The Art of Rivalry

by Sebastian Smee

  Degas, like Lucian Freud, was instinctively drawn to the unknown aspects of people, especially those to whom he was closest. It had struck him that, for all Manet’s social fluency, his laconic magnetism, there was something about him that remained elusive. And he was sure that, to some uncertain extent, that something involved Suzanne. The more entwined the two men’s social lives became, the more it seemed so. Degas was like a hound getting a scent: instinctively, helplessly (perhaps even in spite of his own best interests) caught up in the chase.

  We don’t know how long the sittings took. We don’t know if Suzanne actually played while Degas was painting, or (if she did) what she played. But we do know that when he had finished the picture, Degas—justly proud of his efforts—presented it to Manet.

  What happened next has baffled art historians and biographers ever since.

  Some time later (no one knows quite how long), Degas paid a visit to Manet’s studio. When Degas spied his finished painting, he immediately saw that something was wrong. Someone had taken to it with a knife. The blade had gone right through Suzanne’s face.

  The culprit, as Degas presently discovered, was Manet himself. We don’t know what he said to explain away the deed. Degas, one imagines, was probably too stunned to hear him. He chose simply to leave—“without saying goodbye,” he later recalled, “and taking my picture with me.”

  Back home, Degas took down the little still life Manet had given him after a dinner party at which Degas had broken a salad bowl. He had it wrapped, and sent it back with a note that, according to Ambroise Vollard, said: “Monsieur, I am returning your Plums.”

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  ÉDOUARD MANET WAS THE wayward eldest son of two respected members of France’s grand bourgeoisie. His father, Auguste, was a lawyer who would later become chief of staff at the Ministry of Justice, then a high-ranking judge, and eventually court counsel. His mother, Eugénie-Desirée, was the daughter of a French diplomatic emissary to Sweden. She was also a godchild to Napoleon’s marshal of France, Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte—the French army officer who went on to become King Charles XIV of Sweden. Her firstborn son, Édouard, was expected to go into the law like his father. But in his studies he showed little aptitude, and even less application. “Wholly inadequate” was the verdict on one report from the collège Rollin, the prestigious school in Paris he left soon after. What he did like was art. His mother’s brother, Édouard Fournier, encouraged him to pursue it, and even gave him drawing lessons. Fournier used to take Manet and his young friend Antonin Proust to the Louvre, where, more than a decade later, Manet would meet Degas.

  In 1848, a year of revolutions across Europe, Manet sought permission from his father to enter the École Navale, the naval academy. His father consented, but Manet failed the entrance exams. A loophole allowed him to try again if he went first on a training vessel bound for Rio de Janeiro. And so off he set on a voyage across the Atlantic. He endured horrible seasickness (“the rolling is so bad that you can’t stay below deck,” he wrote to his mother). He crossed the equator—a momentous rite of passage for any sailor—practiced fencing, and made sketches for his fellow sailors. When his ship finally reached Rio, he attended a Mardi Gras carnival, observed a slave market (“a rather revolting spectacle for people like us”), and was bitten by a snake on an excursion to an island in the bay of Rio.

  He couldn’t wait to get back to Paris. When he did, he was granted his second attempt at the entrance exam. But he failed again. His father, in despair, finally bowed to the inevitable and agreed to let him train as an artist. And so the following year, 1850, Manet found himself studying in the studio of Thomas Couture, a progressive artist, classically trained. Couture was still beholden to academic subjects, but he was willing nonetheless to break with many old-fashioned practices—above all, by letting bright color and texture into his pictures. Manet would stay with him for six long years.

  But 1850 marked the beginning of an even more momentous relationship in Manet’s life. It was the year he began a secret romantic affair with Suzanne Leenhoff, the Dutchwoman his parents had hired to teach their sons piano. Clandestine visits to Suzanne’s apartment in the rue de la Fontaine-au-Roi culminated in her becoming pregnant in the spring of 1851. Suzanne was twenty-two. Manet was just nineteen. And at the beginning of 1852, Suzanne gave birth to a son, Léon.

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  WHEN MANET HAD EMBARKED on his secret liaison with the piano teacher employed by his father, it was just one of many misdemeanors marking his youth and frustrating his parents. There were the poor school results, the failure to follow his father into the law, the twice-failed entrance exams to the naval academy, and—perhaps worst of all—his insistence on becoming a painter. So his parents were well aware that they had a wayward, obstinate son. They seemed to have reached the conclusion that there was little to be gained from trying to obstruct him.

  But when Suzanne became pregnant with Léon, it was an outright disaster. Impregnating a foreign woman from a lower social class and out of wedlock was, in itself, an outrage against bourgeois propriety. It was notably worse for the Manet family because of the special social position of Manet’s father. Not only was Auguste a judge of the First Instance of the Seine, who went to work at the Palais de Justice; he also routinely heard paternity cases. The potential for embarrassment, therefore, was acute. The idea that Auguste should now have to welcome a bastard child into the family was beyond the pale—and Manet must have known this immediately.

  It had to be kept secret.

  Luckily, Manet could trust and confide in his mother. When he did, she immediately took matters in hand. She informed Suzanne’s mother, who came quickly from Holland to Paris. Léon was born on January 29, 1852. He was registered “Koëlla, Léon-Édouard, son of Koëlla and Suzanne Leenhoff” (no mention of Manet), and he was presented in society as Suzanne’s brother—that is, as the last-born son of the woman who was actually his grandmother.

  Manet, meanwhile, was made Léon’s godfather at his baptism. And so for many years he shuttled back and forth between his own home and an apartment in the Batignolles district, where Léon lived with Suzanne, Suzanne’s mother, and later her two brothers, who also moved to Paris from Holland.

  Manet lived, in other words, a double life—not so much by choice as by necessity. There was a secret at the very center of his private life that needed to be protected. And it was. In fact, the Manet family was so successful at disguising their secret that we still don’t really know details of the circumstances around Léon’s birth and early life. It was all very deliberately obscured. How this affected Manet in the long term we can only guess. But it seems certain that it contributed to a pressure, a tension, that lay not far beneath the breezy, insouciant surface of his art.

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  MANET WAS A FERVENT REPUBLICAN. So he was appalled when, at the end of that same year, 1851, Louis-Napoléon staged the coup that gave rise to France’s Second Empire. The brutality of the coup, and the era of censorship that ensued, did much to snuff out republican hopes, which had been so giddy after the upheavals of 1848. Young artists and writers now became disillusioned by the political sphere. They turned away from big public themes toward more private subjects. Manet was part of this general tendency, and yet his political convictions burned hotly beneath his cool visage. He had been out in the streets with his friend, Proust, on December 2, 1851, when Louis-Napoléon—or “Napoleon III,” as he would style himself exactly one year later—made his grab for power. The two young art students observed much chaos and bloodletting as the day unfolded. They were even arrested and detained for several nights—although more for their own safety than because they represented a threat.

  In the coup’s aftermath, Manet and his fellow students at Couture’s went to the cemetery at Montmartre, where Napoleon’s dead victims had been carried, in order to sketch the bodies. A quietly macabre streak—dating, perhaps, to this formative experience—would run through much of Manet’s later work. It fed into painting
s like The Dead Toreador (1864), The Execution of the Emperor Maximilian (1868–69), and The Suicide (1877), and it touched—like the “shadow of life passing all the time” so admired by Francis Bacon in the court paintings of Manet’s hero, the Spanish painter Diego Velázquez—even his ostensibly sunnier pictures. There was a dollop of melancholy, even of morbidity, behind Manet’s legendary charm. This would later fascinate Degas, who was himself an introspective man, a brooder.

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  MANET MAY HAVE BEEN a burr in the side of his respectable parents, an irresolute, underachieving elder son. But by his mid-twenties, he had grown into an agreeable and impressive man. After years studying under Couture, who was just progressive enough to suggest new possibilities, and just academic enough to provide a model to kick against, he was finally coming into his own. He had developed a brisk, bracing new manner of painting, based on sensuous brushwork, strong outlines, and abrupt transitions between lights and darks, and it had piqued the interest of critics. When his painting The Spanish Singer—which showed a guitar player, perched on a blue bench, against a dark, empty background—was exhibited at the Salon of 1861, its effect was disarming, earning Manet accolades from conservative and progressive commentators alike.

  For more than a century, the Salon had been the most important annual art event in the Western world and the most vital single arbiter of artists’ reputations. It was the official, government-sponsored exhibition where, in vast galleries hung floor-to-ceiling, the public came in huge numbers to see a broad cross section of the latest painting. Eclecticism reigned. Every conceivable style was on display, all vying for attention. Ambitious painters contributed heroically outsized canvases, with eye-catching updates of old subjects. The vast majority of what was displayed was the product of an official culture that insisted that aesthetic excellence be rooted in traditional technique. Subjects that reflected bourgeois proprieties and, wherever possible, the glory of the French state were highly favored. And so almost all of what was depicted was grounded in the past: in episodes celebrating virtue from history, from the Bible, and from Greek and Roman mythology. These works were all aimed at fortifying a grand but largely hollowed-out tradition. Painting that directly reflected contemporary Parisian life was nowhere to be seen.

  All this was about to change. But for a painter in the 1860s, success at the Salon still seemed a necessary stepping-stone toward a viable career. Manet, for all his exuberance, was not out to disrupt this assumption. Over the following decade, year in and year out, he dutifully submitted his work to the Salon. Sometimes he was accepted, sometimes not. What he detested was the air of cliché that enveloped the art of his time, and so he was determined to rebel against the Salon from within. He had no interest in producing yet another rendition of Hercules and his labors, or of Napoleon in his pomp. Feminine beauty aroused him, but he held the prevailing penchant for porcelain-smooth and glabrous eroticism, glazed with a thin crust of moral piety, in utter contempt. And he detested above all the refusal to register anything that smacked of real life, of personal appetite, of the present tense.

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  IN THE SPANISH SINGER, the guitarist’s tattered white shoes and the white scarf tied under his black hat were enough to make casual observers brand Manet a “realist.” This immediately put him in the same category as Gustave Courbet, whose flinty pictures of laboring peasants, forested landscapes, and plump, erotic nudes had been shaking up the establishment since 1850. The brash and self-promoting Courbet was allergic to fussiness and loyal to concrete, un-idealized truths in ways that appealed instinctively to Manet (and would later have a huge impact on Lucian Freud). Courbet was fed up with the insistent emphasis—at least in officially sanctioned art—on tired mythology and distant historical events. More than any other artist of his generation, he wanted to face up to what it was like to be alive now.

  But Courbet was from the provinces; it was rural life he was interested in—not the city. In the city (and no city in the world at that time was more sophisticated and manifold than Paris), Courbet’s literalism could seem cloddish and crass. Manet wanted to find an urban, or really an urbane, equivalent. And so, more by instinct than calculation, he set about developing a new approach, one that combined Courbet’s straightforwardness with a secrecy, a playfulness, and a disregard for rules that perfectly expressed his own personality.

  Manet’s picturesque touches of “real life” in paintings like The Street Singer fell deliberately short of Courbet’s idea of realism. Even as it expressed an appetite, a freshness, that was entirely new, there was something provocatively ironic and knowing about Manet’s gleefully patched-together style. His pictures came with a wink. When it was pointed out that the guitarist in The Spanish Singer was left-handed and yet played an instrument strung for a right-handed player, Manet was unfazed, and blamed his mirror: “What can I say?” he blithely replied. “Just think, I painted the head in one go. After working for two hours, I looked at it in my little black mirror, and it was all right. I never added another stroke.”

  Manet’s so-called realism, that’s to say, was actually nothing of the sort. It was, instead, a kind of counterfeit realism, a casual yet elaborate aesthetic game he was just beginning to perfect. What mattered was not so much the game’s rules—these were negotiable—as the spirit in which it was played. The impact of these sly, foxy pictures at the Salon was profound.

  Several young painters who went together to the Salon of 1861, according to the critic Fernand Desnoyers, were seen looking “at each other in amazement, searching their memories and asking themselves, like children at a magic show: Where could Manet have come from?” Something about not just the subject but also Manet’s insouciant handling of it seemed, to them, to hold out the promise of liberation. It was a freighted moment—a turning point. These same painters later came, as a group, to Manet’s studio, along with several writers, including the poet and critic Charles Baudelaire and the critic and novelist Edmond Duranty. Manet welcomed all his admirers brightly. And from that moment on, he became, without ever having asked, the de facto leader of a younger generation of painters itching to change the course of art history.

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  MANET FIRST MET DEGAS that same year, 1861, while wandering through the galleries of the Louvre. He was just shy of thirty. Degas was twenty-six or twenty-seven, a morose-looking young man with a scruffy beard, a high forehead, and hooded eyes, bottomlessly black. He had set himself up in one of the Louvre’s grand galleries with an easel and etching plate, and was struggling to etch a copy of Velázquez’s painting of the Spanish royal princess, the Infanta Margarita.

  Since Manet was in the throes of a sustained infatuation with all things Spanish, and since he lionized the seventeenth-century chronicler of Philip IV’s court above all other painters, it was surely no accident that he had wound up in the gallery containing Velázquez’s small portrait of the blond infanta (a painting since downgraded to “workshop of Velázquez,” but no matter). Manet, moreover, had lately been immersing himself in all the arcana of etching, and so he had a few ready-to-go thoughts on the subject.

  He ambled over to Degas and saw immediately that he was making a hash of things. Clearing his throat, he proceeded to offer up a few good-humored words of advice. Degas was touchy, and proud, and the intrusion might easily have irked him. So it’s one measure of Manet’s sheer congeniality that the encounter produced an opposite effect. Degas later reported that he would never forget the lesson he received from Manet that day, “along with his lasting friendship.”

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  DEGAS WAS THE ELDEST of five children, a favored son from a family, like Manet’s, that was affluent. His grandfather, Hilaire, had led an extraordinary life. He was a speculator on the French grain market and a money changer. His fiancée was guillotined by revolutionaries in 1792 for aiding the enemy. He fled Paris the next year after receiving a tip-off that he was about to suffer the same fate. He later joined Napoleon’s army in Egypt before ending up in Naple
s, where he got married and established a successful bank. Soon, he became personal banker to the newly installed Neapolitan king, Joachim Murat—Napoleon’s brother-in-law. Even after the demise of Napoleon and the second restoration of the Bourbon monarchy, Hilaire’s rise continued. He amassed a fortune that bought him a hundred-room palazzo in the center of Naples, and he installed his son, Auguste—Degas’s father—as head of the Parisian branch of the family bank. Auguste married Celestine Musson, the seventeen-year-old Creole daughter of a successful cotton merchant, whose family had just moved to Paris from New Orleans. She died when Degas, her firstborn child, was thirteen.

  Degas was educated at Louis-le-Grand, the best school in Paris (among its illustrious alumni were Molière, Voltaire, Robespierre, Delacroix, Géricault, Hugo, and Baudelaire). He was bright, and held himself to high standards. Although Auguste Degas loved art and had transferred that love to his son, he intended for Edgar to enter the law, just as he had—not to actually become an artist. For a short time, Degas was indeed enrolled in the law, but it was no use: He had caught the art bug. He was clearly very talented, and he was not to be deflected, so his father eventually chose to support his wishes, on the condition that he pursue them with rigor. Auguste went to some lengths to find a respectable painter, Louis Lamothe, for his son to study under, and he watched his progress closely. Degas, for his part, internalized his father’s high expectations. He lived an ascetic life, utterly dedicated to art.