The Judgment of Paris

by Ross King

  Le Déjeuner sur I'herbe, meanwhile, has staked its own claim as a foundation of modern art. Few serious artists have managed to escape its spell. It inspired Claude Monet's own Le Déjeuner sur I'herbe as well as Cézanne's numerous paintings of male and female nudes bathing in streams and lounging on riverbanks. Most transfixed of all, though, was Picasso, who was born just eighteen months before Manet died. Le Déjeuner sur I'herbe inspired him more than any other painting. "One can see the intelligence in each of Manet's brushstrokes," he once wrote to a friend.14 Ultimately Picasso would produce some 200 versions of the work: 150 drawings, twenty-seven oil paintings, and even a number of cardboard models from which thirteen-foot-high statues were created from sand-blasted concrete and sent to adorn the sculpture garden of the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. He was attempting to dissect this most enigmatic of paintings, probing at it from every angle with his pencil and brush, repeatedly taking it apart and putting it back together in a struggle to divine the secrets of its power and mystique.15

  Picasso had first seen Le Déjeuner sur I'herbe in 1900, when it was shown at the Universal Exposition in Paris, in a room in the Grand Palais that the Fine Arts administration grudgingly dedicated to Impressionism. The seventy-six-year-old Gérôme had tried to prevent Émile Loubet, the French president, from entering the room by exclaiming: "Stop, sir, for in there France is dishonoured!"16 Thirty-seven years after its appearance at the Salon des Refusés, paintings by the members of the École des Batignolles still had the power to provoke and offend.

  Le Déjeuner sur I'herbe had a much longer wait than Olympia for its consecration. It had first been bought in 1878, for 3,000 francs, by Jean-Baptiste Faure, the singer who had acquired Le Bon Bock five years earlier for double that price. Two decades later it was purchased for 55,000 francs by the collector and art historian Étienne Moreau-Nélaton, who willed the work to the French nation in 1906. The canvas was deposited not in the Louvre proper but rather—in a bizarre act that revealed lingering official hostilities—in a room in the Louvre then occupied by the Ministry of Finance. Not until 1934 did the officials of the Louvre see fit to place Le Déjeuner sur I'herbe in the part of the building concerned with the fine arts rather than fiscal policy. Both works were subsequently moved, in 1947, to what became known as the "Impressionist Museum," the Musée du Jeu de Paume, situated in the northwest corner of the Jardin des Tuileries, in a building Napoléon III had constructed to house tennis courts. This new museum was, as the Louvre's Chief Conservator declared, a "triumphant temple" to a style of art that by then had gained a worldwide popularity.17 In that year an admiring American art historian, Robert Goldwater, declared of Le Déjeuner sur I'herbe: "No other painter of the century managed to get so much into a canvas."18

  In 1986 the two paintings were again moved, this time to another newly founded "Impressionist Museum," the Musée d'Orsay. By this time, dozens of Manet paintings had found themselves into museums all over the world, from Russia and Poland to Australia and Japan, and in every corner of America. Most spectacular, perhaps, had been the entry of ten of his canvases into the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1929, as part of the bequest of Louisine Havemeyer. Prices for Manet's paintings have risen in accordance with his collection in museums. As early as the 1920s examples of his work were selling for more than 400,000 francs; by the 1950s a number of his canvases had exceeded a million francs; and by the 1970s they had surpassed a million U.S. dollars. In 1983 a work painted in the early 1880s, La Promenade, showing a woman strolling in a park, sold for $3.6 million; six years later it fetched $14,850,000. More recently, in May 2004, Sotheby's in New York sold The Races in the Bois de Boulogne—the canvas for which Barret paid 3,000 francs in 1872—for just over $26 million. But the record price for a Manet painting is still the $26.4 million paid in 1989 by the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles for The Rue Mosnier with Flags, a street scene that Manet painted in 1878 from the window of his studio in the Rue de Saint-Petersbourg. Anyone managing to locate one of Manet's lost paintings, especially Croquet at Boulogne—a far more exemplary work once described by a connoisseur as a "delicious painting"19—could reasonably expect to receive a good deal more.

  Manet's vital statistics have been equally healthy on the turnstiles of the world's museums. Three major shows featuring his work were mounted in the year 2003 alone. Manet at the Prado, in Madrid, averaged almost 6,000 visitors per day, or more than 439,000 altogether, making it the second most successful exhibition ever staged at the museum. Manet/Velázquez, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, drew more than 553,000 viewers following an equally impressive outing at the Musée d'Orsay. Finally, an exhibition dedicated to his maritime painting, Manet and the Sea, opened at the Art Institute of Chicago before traveling to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In 2004 it moved to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, where, in the country of Suzanne Manet's birth, it proved the most successful exhibition of the year. A poll conducted by BBC Radio 4 in the summer of 2005 testified to the widespread appeal of Manet's work, with A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (in London's Courtauld Institute of Art) attracting the third-highest tally of votes for the public's favorite painting in a British museum. Only works by twin titans of British art, Constable and Turner, finished higher.

  "Time gives every human being his true value," Ernest Meissonier once wrote. "The real worth of a man cannot be gauged until he is dead, until the clamor of friendship dies down over his ashes, until the farewell speeches, official or kindly, have been delivered. Then the edifice either crumbles away, or endures in glory, flooded with light and fame."20

  Few artists can have brooded over their posthumous reputation as much as Meissonier. After dominating his own era so completely, nothing remained for him but the conquest of future generations. His obsession with mural painting was a symptom of his anxieties about this rendezvous with posterity. In the end, though, despite his grand designs, he would not spread a single brush of paint on his wall in the Panthéon. A man who took an entire decade to paint a few square yards of canvas was never going to be a good bet to finish a colossal mural, plans for which did indeed prove—as the skeptics had predicted—an "absurd fantasy." This failure nonetheless did little to undermine his cosmic preeminence. In 1878 he showed sixteen paintings at the third Universal Exposition held in Paris, and for the third time he was given the Grand Medal of Honor—an award that simply reconfirmed his stature as Europe's most celebrated painter. Then in 1889 he became the first artist ever to receive the Grand Cross, the highest order of the Legion of Honor.

  Two years after its unveiling in Vienna, Meissonier had finally completed Friedland more or less to his own satisfaction, signing "EMeissonier 1875" in black paint in the lower left-hand corner. He was suitably compensated for the snub by Sir Richard Wallace when, in 1876, another buyer was found: Alexander T. Stewart, an Irish-born American dry-goods millionaire known as "The Merchant Prince." The single largest taxpayer in America, Stewart paid 380,000 francs for Friedland, almost double the price originally offered by the Marquess of Hertford. The work was shipped to America early in 1876—though not before Meissonier, on the eve of its departure, scraped down and then repainted the central group of horsemen. Once in New York, Friedland became one of the grandest trophies of the Gilded Age, adorning the sky-lit picture gallery in Stewart's $1.5 million mansion on West Thirty-fourth Street. Henry James would exult in The New York Tribune that Stewart had claimed one of "the highest prizes in the game of civilization."21

  Stewart did not enjoy his prize for long. He died in April 1876, only a few weeks after taking delivery of Friedland. The work remained in Stewart's mansion (which occupied the site where the Empire State Building would eventually be built) until it was sold at auction in New York in 1887. Judge Henry Hilton, the executor of Stewart's estate, purchased it for $69,000—the equivalent of more than 300,000 francs—and immediately donated it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. More than a century later, Friedland is still in the museum, where it hangs in
a corridor beside another great equestrian canvas, Rosa Bonheur's The Horse Fair. Visitors to the Metropolitan Museum can admire it immediately before passing into the "Manet Room" (featuring nine of Manet's canvases) only a few yards away. The "two opposite poles of art" have been brought together within steps of one another.

  Stewart and Hilton were not the only American tycoons with a taste for Meissonier. William H. Vanderbilt, the shipping and railway magnate, would purchase seven of his paintings and also sit for a portrait; all were shipped to New York to grace his block-long Greek Renaissance townhouse, "The Triple Palace," on Fifth Avenue. The most exalted estimate of Meissonier's worth was offered, though, by a Frenchman. In 1890, the year before Meissonier's death, Alfred Chauchard, owner of the Grands Magasins du Louvre, an enormous department store in the Rue de Rivoli, paid a staggering 850,000 francs when The Campaign of France, formerly owned by Gaston Delahante, came onto the market. To get some perspective, the entire annual budget for the Paris Opéra was 800,000 francs, a sum sufficient to maintain an eighty-piece orchestra along with seventy ballet dancers and sixty choristers.22 This stratospheric price made The Campaign of France the most expensive painting ever purchased during the nineteenth century, by a painter either living or dead. Almost two decades after the Universal Exhibition in Vienna, Meissonier's signature had still been worth that of the Bank of France.

  Meissonier died at his Paris mansion in the Boulevard Malesherbes on January 31,1891, a few weeks shy of his seventy-sixth birthday. He was survived by his children and by Elisa Bezanson, whom he had married two years earlier, following Emma's death in 1888. After a Requiem Mass at the church of the Madeleine, his body was taken for burial to the cemetery of La Tournelle in Poissy. The following year Henri Delaborde, a distinguished art historian, delivered Meissonier's eulogy at the annual meeting of the Académie des Beaux-Arts. "Meissonier's life flowed on for half a century," claimed Delaborde, "in the splendor of a glory without eclipse, in the confident possession of success of every kind, and homage in every form . . . Everything was exceptional in that brilliant career, from the constant chorus of admiration which acclaimed it, to the universal emotion with which the news of its close has been greeted, both in France and abroad."23

  Meissonier had the good fortune to die while his reputation was still intact and unsurpassed. But within a decade or two, his reputation—and his prices—had collapsed. "Many people who had great reputations," he once gravely observed, "are nothing but burst balloons now"24—and he himself provides the most cautionary and startling example. By 1926 the art historian Andre Michel, a professor at the College de France, was able to write: "The case of Meissonier is one that gives us pause to reflect about the variations of taste and the vicissimdes of glory. No painter was more adulated during his lifetime . . . His reputation was global. But what remains today of all this magnificence?"25 Two decades later, Lionello Venmri's two-volume history of nineteenth-century French art, Modern Painters, made no mention of him whatsoever: Meissonier had vanished from the history of French art like a murdered enemy of Stalin airbrushed from an official Soviet photograph.

  When not expurgated from the history of French art, Meissonier has been cast as one of its villains, an evil genius who, among his various sins, frustrated the career of Édouard Manet—the man praised by Michel as someone "who played the role of the heroic annunciator, the initiator of a new art."26 Meissonier's place has thus become an invidious one, that of the counterpole to more progressive artistic movements of the second half of the nineteenth century. Forty years after Michel, a French writer named Jean-Paul Crespelle, author of numerous popular guides to Impressionism, even managed to make Meissonier an opponent of Delacroix, who was in fact one of his best friends and supporters.27 But loathing of Meissonier has known few boundaries, including that of historical accuracy. As Jacques Thuiller, a modern-day professor at the College de France, wrote in 1993: "Rare is the artist on whom more prejudice—and even hatred—has accumulated than Meissonier. Not long ago the mere act of looking at one of his works was considered worthy of excommunication."28 Meissonier was even despised by a staunch aesthetic conservative like John Canaday, the chief art critic for the New York Times during the 1960s and a bitter opponent of the Abstract Expressionists and other exponents of modernism. Canaday confessed himself enraged at the thought that "while this mean-spirited, cantankerous and vindictive little man was adulated, great painters were without money for paints and brushes."29 In 1983 a French connoisseur was even heard advocating the incineration of Meissonier's canvases.30

  In two generations, Meissonier went from the most revered painter in Europe—and one of the world's most famous Frenchmen—to an artist who caused such embarrassment to the French establishment that in 1964 a marble statue of him unveiled four years after his death was unceremoniously removed from the Louvre on orders from Andre Malraux, Charles de Gaulle's Minister of State for Cultural Affairs. Even more demeaning was the fate of another statue of Meissonier, cast by Emmanuel Frémiet in 1894 and unveiled near the church in Poissy: it was melted down for scrap.

  Thuiller has claimed that Meissonier's excesses—his enormous wealth as well as the excruciating conscientiousness of his paintings—became "a target for the new generations." The art critic Gustave Coquiot, who was born in 1865, the year of Olympia, summed up the opinion of many younger artists appalled by the extravagant prices paid for Meissonier's works by men such as Stewart, Vanderbilt and Chauchard. Author of books on Van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec, and a man who once posed for the young Pablo Picasso, Coquiot claimed that Meissonier was "the representative choice of the limitless stupidity of the bourgeoisie and the nouveaux riches. . . . He possessed in exact proportions the ignominies of his time; and he threw into the face of the nouveaux riches of two hemispheres his low smears, a puerile and silly tedium that they found so agreeable. Thus we have Meissonier, a bad painter for businessmen and vulgar upstarts! Yes, all of that, and nothing more."31

  Coquiot's hateful shrieks ring a little false when set against the nouveau riche adulation of the Impressionists: in 1912 Louisine Havemeyer purchased Degas's Dancers Practicing at the Bane for 435,000 francs, or a little more than $95,000, which made it 55,000 francs more expensive than Friedland. The difference between Meissonier and Manet was actually over artistic aims and techniques, not side issues such as fat bank balances and great painters (in Canaday's melodramatic scenario) "without money for paints and brushes." The decade between 1863 and 1874—the years between the Salon des Refusés and the First Impressionist Exhibition—had witnessed a struggle between the votaries of the past and those of la vie moderne. This struggle concerned rival ways of painting as well as, ultimately, rival ways of seeing the world, and it would result in the greatest revolution in the visual arts since the Italian Renaissance. The contest was shot through with amusing ironies as well as questions about our most confident value judgments. It is superbly ironic, in the first place, that at a time when a group of artists began experimenting with new methods of capturing their "sensations" of objects through slurred colors and summary brushwork, the most celebrated painter in France should have been constructing his own railway track for the purposes of understanding with micrometric accuracy the precise motions of a galloping horse's legs—and then attempting faithfully to convey this movement on his canvas with one of the steadiest and most deliberating paintbrushes in the history of art. That the cultural gatekeepers condemned the first procedure as roundly as they celebrated the second seems perversely unthinkable from a point of view—the one that has prevailed for the past century—that takes for granted that what one sees is not as important in the visual arts as how one sees or expresses it.

  To these gatekeepers, however, our reversal of their aesthetic judgments, and the collapse of Meissonier's reputation at the expense of those of Manet and the Impressionists, would have been equally unthinkable. Meissonier is far from alone, though, in suffering a posthumous reputation that cruelly gainsays his contemporary ac
claim. Numerous other artists and writers have paid for the applause of their lifetimes with silence and obscurity after their deaths. Removing the idols of the previous generation from their pedestals has long been a favorite pastime of cultural historians—though rarely does it happen quite as literally as in the case of the two statues of Meissonier. The French offer a striking literary parallel to Meissonier in Anatole France, their most popular writer in the two or three decades before his death in 1924, yet someone now devoid of an influence or a following.32 Such harsh reevaluations provide a matter for sober reflection not only for today's cultural icons but to all those who realize that posterity will always have the last word.

  There is perhaps a final irony in Manet and Meissonier's careers. Before we mock the seemingly inexplicable appeal for nineteenth-century Salon-goers of Meissonier's bonshommes in their quaint costumes, it is worth considering whether some of the more recent admiration for Impressionist portrayals of "modern life" may be steeped in something of the same yearning for a bygone time. Meissonier's spurred and booted cavaliers being served drinks outside a country tavern spoke to nineteenth-century Parisians in the same language of gentle nostalgia that Monet's parasol-clutching woman wading through a field of poppies, or Manet's barmaid under a chandelier at the Folies-Bergère, speak to many museum-goers today. The painters of modern life created, in the end, the same consoling visions of the past.