The Judgment of Paris
Page 29
In the run-up to the election, the Committee of Non-Exempt Artists embarked on a well-organized campaign that left no one in any doubt about their intentions. Their slogan was "Liberty in Art," and their published manifesto—which came with a detachable ballot paper inscribed with the names of the twelve candidates—declared that they would follow "a frankly liberal course" and "open the doors of the Salon to all artistic production, whatever its inclination, which they agree unanimously not to reject."13 They were therefore a team of prospective jurors who planned, should they get elected, to abolish the jury altogether. Nieuwerkerke must have held his breath as, on March 22, the Palais des Champs-Élysées filled with artists clutching their ballot papers.
Manet did not put himself forward as a candidate for the painting jury; but not having made a single sale from his 18,000-franc investment in the Place de l'Alma, he decided to end his boycott of the Palais des Champs-Élysées and send work to the 1868 Salon. He had failed to complete The Execution of Maximilian on time to hang it in his pavilion, which had closed on October 10; nor was it ready by the time the deadline for Salon loomed. He had abandoned his second version of the work sometime in the autumn and commenced yet another, this time on an even larger canvas, exactly ten feet wide. But since this latest version of Maximilian's execution was likewise incomplete by the middle of March, he submitted two portraits instead.
The first of these paintings, done some two years earlier, was of Victorine Meurent. Placing before the jurors yet another image of Victorine may have looked like a provocative stunt and a foolish temptation of fate. For this canvas, however, she had worn clothing; or at any rate she had donned a pink peignoir and posed in Manet's studio with an African gray parrot. Begun around the time of the Salon of 1866, the work was entitled Young Lady in 1866. Though Victorine struck a modest pose, little doubt could be left in the mind of the spectator about the profession followed by this particular "young lady": Manet had, as usual, cast Victorine as a prostitute. Parrots were well known as a signature attribute of the courtesan, with Marie Duplessis, for instance, one of the most famous courtesans of the century, having kept a parrot with brilliant feathers in a gilded cage in her apartment in the Rue de la Madeleine. The bird, which she had taught to sing, was sold at auction along with the rest of her possessions after she died in 1847 at the age of twenty-three.*
The subject of Manet's second portrait was, if anything, more notorious than Victorine Meurent. Sometime after closing his pavilion in the Place de l'Alma he had begun a portrait of Émile Zola. Already infamous for his art criticism, by the time the painting was under way Zola had become still more ill-famed as his novel Thirésè Raquin, serialized in L 'Artiste between August and October, appeared in book form in December. A lurid tale of adultery and murder among working-class Parisians, this work plunged even his scandalous first novel, The Confession of Claude, into the shade.
Thirésè Raquin tells the story of an adulterous affair between the title character, the wife of a lowly clerk in a railway company, and a would-be painter named Laurent whose canvases (rather like those of Zola's friend Cézanne) "defied all critical appreciation."14 Zola evoked controversial Realist painters such as Courbet, Manet and Cézanne not merely through his portrayal of Laurent and his violent and ugly canvases layered thickly with paint. The milieu of Manet's Le Déjeuner sur I'herbe was suggested in Chapter Eleven, in the novel's murder scene, where Camille, the cuckolded clerk, goes on a day's outing with his wife and her lover to Saint-Ouen, directly across the Seine from Asnières. Here the three of them encounter among the fairground stalls and raucous cafés the sorts of daytrippers typically found along this stretch of river: office workers and their wives, people in their Sunday best, crews of oarsmen, and "tarts from the Latin Quarter."15 They find a shaded spot in the woods where they sit on the grass, the two men in their coattails and Therese—in a kind of homage to Victorine Meurent—provocatively baring a leg. This description of a threesome reclining on the grass beside the river would undoubtedly have put many readers in mind of Manet's Le Déjeuner sur I'herbe. And the violent outcome of the scene—Camille is strangled and thrown into the Seine—may have confirmed the suspicions of those visitors to the Salon des Refusés who had found something immoral about Manet's ill-assorted grouping of figures.
Zola had confidently predicted to his publisher that Thirésè Raquin would enjoy a "succès d'horreur."16The forecast proved accurate as the novel became both hugely popular—the first edition sold out in less than four months—and highly controversial. The novel was denounced as "putrid literature" by a writer in Le Figaro. "In the past several years," the critic exclaimed in outrage, "there has grown up a monstrous school of novelists which pretends to replace carnal eloquence with eloquence of the charnel house, which invokes the strangest medical anomalies, which musters plague victims so that we can admire their blotchy skin . . . and which makes pus squirt out of the conscience."17 Zola could hardly have been more pleased with the denunciation. Taking maximum advantage of the opportunities for publicity, he fired off a defense of his so-called "cesspit of blood and filth" in a preface to the second edition.18 He claimed his motive was a scientific one and the novel itself merely a kind of experiment in which he scrupulously but dispassionately viewed the results of mixing together a powerful man and an unsatisfied woman. His efforts, he suggested, resembled those of a chemist with his test tubes or an anatomist with his scalpel and his corpse—or, better still, a painter with his paintbrush and a nude model. "I found myself in the same position," Zola wrote, "as those artists who copy the nude body without feeling the least stirrings of desire, and are completely taken aback when a critic declares himself scandalized by the living flesh depicted in their work."19
Manet was full of congratulations for his friend's robust defense. "I must say that someone who can fight back as you do must really enjoy being attacked," he wrote after the preface appeared in print.20 He recognized, of course, that Zola's project was entwined with his own: "You are standing up not only for a group of writers," he wrote, "but for a whole group of artists as well."21 But if Manet's portrait was to show both his gratitude to and his solidarity with Zola, his choice of a subject was a controversial one. He was proposing to place before the 1868 jurors—and then, if all went well, before the members of the public—the image of French literature's greatest enfant terrible.
Portrait of Émile Zola was made even more provocative by its conspicuous inclusion of a particular prop. Zola, who posed for the portrait over the course of several months in Manet's studio, was depicted sitting at a desk with a book in his hand and a number of pictures pinned to the wall. One of these pictures featured the unmistakeable image of Victorine posing as Olympia—a sight bound to raise eyebrows during the jury sessions. In a witty visual joke, Manet altered Victorine's eyes so that they directed themselves at the seated figure of Zola, her defender and champion. He had therefore given his most controversial work a pride of place in both his studio and his portrait of Zola. And he proposed to smuggle back into the Palais des Champs-Élysées the inflammatory image of Victorine reclining naked on her pillows.
More than 800 painters gathered to cast their ballots for the 1868 jury, almost seven times the number who had voted a year earlier.22 There was much frenzied politicking by the teams of candidates as campaigning continued right up to the door of the Palais des Champs-Élysées. The atmosphere was later described by Zola, who wrote that voters were "pounced upon by men in dirty smocks shouting lists of candidates. There were at least thirty different lists . . . representing all possible cliques and opinions: Beaux-Arts lists, liberal, die-hard, coalition lists, 'young-school' lists, and ladies' lists. It was exactly like the rush at the polling booths the day after a riot."23
The result of the wider suffrage and the campaigns by painters such as Courbet produced a jury that, after the dust had settled,appeared to differ very little from those of the previous few years. Each of the twelve painters elected for service in 1868ha
d served on at least one previous jury, though Cabanel and Gérôme, who normally polled at the top of the list, were placedonly seventh and twelfth respectively. The man who drew the most votes, by a substantial margin, was Daubigny, a member ofCourbet's slate for whom more than half of all voters had ticked. He had been a popular choice among many of the younger artists,such as Pissarro and Renoir, who were voting for the first time, and who had appreciated the support of this "man of heart"against his more conservative colleagues on the Jury of Assassins in 1866. However, the only other member of Courbet's partyto get himself elected was Charles Gleyre, and the voters returned several prominent members of the Jury of Assassins, includingBaudry and Breton.
Perhaps the biggest surprise of the voting was that Meissonier failed to find special favor with the electorate, falling short of the 275 ballots required for elevation onto the jury. Despite his towering reputation, enhanced over the previous few months by both the Universal Exposition and the sale of Friedland, he finished only fifteenth, which gave him a position as one of the alternates. His disenchantment with the Salon, where he had not stooped from his Olympian heights to show work since 1865, coupled with his lack of enthusiasm for the invidious task of serving on the jury, meant he had not actively campaigned for votes. Even so, such a modest showing was a humiliation for the man hailed as Europe's greatest artist. Many of the younger artists who had been enfranchised for the first time, and who were struggling to get their work displayed, clearly did not regard the stupendously successful Meissonier as someone who might best understand their aims or represent their interests.
Meissonier's immediate response was to resign from his position as an alternate. This indignant rejection of the decision of his peers appears to have won him few friends, especially among the younger painters; in fact, it seems to have been a turning point in his career. By 1868 he was fast becoming a marked man. His enormous success and conspicuous prosperity meant that the younger generation—and in particular propagandists for the Generation of 1863 such as Zola and Zacharie Astruc—regarded him as a giant to be slain, together with the two other artistic leviathans of the age, Cabanel and Gérôme. The stratospheric prices fetched by Meissonier's paintings as well as his abundant critical laurels jarred all too conspicuously with, for example, Manet's collection of grisly reviews and his stack of unsold canvases, while the painters of the Generation of 1863 found his painstaking technique difficult to appreciate. Astruc had assailed him as early as 1860, disparaging his work for its supposed creative destitution. After seeing an exhibition of Meissonier's paintings in the Galerie Martinet, Astruc sneered that the work demonstrated "neither movement nor heat nor spirit nor imagination, but only cold-bloodedness, tenacity and, embroidering the whole, a patience for work verging on the phenomenal."24
The ground had begun subtly to shift beneath Meissonier's feet. He may have been more sympathetic than most of his colleagues on the jury to the techniques and styles of the refuse's of 1863 and 1866; yet the "new movement" praised by Zola—the striving for an abstraction of visual effect through the apparently spontaneous application of paint—was as far removed as could be imagined from the severe precision of his own style. Gautier had once enthused over how Meissonier painted so realistically that the viewer fancied he could see his figures' lips move.25 By the middle of the 1860s this sort of finicky exactitude was suddenly, in the eyes of certain painters, merely the stock-in-trade of the technically flawless but creatively barren alumni of the École des Beaux-Arts. Even Delacroix had once admitted in his journal, with pointed reference to Meissonier, that "there is something else in painting besides exactitude and precise rendering from the model."26 Meissonier suddenly found himself in danger of being assailed for the very techniques which had won him such fame in the first place.
1A. Remembrance of Civil War (Ernest Meissonier)
IB. Liberty Leading the People (Eugène Delacroix)
2A. The Emperor Napoléon III at the Battle of Solferino (Ernest Meissonier)
2B. The Campaign of France (Ernest Meissonier)
3A. Music in the Tuileries (Édouard Manet)
3B. A Burial at Ornans (Gustave Courbet)
4A. The Birth of Venus (Alexandre Cabanel)
4B. Olympia (Édouard Manet)
5A. Le Déjeuner sur I'herbe (Claude Monet)
5B. Le Déjeuner sur I'herbe, originally entitled Le Bain (Édouard Manet)
6A. The Races at Longchamp (Édouard Manet)
6B. Friedland (Ernest Meissonier)
7A. The Siege of Paris (Ernest Meissonier)
7B. The Railway (Édouard Manet) I
8A. Le Bon Bock (Édouard Manet)
8B. Bathers at La Grenouillère (Claude Monet)
*Courbet's other candidates were Adolphe Yvon; Hugues Merle; Louis-Henri de Rudder; the journalist Jules-Antoine Castagnary;the Néo-Grec painter Auguste-Barthélémy Glaize, whose work had been appearing at the Salon since 1836; a former student ofGlaize named Théodule-Augustin Ribot, who had been an exhibitor at the 1863 Salon des Refusés; two landscapists, Charles Jacquesand Eugène Isabey; and the journalist Henri Rochefort (on whom, more below).
*Born Alphonsine Plessis, the daughter of a tinker, Marie Duplessis was the most famous woman in Paris for a brief period in the 1840s. During her short career she would inspire Franz Liszt, marry the son of King Louis-Philippe's banker (thereby acquiring the title Comtesse de Perregaux), and become the lover of Alexandre Dumas fils, whose novel (and subsequent play) about her, La Dame aux Camelias, inspired Giuseppe Verdi's La Traviata in 1853.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
A Salon of Newcomers
THE PROTESTS AND petitions launched in the spring of 1867 seemed to have borne fruit when the results of the 1868 jury's decisions were made public: more than 5,000 works of art—paintings, sculptures, engravings, photographs—had been submitted, of which more than eighty-three percent were accepted, including 2,587 paintings.1 The successful artists included Camille Pissarro, who had desperately needed some good news after his rejections in 1866 and 1867. With his riverbank views lingering unsold in his studio, and with two young children to feed, he had been forced to earn money by painting awnings and shop signs. In April, however, he received a letter from Daubigny reporting that both of his pictures had been admitted.2 These canvases, both landscapes, were views of Pissarro's newly adopted home of Pontoise, a market town on the River Oise, eighteen miles northwest of Paris. Another refusé from the previous two Salons, Renoir, likewise found favor with the jury, as did Manet's elegant friend Edgar Degas. In keeping with his love of ballet and opera, Degas had submitted a dreamy costume-piece, Mademoiselle Eugénie Fiocre in the Ballet "La Source?' which was based on a scene from a ballet performed with much success at the Paris Opéra in 1866.
Both of Manet's submissions, Young Lady in 18GG and Portrait of Émile Zola, were accepted without, apparently, either questions or confabulations. The jurors were perhaps reluctant to decline these works lest they bring down on their heads the wrath of the bellicose subject of the second portrait, since Zola had been engaged to cover the Salon for L 'Événement illustré, a journal that had risen from the ashes of L 'Événement following its suppression by the authorities at the end of 1866. In any case, Manet would make a return to the Palais des Champs-Élysées for the first time since the controversy over Olympia three years earlier.
Despite the new munificence on the part of the jury, the results still managed to yield a few disappointments. Paul Cézanne, as ever, failed to have a canvas accepted. One of Cézanne's friends explained his failure by averring that he had "no chance of showing his work in officially sanctioned exhibitions for a long time to come. His name is already too well known; too many revolutionary ideas in art are connected with it; the painters on the jury will not weaken for an instant."3 This perhaps overestimated Cézanne's notoriety, but his arrestingly unique style—combining Courbet's use of the palette knife with Manet's thick outlines and sharp juxtapositions of color—produced undenia
bly brusque-looking canvases with bold but sometimes virtually indecipherable images. The subject matter of his work was frequently as alarming as the style. In 1868 he painted The Murder, a disturbingly brutal scene in which two figures, one wielding a dagger, are shown violently attacking a third. He had also made preparatory sketches for The Autopsy, featuring a man's naked corpse stretched on a mortuary slab as a bearded doctor prepares to set to work. Such eerie-looking scenes had little chance of finding a place on the walls of the Salon. But Cézanne had been persistent, going to the Palais des Champs-Élysées each March, as another friend wryly observed, "carrying his canvases on his back like Jesus with his cross"4—and then bearing them, stamped with a red R, back to his grubby studio. Such martyrdom began to grate. Cézanne's constant rejection made him even more bitter and cantankerous than usual on the rare occasions when he could be tempted to join the company in the Café Guerbois. Asked by Manet on one such circumstance whether he intended to submit anything to the Salon, Cézanne had retorted: "Yes, a pot of shit!"5