The Most Parisian of Them All

By ROBERT HUGHES

At the Metropolitan, the urbane, formal mastery of Manet

When Edouard Manet died of tertiary syphilis in 1883 at the age of 51, Emile Zola and Claude Monet helped carry his coffin to the grave. In life, his milieu had included nearly every French artist of significance, along with writers of the stature of Charles Baudelaire and Stephane Mallarme; the latter called him "goat-footed, a virile innocence in beige overcoat, beard and thin blond hair graying with wit." Dressed to the nines, Manet was celebrated as a dandy in that city of dandies, Paris. To read his friends and admirers, you would suppose that he never uttered a pompous word. His sense of measure, corrected by self-doubt, found expression in a sweet offhandedness. "Conciseness in art is a necessity and a grace," he told a younger painter "Cultivate your memory; for nature will never give you more than information. . . No set pieces! Please, no set pieces!"

He made no bones about hating the country. His life and work amount to a definition of urbanity. Paris is unthinkable without Manet; Manet unimaginable without Paris. Both were joined again last spring in a centenary exhibition at the Grand Palais. The retrospective was curated by two art historians, Franc,oise Cachin, of the Musee d'Orsay in Paris, and Charles Moffett, until recently curator of European paintings at the Metropolitan in New York City. Last week "Manet, 1832-1883" arrived at the Met: 95 paintings, 45 drawings, and prints. It has been shorn of two key paintings, the Olympia and the Dejeuner sur l'Herbe--a defensible loss, in view of their unique importance and the risks of transatlantic flight. This gap does not matter in the end. The Manet show is a triumph, a brilliant conjunction of scholarship and curatorial intelligence with the work of an exceptional artist. It is what institutions like the Met are for. It will enrich our understanding not only of Manet, but of his entire context in 19th century French painting.

An artist of Manet's order has many profiles, not all of them visible at the same moment. Fifteen years ago, it was more or less obligatory for American critics to focus on the "radical" formal aspects of Manet's work and, in particular, on his use of flat (or at least shallow) pictorial space. Lone figures like The Fifer and Matador Saluting were posed against a background too flat to be a room, too brown to be outdoors; it was no more than a neutral backdrop, an exaggerated version of the depthless space behind Velasquez's portraits and some of Goya's. This concern for silhouette and two-dimensional compression could be seen as the progressive missing link between illusion and the flatness of classical modernism. Thus it tended to monopolize discussions of Manet and, on the side, to exaggerate the importance of some of his "flatter" paintings, which are not always his best.

Today, surrounded by art that rejects formal grace in the interest of narrative, contradiction and hyperbole, we are conditioned to see a different Manet. In eyes that have viewed DeChirico's train stations, for instance, Manet's painting of a woman and a child at the Gare St.-Lazare acquires a strangeness that contradicts his intention of painting a peaceful urban scene. The grown woman stares at the painter, the little girl turns her back and gazes raptly through the iron bars into an industrial future, full of clamor and swift disjunction. For each phase of modernism there is a new Manet, and one may predict that the greatest effect of the Met show will be not on the New York public but on the artists once more.

Manet's greatness as a formal artist and no other word for his achievement will do, is not to be predicated solely on the way his work anticipated the desires of later painters. The paintings, seen in themselves, do not look so very flat anyway. As Art Historian Anne Coffin Hanson points out in one of the catalogue's searching essays, they reproduce flatter than they are. In reality, "surface qualities come into play . . . It is as though the artist had discovered a means of simultaneously combining touch and sight."

Manet's sense of touch was extraordinary, but its bravura passages are in the details: how the generalized bagginess of a trouser leg, for instance, rendered in flat, thin paint and firmed up with swift daubs of darker tone in the folds, contrasts with the thick, creamy white directional brush strokes that model the curve of a spat. The ceaseless, intelligent play of flat and round, thick and thin, "slow" and "fast" passages of paint is what gives Manet's surface its probing liveliness. There is nothing "miraculous" about it, but it was not the result of a mechanically acquired technique either. It is there because, in his best work, Manet's inquisitiveness never failed him; every inch of surface records an active desire to see and then find the proper translation of sight into mark.

Of The Fifer, 1866, Zola remarked that Manet did not shrink from "the abruptness of nature": "His whole being bids him to see in patches, in simple elements charged with energy." The same claims would be made by the postimpressionists--patch and discontinuity, "arrangement" as against continuous modeling. If The Fifer were a little more abstract, more "Japanese," it would almost be a Van Gogh. At times, Manet's tact in balancing the decorative and the real almost passes belief, an example being the black stripe on the fifer's right leg--swelling and closing with negligent grace, extending the black of the tunic only to stop it an interval above the foot.

If Manet was not exactly a modernist, he was certainly not an impressionist. He never exhibited with the impressionist group; his aims were not compatible with theirs, much as they respected one another. Manet's firmly built structures of light and dark were mostly done indoors, after many preliminary studies; they have the formal diction of studio art, not the light, open qualities of plein-air painting. Atmosphere and local color were not his prime issues. And when he took what seems, on first glance, an "impressionist" subject, he was apt to load it with ironies and contradictions until its straightforwardness evaporated.

The Balcony, 1868-69, is such a work. If this is a genre scene--well-off young people looking from a balcony into a street--it is a most peculiar one: a painting of a lapse in conversation. It is in fact a portrait of three of Manet's friends, including the painter Berthe Morisot on the left. Its friezelike stylization looks extreme to us and seemed absurd to critics 115 years ago. The color is almost a put-on, a blague, as such effronteries were called in the cafes of the day: the raucous, arsenical green of the shutters and iron balcony set so brusquely against the man's blue cravat and the tumbling white curds of the women's gowns. The formal rhymes within this gross dissonance seem deliberately mincing, as when the branches of the hydrangea on the left echo the angle of the balcony struts.

These are not the comments on Nature and Culture one expects a Monet or a Renoir to make, but disjuncture is part of the content of Manet's art. Time and again it brings a message, which he was among the first artists to deduce from the cultural compression of city life in the 19th century and which has become a shibboleth in the late 20th: that the very unnaturalness of urban life is best resolved in high style and detachment. Manet's urbanity can be fully savored only in contrast with its opposite, the sentimental love of the pastoral that filled the breast of the average culture consumer in his day. There is much in common between Flaubert, constructing the provincial mediocrity of Emma Bovary's life from a thousand icily observed details, and Manet, surrounding the blank-faced barmaid in A Bar at the Folies-Bergere, 1881-82, with a labyrinth of glitter, nuance and reflection. Detail contradicts sentiment. The orange glare of the tangerines, the bizarre rhyme between the green creme de menthe is bottle on the counter and the green boots of an acrobat whose legs make their tiny intrusion into the top left corner: such things maintain the surface and keep us from empathizing with the bored blond.

Manet was no "social realist"; unlike Courbet, he was not on the lookout for allegories within reality. He paints a street singer, but she is his favorite model, Victorine Meurent (who posed for the Olympia), and her taupe dress is far too fashionable ever to have been worn by a musical beggar, while her hat, a studio prop that recurs in the Dejeuner sur l'Herbe, is that of a male student in Paris. Or he renders her again in the preposterously unsuitable guise of an espada, a matador, posed in the bull ring: a transvestism, a play with notions of machismo, that insists on the artificiality of art.

The most famous example of Manet's contrariness is, of course, the Dejeuner: two women--one completely naked, the other virtually so--and two clothed men, occupying the foreground of a sketchily painted Arcadian landscape. We have been taught to see its allusions stick out like elbows (here a homage to Giorgione, there a quotation from Marcantonio Raimondi), but what infuriated the audience at the Salon des Refuses in 1863, and has caused so many gallons of ink to be spilled on it since, is its insolubility as narrative. An "uncouth riddle," one critic called it. What are those people doing? One modernist answer is that they are busy being in a painting. But, as Curator Cachin shows in her catalogue note's meticulous and witty unskeining of Dejeuner, there is far more to it than that.

The painting has the quality of farce, presented in the guise of a Second Empire pictorial machine. At the same time it is intensely serious (as farce can be), and one of the victims of its seriousness is the stereo type of the nude. Manet invariably painted women as equal beings, not as denatured objects of allure. Victorine, the model, is clearly a model doing a professional stint; the illusions of the salon body, timelessness and glamour, are no longer properties of nakedness. Other artists painted nymphs as whores; it took Manet, in the Olympia, to paint a whore as her own person, staring back at the voyeurs, restricting the offer to a transaction. Here, as in paintings of women who were not models (like Berthe Morisot, whose shadowed and inward-turning beau ty Manet could portray as the index of thought), one sees him inventing the image of the "modern" woman. It was there to be seen; but that is true of any prophecy.

--By Robert Hughes This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.