etc. Nature morte” is probably the exuberant and compositionally complex Fish (fig. 11). A third, relatively modest painting, Eel and Red Mullet (fig. 12), seems not to have been exhibited.

It remains unclear whether Manet completed large-scale paintings in Boulogne-sur-Mer or, more likely, while there executed oil and watercolor sketches that he later worked up in his Paris studio.19 Given its provisional composition, broad brushwork, and smaller scale, Eel and Red Mullet seems to have been executed first and possibly on the Channel

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Coast. It alerts us to the compositional and technical solutions Manet was developing for still life. The tablecloth, a distinctive feature of Fruit on a Table, is particularly important. Its indentations and crests in the creases animate the entire painting, breaking the surface into quadrants.

Manet’s decision to misalign this tablecloth’s folds and the table front as it approaches the picture plane results in a particular dynamism. In fussier compositions from the end of this first still-life period, Manet animated these starched tablecloths to even greater effect, most notably in the lower-left corners of Salmon (1866; Shelburne Museum, Vermont) and Melon and Peaches (fig. 13). These works informed Cézanne’s earliest still lifes, including his celebrated, enigmatic Black Clock (ca. 1870; private collection).20 Eel and Red Mullet also establishes Manet’s painterly techniques: he individuates brushstrokes and colors, resulting in wet-on-wet hatchwork, while the handle end of his brush is used to draw into the paint a grid representing fish scales. These features are brought to a crescendo just left of center in Fish and Shrimp. White, gray, mauve, and yellow paints are whipped up into an exuberant frenzy on the fish’s protruding chest (fig. 14). As with the pile of petals from Peonies in a Vase on a Stand, only the surrounding elements contextualize this abstraction and help

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fig. 13 Édouard Manet Melon and Peaches ca. 1866 Oil on canvas 26 7⁄8 x 35 7⁄8 in.

(68.3 x 91 cm) National Gallery of Art, Washington; Gift of Eugene and Agnes E. Meyer (1960.1.1)

fig. 14 Detail of Fish and Shrimp (fig. 8)

make representational sense of it. Fish scales are indicated by high peaks and deep valleys of paint between which the bare canvas shows through.

Manet seems devoted to keeping the paint alive, independently of representation. Along the fish’s spine, a black line composed of short, heavy strokes is pulled down to meet the adjacent white paint in fine gradations, likely achieved with a wooden brush handle. The needlefish’s equally dynamic facture is characterized by angular dabs in which the pressure of the brush has pushed the paint to the brushstroke’s edges, drawing attention to the individuality of each stroke.21 Tension accrues between these strokes’ role in establishing structure and this deliberately staged, seemingly permanent, liquidity.

In contrast to the literal rise and fall of paint that emphasizes Manet’s principal subject, the broad, monochromatic ground colors of Fish and Shrimp are thinned in order to create the effect of stains seeping into the relatively open-weave canvas.22 The horizon line at the rear of the table is only summarily defined as a place two tones meet. Spatial recession is assumed, but by no means clearly indicated. By cropping the table front along three edges of the canvas, Manet further compresses the space, making the drawer’s front and knob one with the picture plane.23 By denying us perspectival lines (teasingly alluded to by the drawer’s perfectly orthogonal black outlines, evidently executed with a straightedge), the tabletop gives the impression of being lifted toward us. It does so in concert with the abstract frenzy of paint that we are asked to believe is a fish, despite

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