The Judgment of Paris
Page 26
The stringency of the 1867 jury meant that, as usual, demand escalated for another Salon des Refusés. In early April the Comte de Nieuwerkerke received an anonymous letter purporting to come from a group of artists who stated, in threatening tones: "This injustice is revolting, and you had better believe that it's not a favor we're demanding, it's our right and we hope you will grant it."11 Agitations by bands of rejected artists soon grew so heated in the vicinity of the Palais des Champs-Élysées that complaints against them were registered with the Prefect of Police.12 A more considered protest came from Frédéric Bazille, who sent Nieuwerkerke a letter requesting the opportunity for the refusés to exhibit their work in a separate Salon. "Knowing your benevolent solicitude for our interests," Bazille finished, somewhat sarcastically, "we are hoping that you will be willing to take our request into consideration."13 Attached was a five-page list of signatories that included Manet, Monet, Renoir, Pissarro and Daubigny. In the middle of April, when Bazille's petition bore no fruit, yet another letter featuring many of the same signatures landed on Nieuwerkerke's desk. At this point the beleaguered Superintendent of Fine Arts agreed to meet representatives of the disgruntled artists, though in the end he denied their requests for another Salon des Refusés. He had little enthusiasm for risking a repeat of the undignified events of 1863 at a time when the eyes of the world were fixed on Paris.
At the time of the petitions against the jury's decisions, Nieuwerkerke was busy curating not only the Salon and the International Exhibition of Fine Arts but also a retrospective of the works of Ingres, who had died three months earlier at the age of eighty-seven. The Superintendent could take great satisfaction in the fact that the exhibition of 600 of Ingres's paintings and drawings was a tremendous success, with more than 40,000 people filing into the École des Beaux-Arts to see masterpieces such as The Apotheosis of Homer, The Vow of Louis XIII'and Jupiter and Thetis. Meanwhile, on the opposite bank of the Seine from the École, the exhibitions of Manet and Courbet were meeting with a quite different reception.
The poor weather that hampered the opening of the Universal Exposition likewise played havoc with Manet's plans for his one-man show. He had been hoping to open the doors of his pavilion on the first of April, but work had barely started on the project by that date as he found himself mired in both the mud of the Place de l'Alma and—much worse—unpleasant legal wrangles with his builders.
For the design of his thirty-foot-long wooden pavilion Manet had employed an architect recommended by the Marquis de Pomereu-d'Aligre. After drawing up a set of plans, the architect had entrusted the work to a contractor named Letellier, who subcontracted the work to another builder and promptly vanished. The subcontractor worked sporadically through the bad weather of February and March before downing tools altogether at the beginning of April with the job nowhere near complete. Having paid out a total of 18,305 francs, Manet was furious. Time was obviously of the essence since he needed to have his paintings exhibited in time to catch the attention of the millions of people pouring into Paris for the Universal Exposition. He therefore brought legal pressure to bear on the wayward contractor by engaging a solicitor named Chéramy. Légal summonses were promptly served on Letellier and a man named Belloir, the housepainter in charge of decorating the pavilion. The truant laborers arrived back on the site, where work finally resumed soon after the Salon opened in the middle of April.14
Manet was also involved at this time in more solemn and heartrending affairs. By 1867 Baudelaire was back in Paris, in a special hydrotherapy clinic near the Arc de Triomphe, following a series of strokes and seizures caused by advanced syphilis. Newspapers in Paris had reported his death a year earlier, in April 1866, after he suffered a debilitating stroke in Belgium. While the obituaries had been premature, the poet was in an extremely serious condition, paralyzed down his right side and virtually incapable of speech. His mother had brought him back to Paris in July, and Manet had paid frequent visits to the clinic, where to ease Baudelaire's sufferings Suzanne played excerpts from Tannhauser, his favorite piece of music. Throughout the last half of 1866 and the early months of 1867, the garden in the hydrotherapy clinic became a place of pilgrimage for artists and writers such as Nadar, Gautier, Champfleury and the poet Théodore de Banville, all of whom gathered around the disabled Baudelaire. But it was Manet, apparently, whom the poet most wished to see. At the end of 1866 the painter received a letter from Nadar describing how he had discovered Baudelaire in the garden crying: "Manet! Manet!"15
These various anxieties kept Manet from his painting. At some point in the spring of 1867, however, he took a canvas and easel to the hill of the Trocadéro, a quarter mile downstream from where his star-crossed pavilion was taking shape near the Pont de l'Alma. Though used as a refuse dump during the Universal Exposition, the Trocadéro provided a beautiful panorama of the Palais du Champ-de-Mars. Therefore, despite his supposed reservations about plein-air painting, Manet began a cityscape not unlike Monet's Garden of the Princess. He placed a series of figures in the foreground—a clutch of men in top hats, others in military uniform, and a group of ladies wielding their ubiquitous parasols. He also added the fifteen-year-old Léon Koella, spiffily attired in a pearl-gray top hat and white trousers, walking a shaggy-looking dog along the path. Kranz's gigantic exhibition hall was shown at a distance, obscured by clouds of steam, while Nadar's Cileste, a small teardrop, hung in the sky above.
Had Manet's panorama of Paris continued a few more inches to the left it may have captured the Pont de l'Alma and his own small exhibition hall, which was nearing completion, at long last, around the time he began his View of the Universal Exposition of 1867. The Manet pavilion finally opened on May 24, with fifty-three canvases on show, including Music in the Tuileries, The Absinthe Drinker, Le Déjeuner sur I'herbe and Olympia. Manet had spared no expense to make his gallery a success. On the outside, pennants fluttered on flagpoles, while on the inside the walls were hung with red velvet and a divan in the center of the room offered respite to weary visitors. "A perfume of gallantry floats on the air," wrote one of his friends.16
For good measure, Manet made available copies of Zola's article from the Revue du XIXe Siècle, which he published in pamphlet form despite some initial reservations. "I think it might be in poor taste," he had written to Zola in March, "and strain our resources to no great advantage, to reprint such an outspoken eulogy of me and sell it at my own exhibition."17 But he was won over by Zola, who understood a thing or two about publicity from his days at the Librairie Hachette. The pamphlet, handsomely attired in blue slipcovers, was therefore available in bookshops by the time the gallery opened to the public. Likewise on offer was a catalogue for Manet's exhibition, complete with a preface elucidating his motives in showing his work outside the Palais des Champs-Élysées.
Though no doubt composed with the help of Zola, this short article rehashed many of the points that Manet had put to the Comte de Walewski at their meeting in 1863. It explained that Manet's work had attracted criticism from those who followed (and here the preface alluded pointedly to the École des Beaux-Arts) "the traditional teachings concerning composition, technique and the formal aspect of a picture. Those who have been brought up on these principles," it asserted, "countenance no others." Constant rejection by Salon juries adhering to these conservative principles was obviously detrimental to the livelihood of an artist. Deprived of an audience, such an artist "would be obliged to stack up his canvases or roll them up and put them away in the attic." But Manet had decided, the preface stated, "to present a retrospective exhibition of his work directly to the public." Of course, the public had been even more hostile to many of his works than had most members of the Salon juries, but the preface urged visitors to give the paintings a second look. With repeated viewing, the initial "surprise and even shock will give way to familiarity. Little by little," the preface confidently predicted, "understanding and acceptance will follow."18
Title page of Zola pamphlet on Manet
Manet was fraught as the day of the opening approached. "He is in a frightful state," Claude Monet (not yet exiled to Normandy) reported to Bazille after a visit to the pavilion.19 Despite his efforts and professed optimism, Manet's exhibition proved a comparative failure. He did receive a good notice in L 'Indipéndance beige from Jules Clarétie, who called him "a Velázquez of the boulevards" and a "Parisian Spaniard."20 He also received a glowing report in the Revue libérale from Hippolyte Babou, an influential writer and critic who had immortalized himself a decade earlier by providing Baudelaire with the title for Les Fleurs du mal.21 But these lines marked the full extent of the blandishments. The other Parisian papers completely ignored the exhibition: no reviews appeared in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, L 'Artiste, Le Moniteur, or any of the other journals that had previously humiliated him with their pungent comments. Critics like Gautier, Saint-Victor and Mantz, busily surveying the other art on show in Paris, all declined to set foot in his little pavilion. One of the few references to the exhibition was in the humorous Journal amusant, which dubbed it the "Musée Drôlatique"22—the Museum of Drolleries.
Nor was the public any more reliable, since most of the spectators apparently came to laugh. "Never at any time was seen a spectacle of such revolting injustice," fumed Manet's friend Antonin Proust, who claimed the public was "pitiless": "They laughed in front of these masterpieces. Husbands escorted their wives to the Pont de l'Alma. Wives brought their children. The entire world had to avail itself of this rare opportunity to shake with laughter."23 As usual, Proust was exaggerating. In fact, Manet's pavilion was never really thronged. He began by charging an entrance fee of fifty centimes, half of what Salon-goers paid to get into the Palais des Champs-Élysées. This modest fee meant that in order to recoup his costs he needed to entice 36,000 paying customers into his pavilion, or to make up any shortfall in these numbers with sales of his canvases. The Ingres retrospective at the École des Beaux-Arts drew such crowds, but Manet's name did not possess the same magnetic properties. By the end of June, in a bid to inflate his receipts, he had doubled his entrance fee to a franc.24
Manet did at least have one celebrated visitor to his pavilion. Gustave Courbet took time out from superintending his "personal Louvre" in order to inspect the work of his fellow Realist. Alas, Manet could not count on a kind word even from Courbet. "What Spaniards!" was the older painter's only comment as he stalked from the pavilion.25
Courbet naturally entertained a higher opinion of his own efforts. "I have staggered the art world," he declared to a friend soon after his own pavilion opened, likewise at the end of May26 This was a gross hyperbole, since Courbet was scarcely any more successful with his exhibition than Manet. Visitors stayed away in droves, the press paid him little attention, and even friends and admirers such as Monet were distinctly unimpressed by many of the 130 works on show: "God, what horrors Courbet came up with," he confided to Bazille.27 Though celebrated works such as A Funeral at Ornans and The Stone-breakers were part of the exhibition, Courbet had crammed the walls of his pavilion with lesser works, including many of the seascapes hurriedly knocked off during his boozily gregarious interludes at Trouville and Deauville. "Ugliness and more ugliness," sniffed Edmond and Jules de Goncourt after their visit.28 Such a tepid reception was a letdown for a man who had been hatching grandiose plans of expanding his exhibition space into a gallery 220 yards in length and earning a million francs through the sales of his paintings.
But at least Courbet was able to sell a few of his works. A wealthy collector bought two of his paintings, including The Stonebreakers, while the widow of the Due de Morny showed interest in another. Manet, on the other hand, failed to tempt a single buyer with any of his fifty-three canvases. Yet both of their travails were soon overshadowed by the rumors emanating from the Champ-de-Mars: a wealthy American collector named Henry Probasco, visiting from Cincinnati, Ohio, had offered to buy a French painting for the unheard-of sum of 150,000 francs. The work in question was Friedland. As in 1855, Ernest Meissonier had once again become the talk of the Universal Exposition.
Visitors wishing to view the International Exhibition of Fine Arts needed a good deal of patience and persistence. On display at the center of the vast exhibition hall, next to the Museum of the History of Work, this exhibition dedicated to paintings and sculptures from around the world could be seen only after one passed, among other attractions in the open air on the Champ-de-Mars, a Tunisian palace, an aquarium, two lighthouses, a prefabricated American schoolhouse, and a full-scale model of a Gothic cathedral in which religious artifacts had been placed on display. Nonetheless, more than a million people managed to thread their way through the cast-iron labyrinth to where hundreds of the most remarkable modern masterpieces were on show. The British section included paintings by Sir Edwin Landseer (who at the time was designing the enormous lions for the base of Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square) and two cofounders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais. The biggest star among the British was Millais. A former child prodigy, he was known for attacking his canvases with all of the industrious preparation and finicky application to detail of a Meissonier or a Gérôme. For one of his works, Ophelia, painted fifteen years earlier, he had dressed his model, Lizzie Siddal, in an expensive gown, placed her in a full bath of water, and toiled so long over his canvas that she caught a chill and required medical attention. For many years Millais had suffered at the hands of the critics what he called "such abuse as was never equaled in the annals of criticism"; but by 1867, at the age of thirty-eight, he had survived this invective to become the most commercially successful painter in England, with earnings of 35,000 pounds per year. Equivalent to 175,000 francs, this huge sum made him, he boasted, "almost like Meissonier."29
The American section in the International Exhibition of Fine Arts occupied a much smaller set of galleries between those dedicated to Mexico and Tunisia. The stellar attraction was the four paintings by Whistler, including The White Girl. Having survived his South American odyssey, Whistler had gone to Paris in March with a canvas from Valparaiso called Twilight at Sea*and a destructively violent spirit that saw him quarrel with the American delegation over the hanging of his paintings, pummel a plasterer in the street, push his brother-in-law through the window of a café, and (in an incident that may explain the others) acrimoniously part company with Jo Hiffernan. Then, back in London in April, in an episode whose details were never properly explained—Whistler called it "the simple chastisement of a gross insult"30—he had thrashed his erstwhile friend Alphonse Legros so severely that the Frenchman had needed the services of a doctor. But if Whistler was becoming seriously unhinged, at least his paintings appeared to be finding favor. A French critic pronounced him "the only American worthy of attention," while, surprisingly, the Comte de Nieuwerkerke, who owned several of his etchings, made no secret of his admiration of Whistler, the only member of the Generation of 1863 for whom he had any taste.31
The largest and, to many visitors, the most impressive section in the International Exhibition of Fine Arts was dedicated to French painting. Cabanel and Gérôme both displayed thirteen of their finest works, the former thrilling viewers with his famous Birth of Venus and the latter with works such as The Prisoner and Dance of the Almeh. But most of the attention, along with most of the critical laurels, went to Ernest Meissonier, whose legions of admirers swarmed into the Palais du Champ-de-Mars. One English visitor to the International Exhibition of Fine Arts claimed the picture galleries were "rendered well-nigh impassable by curious sightseers expatiating over a Meissonier."32 Émile Zola, for one, was irritated by the contrast between the frantic squash of people in front of Meissonier's paintings and the dearth of visitors to Manet's pavilion across the river. Mocking the popularity of Meissonier in an article published in a journal called La Situation, he bitterly condemned "the enthusiastic crowd that pressed around as though to crush me, exclaiming t
o each other and enumerating in lowered voices, with a religious astonishment, the fabulous prices of these bits of canvas."33
A total of fourteen Meissonier paintings were on view, including The Battle of Solferino and The Campaign of France. The catalogue for the International Exhibition of Fine Arts listed Friedland among their number, but Meissonier had not managed to finish the work. Though successfully repaired after its mishap the previous December, the canvas was still in Meissonier's Poissy studio. Meissonier seems to have been dissatisfied with his depiction of the horses; in any case, he had begun planning further studies into equine locomotion in order to make his cavalry horses as realistic as possible.
Meissonier's disappointment at not completing Friedland on time was offset by the rapturous reception given his fourteen other paintings. The Universal Exposition of 1867 witnessed his coronation as France's—and indeed the world's—greatest living artist. Praise for him was unanimous and almost boundlessly extravagant. Scarcely a day passed in the spring and summer of 1867 without one critic or another declaring Meissonier's unsurpassed greatness. The respected art historian Charles Blanc, founder of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, wrote that the painter "had no equal . . . either in France or anywhere else." "All things considered, there is only Meissonier in Europe, and he is ours," declared Paul Mantz, who proclaimed him "the hero of the French display." Even Théophile Thoré, a champion of "modern" art as well as the rediscoverer of Jan Vermeer, had no doubt that Meissonier was one of the few painters alive in France who would be "definitively consecrated" by future generations. "Let us prostrate ourselves with Europe," Léon Legrange simply urged his fellows, "at the feet of one of the glories of French art."34