Spring
As Gloria Groom, chair of European Painting and Sculpture at the Art Institute of Chicago, recently told New City Art : “Toward the end of his life, when Manet was contemplating where his major works might be seen together, he said to his friend [French journalist] Antonin Proust, ‘I must be seen whole.’
And who would not want to see a retrospective of Manet’s major works, going all the way back to the “Absinthe Drinker” (1859) . According to one leading professor of modern art theory, Thierry de Duve: “Manet is where the adventure of modern art takes off”
Regretfully, this exhibition is nothing like that -- not even for the major works of Manet’s last ten years. It includes three pieces that were submitted to the salon: “Boating” (1874) , “The Conservatory” (1879), and “Spring”(1882). Mostly, however, it includes sketches, ephemera, and unfinished projects - many found in his studio at the time of his death. There are a few charming portraits and many pleasant florals. These are, however, the kind of things that thousands if not hundreds of thousands of sensitive, well-trained, observational artists have been producing ever since the Renaissance, right up through today. Do they really reveal anything of importance about this artist or his contribution to art history?
The most glaring absence is “The Bar at the Folies-Bergere”, the artist’s final salute to the thrilling demi-monde that had been so important to his life (and brought about his early death). Submitted to the 1882 salon along with “Spring”, its presence might have made that portrait of a young actress feel more like a meditation on mortality rather than a celebration of modern life and beauty. It’s not just the somber expression on the woman’s face that might lead us in that direction - it’s also the tight triangular compositional elements that box the lady in, and the long jagged slash of thick black paint that stretches across her throat. (to experience that thick blackness, the painting must be seen in person). The final painting in the exhibition, “House at Rueil”, done the same year, is also foreboding, as a heavy, great tree splits the canvas in two and obliterates the charming sunlit portico behind it with a chilling sense of finality.
“Boating” and “The Conservatory” are the pieces in this show that are really worth the price of admission. Many artists can make quick, charming, mimetic sketches - and many such pieces in this show really aren’t that good - which is only to be expected with an artist who dares to experiment. But to give large figurative paintings such as these a sense of thrill, immediacy, luminosity, and social reality —- as if they had captured all the life in a moment in time — that is truly remarkable. There’s nothing uniquely modern about that - but it remains quite an achievement.
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Though not as important as the painting, it's hard to totally ignore exhibition signage, both online and attached to gallery walls. Apparently as an encore to a successful 2013 exhibition, "Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity”, curatorial staff has suggested that the paintings in this show offer a “radical new alignment of modern art with fashionable femininity.” Perhaps that might apply to the choice of garment as in the “Young woman in riding costume” (1882). But in that painting, as elsewhere, the fashionable details have been ignored by the loose technique. The signage also tells us: “he simultaneously approached smaller works more fluidly and spontaneously, taking up pastel and watercolor “- as if all his earlier work felt less spontaneous and never involved watercolors -- "unapologetically embracing beauty and visual pleasure” — though many of these smaller works, especially the still lifes of fruit, feel as uncomfortable as the ailing artist must have often felt himself.
The Art Institute is apparently mostly concerned with building Manet as a brand ("The painter of modernity") to attract more visitors. One should listen carefully to a good teacher - but might well ignore good pitchmen. They are not pursuing the truth.
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It's been a few years since the Chicago dailies had anything like a dedicated art critic (when was Alan Artner fired ?) -- so what passes for art journalism in the Chicago Tribune today is Steve Johnson's interview with Gloria Groom
In that interview she doubles down on "Spring" as an embodiment of Modern Beauty - then and now. "It was beautifully painted. It was like a fashion plate. Everything about it was understandable, legible, done.”
She goes even further to assert that "toward the end of a shortened life, Manet was speaking eloquently in a new language. It took feminist art historians working in universities in the last couple of decades to start the reconsideration and their work informs this exhibition."
"The oils, pastels and watercolors gathered here seem, tantalizingly, to articulate a never fully realized alternative vision for the future of modern painting -- Fresh, intimate, and unapologetically pretty, Manet’s late works demonstrate his fierce embrace of beauty and pleasure in the teeth of acute physical suffering.”
I would like to read what a feminist art historian has to say about a male artist who painted women as well as buying their sexual services -- but that's probably not relevant to the general public to whom this show was targeted.
As we are later told, "Groom gave a long look, then a smile. When you’re in the European painting business, apparently, public confusion between Claude-with-an-O and Edouard-with-an-A is like an oft-told joke."
Perhaps attendance statistics will ultimately prove that this art-business event was a success.
But as an art-culture event, it seems like a poor use of the museum's cultural authority, gallery space and curatorial time. It's greatest contributions were bringing over "The Conservatory" from Germany and the consequent substitution of Caillbotte's "Floor Scrapers" for his "Rainy Day in Paris".
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This show was also reviewed by Jason Farago in the New York Times.
The glaring absences in this exhibition — even more than the “Bar” — are Manet’s 1881 portrait of the exiled Communard Henri Rochefort, as well as his two late great seascapes, both titled “Rochefort’s Escape” and painted in 1880-81. As Mr. Allan writes in the catalog, Manet’s last years coincided with “an epochal political shift leftward” in France, and these maritime paintings with a political prisoner form the last act in Manet’s long interweaving of historical painterly styles and current events.
We were both disappointed by the shows centerpiece, "Jeanne (Spring)".
I thought it was more about death than beauty -- while Farago wrote:
" May the gods of French painting forgive me, but “Jeanne” is a banal and overly refined picture, and its marriage of fashion and foliage tips exhibits a vulgarity wholly unlike the cool, careful “In the Conservatory.” "
But then - thanks to feminist scholarship - he walks it back:
Why do I value this early Manet so much more? It is only because I think art has a higher vocation than delivering joy? Or is it because, poor modern boy that I am, I have been trained by more than a century of artists and writers to be suspicious of beauty — that ruse, that luxury, that feminine thing? The received history of modern Western painting, over which Manet looms like our great bourgeois Allfather, can feel like a succession of attacks on beauty by generations of arrogant men, each more certain than the last that their art would at last redeem an ugly society. But Manet knew that there is as much rebellion and insight in a dress, a bouquet or even a pile of strawberries if he could see past their surfaces to the richness within. That is another path to modernity, grounded in what his dear friend Baudelaire, in “The Painting of Modern Life,” called “beauty, fashion and happiness.”
So now he no longer finds "Jeanne" to be "banal", "overly refined", and "vulgar -- just because some feminist scholars disagree?
Perhaps he needs to grow a new pair!
More seriously, we might realize that he is still offering that first opinion along with his second, and that neither is really his own response to what he saw. They are more like his idea of what sophisticated responses should be -- from the twentieth and then the twenty-first centuries.
In our time, art critics are not expected to make their own aesthetic judgments.
Finally, we have Stephen Eisenman in 'Art in America' querying whether Manet should be considered Modern at all - and offering the following by way of comparison with "Jeanne":
Portrait of Sarah Bernhardt by Jules Bastien-LePage, 1879
The centerpiece of the exhibition is Jeanne (Spring), from 1882, acclaimed by one critic at that year’s Salon as “an absolute masterpiece, the Mona Lisa of the master.” Like In the Conservatory, it is painstakingly rendered and pays great attention to the subject’s face, figure, and fashionable accoutrements. Critics inventoried the “pompadour dress,” “cabriolet hat,” “twenty-five button suede gloves,” and “café-au-lait parasol.” But unlike its Salon companion, The Bar at the Folies-Bergère (notably absent here), it provides no visual ambiguities, no frisson of degeneracy, and no challenge to the masculine, spectatorial gaze. It is every bit a salon picture, the equal of works by Alfred Stevens, James Tissot, and Jules Bastien-Lepage. (This last artist’s Portrait of Sarah Bernhardt, for example, shown in the Salon of 1879,
I would agree that "Jeanne" offers no visual ambiguities, no frisson of degeneracy, and no challenge to the masculine, spectatorial gaze --- but it does seem much more committed to form than the inventory of distinctive costume and facial features compiled by Bastien-LePage.
Were Modern painters more committed to form than their contemporaries in the Salon ? I would say so --- but it's problematic to identify them as "modern" since so many of their predecessors were no less committed to form than they were -- going all the way back to early cave painting, and all the way up to Ingres and Delacroix.
It's only since the late 19th century that sensitivity and commitment to form became the topic of a conversation that needed the term "formalism". It has been marginalized by the ascendance of conceptual art and a university based art history based on ideas rather than visual experience. Eisenman's concluding paragraph serves well as an example:
Was Manet ever truly modern? Judging from the current exhibition, the answer is no. Or he was modern only when he was the least modern in the Greenbergian sense—when he embraced challenging, and even rebarbative, contemporary or historical subjects: ragpickers, prostitutes, drunks, female bartenders, and debauched picnics. Without that content, the result is a shallow formalism that is indistinguishable from fashion.
