The Art of Rivalry

by Sebastian Smee

  Degas, as McMullen has pointed out, took all this kind of thinking to heart. He was persistently patronizing toward the category of “wives” in general. About his choice to remain a bachelor, he explained, “I was too afraid that after I had finished a picture I would hear my wife say, ‘What you’ve done there is very pretty indeed.’ ”

  These generally defensive and contemptuous feelings must have played into his attitude toward Manet’s—from the outside—rather baffling marriage to Suzanne.

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  SCHOLARS HAVE WONDERED WHETHER Degas’s skepticism about marriage was merely symptomatic of his vocation and his times, or whether it was an extension of something darker, more disturbing. “Art is not a legitimate love,” he once said: “one does not marry it, one rapes it.” In the literature on Degas, this uncomfortable metaphor has often been linked with a highly ambiguous, partly scratched-out diary entry from 1856, when Degas was twenty-one. Degas seems to have tampered with the entry himself. But the cryptic note does suggest some kind of shameful encounter:

  “I find it impossible to say how much I love that girl, since for me she has…Monday, April 7. I cannot refuse to…how shameful it is…a defenseless girl. But I’ll do it the least often that is possible.”

  It’s impossible to know what actually happened here; easy to jump to conclusions. But whatever it was, it may have triggered feelings that were hard for the young Degas to overcome.

  The dealer Vollard, who would go on to play such a key role in the careers of Matisse and Picasso, was one of many people who knew Degas intimately and rejected the “commonplace” that he hated women. “No-one,” he said, “loved women as much as he.” Rather, said his friends, his problem was essentially shyness—a fear of rejection or a squeamishness that prevented him from pursuing women who attracted him. The cause of this embarrassment may have been impotence, as some believe, or it may have been something else. But whatever it was, his art had a detached and at times voyeuristic quality, charging his subjects with hidden drama.

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  THE HARDEST THING in the world, at times, is to be oneself. Manet, at least on the face of it, seemed to have no such problem. For Degas, however, it wasn’t so easy. His well-fortified social persona failed to hide the fact that he was never quite comfortable in his own skin. Manet must have sensed this about him. Degas was certainly aware of it himself, and it ate away at him. In his twenties, he had been inordinately obsessed with himself; by the time he was thirty, he had produced no fewer than forty self-portraits. So it’s telling that he ceased painting self-portraits soon after meeting Manet. He also abandoned his attempt to win plaudits for grand historical or mythological pictures. He busied himself instead with portraits. Portraits of other people.

  His last self-portrait, painted in 1865, was actually a double portrait. It showed Degas sharing space with another artist. Degas did not attempt at this stage to immortalize his friendship with Manet, or indeed with any of the other talented painters he had come to know well; he didn’t want, perhaps, to invite invidious comparisons. Instead, he chose Évariste de Valernes, a struggling painter, devoid of talent, doomed to obscurity.

  Degas liked Valernes, who was ambitious, and convinced that he was on the verge of success. Degas almost certainly knew better. But—as he admitted in a moving letter to Valernes several decades later—he felt scarcely any better about his own prospects. At that time, he wrote, “I felt myself so badly formed, so badly equipped, so weak, whereas it seemed to me that my calculations on art were so right. I brooded against the whole world and against myself.”

  Degas was a “queer specimen,” as he himself openly admitted. He had few close friends. No one seemed to know what to make of him, or where they stood in his eyes. Those eyes, dark and deeply recessed, seemed to be forever withdrawing into a private place from which it was easier to cast judgment. If this made him slightly terrifying to others, in truth Degas was no easier on himself: His diaries are full of self-reproach. Those early self-portraits, meanwhile, have a doleful, self-lacerating intensity unlike anything else in art.

  He developed impressive compensatory strategies. His famously withering wit, for one thing; you didn’t want to be its target. Also, a nose for similar insecurities in others. Years later, in the 1880s, the English painter Walter Sickert was both impressed and intimidated by Degas, whose dismissals of other artists were notorious. Feeling insecure, Sickert tended to show off in his company and talk a lot. (This was a story Lucian Freud loved to tell.) Degas, in contrast, remained very, very quiet—until one day he turned to Sickert and said: “You know you don’t have to do that, Sickert—people will still think you’re a gentleman.”

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  TO UNDERSTAND THE EFFECT that Manet’s attitude toward art had on Degas in the early 1860s—and to grasp what it was that Degas would soon begin to kick against—it is necessary first to register the impact that the poet Charles Baudelaire had on Manet.

  Manet was a dandy. He was in love, above all, with the city—the characters, the disguises, the secrets, and the play of illusions that were all part of life in Second Empire Paris, a city fraught with tensions and social disharmony, theatrical in the extreme, and constantly in flux. He wanted to represent it. But he had little interest in doing so as a realist, per se. His inspiration, beyond the city itself, was Baudelaire.

  For a time in the early 1860s, Manet saw the poet on an almost daily basis. Baudelaire’s impact on him was profound, but it was as much a question of sensibility and temperament as of anything more theoretical or programmatic. Outwardly blasé, Baudelaire was internally tortured. An apolitical dreamer and sensualist, he nonetheless had a humanist’s sympathy for the outcast and downtrodden, and he was a magician of martyrdom: “I want to turn the whole human race against me,” he once wrote. “The delight this would give me would console me for everything.” It was the very extremity of Baudelaire’s contradictions that made his company so electrifying, his friendship so flattering.

  Born in 1821, he was Manet’s senior by ten years. He was a prolific drug taker. A scourge of the bourgeoisie, he had turned to journalism—and specifically to art criticism—in 1842. When he became friends with Manet in the mid-1850s, most of his criticism—the greatest, most prescient writing about art of the nineteenth century—was behind him. His mistress, Jeanne Duval, had been an invalid for a dozen years, and Baudelaire himself was not only sick with advancing syphilis, but constantly in debt. Manet was one of many called on to help, without much hope of being paid back.

  In the essay that is still his most famous, “The Painter of Modern Life,” Baudelaire had made a case for particular beauty—transient, partial, and improvised—over general beauty—the timeless and classical kind. Raphael, he wrote, “does not contain the whole secret.” Instead, he argued, a fashionable dress, a stylish fan, the latest milliner’s concoction were all true expressions of the transience of the modern city, and this transience made up at least one half—and perhaps the more interesting half—of the sum of its beauty. So he called for artists to paint what he described as “the pageant of fashionable life and the thousands of floating existences,” the “attitudes and gestures of living beings,” “external finery,” “the beauty of circumstance and the sketch of manners,” and “unknown, half-glimpsed countenances”—everything that was not, in other words, addressed in the pictures artists submitted to the annual Salons. All this chimed with convictions Manet had already arrived at himself. In his paintings of the 1860s, he, too, was enamored of the idea that, as Baudelaire put it, “each era has its own forms of beauty.” And so he set out to depict the parade of urban life in all its many facets, and in a wholly fresh style.

  Neither the artist nor the poet-critic was a documentarian, looking at the city with cool, detached eyes. Instead, both cultivated an idea of Paris as an incessant spur to the imagination, a locale of masks and of mystery, of suffering and sensuality, one that changed “faster, alas, than the human heart.” Baudelaire’s understa
nding of the modern city was personal, provisional, and erotic. The key words in the poet’s lexicon were languid, idle, furtive, secret, private, and they found equivalents in Manet’s signature motifs: the black cat, the bunch of flowers, the black ribbon, the cascading dress, the half-peeled orange, the fan, and the blank, unrevealing face.

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  IN 1863, JUST TWO YEARS after his success at the Salon with The Spanish Singer, three of Manet’s paintings and three etchings were included in an exhibition of paintings rejected by the official Salon jury, the so-called Salon des Refusés. Napoleon III had personally sanctioned this runoff display—the first of its kind—after receiving a petition protesting the harshness of that year’s jury for the official Salon. It was an ignominious situation for Manet to be in. Given his success in 1861, he must have been hoping for more.

  One of his paintings, exhibited as Le Bain, is known today as Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe, or Luncheon on the Grass. A knowing pastiche of Renaissance pictures (including Giorgione’s Fête Champêtre in the Louvre), it shows a naked woman enjoying a picnic with two clothed men. The models were Victorine Meurent, the nineteen-year-old girl who had posed for an earlier picture, The Street Singer; Manet’s brother Eugène; and Suzanne’s brother, Ferdinand.

  Even today, the picture seems bizarre—albeit in beguiling, even delightful ways. It’s clearly not meant to be taken as a scene from real life. At the time, it aroused only angry perplexity. What was the woman doing with no clothes on in the middle of a park? Why were the men dressed? Why was she staring out of the picture directly at us, while they carried on with their picnic as if this were the most normal thing in the world? And what was the story with the bather in the background, so sketchily rendered! Nobody knew. One critic called it “a practical joke, a shameful open sore not worth exhibiting.”

  Manet’s other pictures, which stood out in the Salon environment thanks to their bold local coloring, their poster-like flatness, and their stark contrasts in tone, didn’t fare much better. The public came by the thousands to ridicule the Salon des Refusés. Their mockery was focused on Manet, partly because his work stood out so starkly, and partly because they were following the lead of the emperor himself: On his official visit to the exhibit, he had allegedly paused in front of Manet’s Déjeuner, made a gesture of moral revulsion, and moved on in silence. Manet’s taste, wrote one critic, “is corrupted by infatuation with the bizarre.” “I seek in vain for the meaning of this uncouth riddle,” wrote another.

  But Manet was nothing if not stubborn. He had tasted success in 1861. He knew that it would be a mistake to retreat. Buoyed by his supporters, he chose instead to become more audacious, both in style and in subject matter.

  Nonetheless, with each new submission, the vituperation only grew in intensity. Manet took the blows. But he was not immune to criticism, and he suffered. In 1864, when his Episode with a Bullfight was scorned for its ungainly perspective and flat handling, he responded by cutting it up into separate pieces. And then, in 1865, Manet submitted Olympia, a large painting for which he had Meurent pose as a prostitute waiting to receive a client. It was sent to the Salon along with a religious picture, Dead Christ with Angels. The combination—sacred and profane—was in itself a provocation. The Dead Christ fared badly. Even people whose previous support had cheered Manet proffered needling comments. The older Courbet, annoyed by Manet’s growing notoriety, asked wryly whether Manet had seen enough of angels to know that they had backsides and big wings. Even Baudelaire, while doing his best to proselytize behind the scenes on Manet’s behalf, pointed out that the wound in Christ’s torso was on the wrong side.

  But all this was as nothing compared with the response to Olympia—an uproar unprecedented in the annals of art history. Manet had painted Victorine, naked but for a ribbon tied around her neck, two satin slippers, and a gold bracelet around her arm, reclining on a bed and staring implacably out of the picture. While clearly alluding to Titian’s Venus of Urbino, the painting was also inspired by “Les Bijoux” (The Jewels), a poem in Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, which begins: “The darling one was naked, and, knowing my wish / had kept only the regalia of her jewelry.” The poem goes on to describe the “darling one” in question as a prostitute who was “naked…/ Smiling in triumph from the heights of her couch / At my desire advancing…/ Her eyes fixed as a tiger’s in the tamer’s trance, / Absent, unthinking…”

  The critical reaction to the painting was stunningly brutal. “Art sunk so low doesn’t even deserve reproach,” wrote Paul de Saint-Victor. Ernest Chesneau, a critic who had actually purchased a painting by Manet earlier that year, deplored Manet’s “almost childish ignorance of the first elements of drawing,” his “bent for unbelievable vulgarity.” He derided Olympia as a “ludicrous creature,” and found comedy in Manet’s “loudly advertised intention of producing a noble work, a pretension thwarted by the absolute impotence of the execution.” Another critic described Manet’s submissions as “terrible canvases, challenges to the mob, pranks or parodies.”

  The response of the general public was no better. In front of Manet’s canvases, wrote Ernest Fillonneau, “an epidemic of crazy laughter prevails.” The painting had to be rehung above the doorway of the last gallery—so high that you couldn’t tell “whether you were looking at a parcel of nude flesh or a bundle of laundry”—after several people threatened to attack it with more than words. (An earlier Manet painting—Music in the Tuileries—had already been attacked by a man wielding a walking stick during Manet’s one-man show at the Galerie Martinet two years earlier.)

  “Like a man falling into a snowdrift, Manet has made a hole in public opinion,” wrote the critic and champion of realism Champfleury in a letter to Baudelaire at the time of the Salon. The criticism was so loud, so ubiquitous, and so personal in tone that Manet, on the verge of a nervous breakdown, wrote pleadingly to Baudelaire. “Insults pour down on me like hail. I have never before been in such a fix…I should so much like to have your sound opinion of my work, for all this outcry is disturbing, and clearly somebody is wrong.”

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  SOMEBODY WAS WRONG. But who was it?

  Baudelaire, more than anyone, was qualified to understand what Manet was going through. When his own volume of poetry Les Fleurs du Mal had been published in 1857, he, his publisher, and the printer were all prosecuted and fined for offending public morality. Six of the poems were suppressed, and Baudelaire’s name became a byword for depravity.

  And yet despite this firsthand experience, and despite his admiration for Manet, Baudelaire was not able, or not willing, to offer up the support and relief Manet so badly needed at this critical moment. He replied to Manet’s letter with exasperation. After a chatty opening, in which he wryly noted that “it seems that you have the honor of inspiring hatred,” he seemed to emit an impatient sigh:

  “So I must speak to you of yourself. I must try to show you what you are worth. What you demand is really stupid. They make fun of you; the jokes aggravate you; no-one knows how to do you justice, etc., etc….Do you think that you are the first man put in this predicament? Are you a greater genius than Chateaubriand or Wagner? Yet they certainly were made fun of. They didn’t die of it. And not to give you too much cause for pride, I will tell you that these men are examples, each in his own field and in a very rich world; and that you, you are only the first in the decrepitude of your art. I hope you won’t be angry at me for treating you so unceremoniously. You are aware of my friendship for you.”

  Baudelaire had, as he admitted himself, “one of those happy natures that enjoy hatred and feel glorified by contempt.” Manet was more easily undermined, and the ailing poet knew it. His rough words were the response of a man who has decided his best contribution to a friend in danger of losing his nerve is a good, brisk slap around the cheeks.

  The following day, in a letter to a mutual friend, Champfleury, Baudelaire noted: “Manet has a strong talent, a talent which will resist. But he has a weak characte
r. He seems to me disconsolate and dazed by the shock. I am also struck by the delight of all the idiots who think him ruined.”

  If nothing else, Baudelaire’s response reminds us of the precariousness of Manet’s position at this point. There was deep uncertainty around the nature of his achievement. Was he to be taken seriously? Or was he instead a kind of joker, a provocateur, a passing fad? Today, we regard the 1860s as Manet’s great decade—the decade that saw him produce the majority of his most famous and audacious pictures. But it was also a period of steadily increasing pressure and demoralizing setbacks. Each year, Manet marshaled his resources, planned his approach, and sent his finest pictures to the Salon. And each year, he was either spurned—his submissions rejected by the jury—or subjected to the humiliating white heat of public contempt. There was, in fact, no nineteenth-century painter who was so relentlessly and brutally battered by criticism. For a man who craved public approval and yearned for official honors, this reception was crushing. Manet emerged from the drubbings like an exhausted swimmer from torrid surf: standing, sun-bleached, even smiling (he had asked for it, hadn’t he?), but more groggy and dazed each year.

  By 1867, he had lapsed into a sustained period of gloom and dismay. Usually prolific, he painted barely more than a dozen pictures over the following two years. On the outside, he remained his sociable self, but he let his circle of trusted intimates contract. “The attacks directed against me broke in me the mainspring of life,” he later said. “No one knows what it is to be constantly insulted. It disheartens you and undoes you.”