The popularity of still-life painting continues to soar -- as evidenced by the success of Abrams' recent book on Manet's still lifes, as well as by several major museum exhibitions. With lush colorplates reproducing more than 65 masterworks by 17 Impressionist artists, this exceptional collection of still lifes is a brilliant display of the genre in all its glory.
Chapter One
MANET: THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THINGS
Eliza E. Rathbone
Born of a rich tradition, Manet's still lifes still strike
us as new. Their freshness owes something to his
original choice of subject, his rare and rich tonalities,
and his lively and fluent brushstroke. Yet we also
marvel at his freedom from convention and are struck by
his economy of means. His images of inanimate objects
defy the French term nature
morte. For all their direct
and vivid translation of
reality, however, Manet's
still lifes are astonishingly
varied, complex, and at
times enigmatic. Their
complex sources in the art
of the past are offset by their
utter truth to the present.
They are often paintings,
within paintings about
paintings and yet vividly
real. Whether an element
of a large composition such
as Olympia (Musée d'Orsay,
Paris) or The Luncheon (fig. 1) or a "pure" still life, these various
objects, flowers, books, fruits, or articles of apparel
that Manet imbues with so much life unfailingly command
our attention. Their implied significance has mesmerized
and challenged many scholars of his work.
Manet gave still life a new stature. In the mid-nineteenth
century, to elevate still life to the importance of
historical, literary, or religious subjects constituted in itself
a radical move and indicated a desire to dismantle the hierarchies
of the past. It was a "modern" thing to do. As a
leader of the artists who created the "new painting,"
Manet's position is critical to any investigation of Impressionist
still life. On the other hand, still life was not a subject
to which the Impressionists themselves devoted most
of their time and energy. For Monet, Pissarro, Sisley,
Morisot, Renoir, and Bazille, still life constituted a small
percentage of their oeuvres, and they approached it in
much the same way they did landscape or portraiture.
Manet, however, devoted approximately one-fifth of his
painting to pure still life and included it as a key element
in numerous figure compositions. He transformed the role
of still life in painting. Inspired by artists both from the
past as well as from the present, he drew on multifarious
examples to create a new synthesis of old and new that
had far-reaching consequences. Having primarily focused
on still life in the 1860s, the decade when he was keenly
affected by Spanish painting, he returned to still life during
the last years of his life before he died in 1883.
Why did Manet attach such importance to still life,
and how was still life transformed in his work into an
expression of the modern?
Manet's art education consisted
of a mix of traditional
and innovative strategies
manifested in the work of
his teacher Thomas Couture.
While Couture used
pure color and a spontaneous
brushstroke, his subjects
were often drawn from
history or mythology. For
six years, 1850-56, Manet
studied in Couture's studio
where he must have learned
from him at the very least a
healthy respect for past
masters as well as the goal of exhibiting at the Salon. At the
same time, he constantly found himself at odds with Couture's
instruction. Of his years in Couture's studio, he is
reputed to have said, "I feel as though I am entering a
tomb." In the 1850s antiquity provided a constant frame
of reference for artists and the Prix de Rome was considered
the ultimate honor. As a subject for painting, still life had
come to hold a position of least importance. By the 1860s,
however, still life was an increasingly popular subject,
whether for the rank and file or for artists submitting to the
Salon, so much so that one journalist called the Salon of
1863 a veritable "garden." These still lifes were for the
most part far from radical and by painters who were never
destined to change the course of art. The history of still life
in France, which was paralleled in the Netherlands, Spain,
and Italy, comprised themes from flowers and fruit to hunting,
fishing, and military trophies, from vanitas or momento
mori to the attributes of the arts and of sciences. Still life
varied from the purely decorative to subjects laden with
meaning. While sometimes lavish and splendid, as a genre
it tended toward the impersonal or intellectual. Where
symbolism was involved, it tended to refer to abstract ideas
or concepts.
An aspect of Manet's achievement lay in his ability to
counter both the decorative and the symbolic traditions.
He found in still life the potential for a vivid transcription
of reality as well as the opportunity for specific and personal
associative meaning. In addition to Chardin, whose still-life
painting is the most obvious source of inspiration to
still-life artists in mid-nineteenth-century France, other
artists outside the French tradition were of particular relevance
to Manet. His sources of inspiration extended to the
work of artists better known for human subjects, like Titian
and Velázquez. Any investigation of still life in Manet's
work, therefore, quickly leads to a consideration of his
larger compositions with figures. Scholars as well as critics
of Manet's own time have often found in his large compositions
a provocative relationship between the figures and
the objects that accompany them. Who can forget the rich
collagelike disarray of papers, books, and prints in Manet's
portrait of Emile Zola (fig. 8), or the curious arrangement
on a stool that accompanies Théodore Duret in his portrait
by Manet (fig. 7), or the extraordinarily disparate collection
of still life objects in The Luncheon (fig. 1). The literature
on the subject of Manet's still life testifies to the artist's
powers of invention as well as to the complexity of his
stance vis-à-vis painting in his own time.
Throughout the 1860s Manet's work was constantly
the subject of ridicule and criticism. In the course of that
decade, however, his talent as a painter of still life became
increasingly recognized, and by 1872 this reputation had
become sufficiently established for him to be considered an
artist who excelled at this genre. As Louis Leroy wrote of
Manet's Salon submission of 1872, "it is regrettable that
Manet has not just exhibited one of his still lifes which, by
exception, he does very well." In the face of Emile Zola's
staunch support for Manet's painting, other critics writing
for the Gazette des beaux-arts consistently denied his abilities
as a painter of portraits or the human figure, accusing
him of rendering his subjects with indifference and a cold
lack of humanity—attributes they considered much more
suitably addressed to the subject of still life. Of his portrait
of Emile Zola, exhibited at the Salon of 1868, the critic
Paul Mantz observed that the principal interest lay in the
drawings on the wall and called the portrait itself "indifferent
and vague." Odilon Redon described it as more of a
still life than an expression of a human character. The
enormously influential critic Théophile Thoré acutely
observed that Manet "sometimes bestows even more
importance on a bouquet of flowers than on a woman's
face," and went on to remark that Manet's problem was
that he painted everything "uniformly, furniture, carpets,
books."
When Manet's The Balcony and The Luncheon were
shown at the Salon of 1869, Mantz deplored the lack of
apparent narrative in the former ("One doesn't quite know
what these good people are doing on the balcony") and
described the work as "devoid of thought," having "almost
as much interest as a still life." Likewise, the more sympathetic
Jules Castagnary wrote of Manet's The Luncheon, "I
see on a table where coffee has been served, a half-peeled
lemon and some fresh oysters; these objects hardly go
together. Why were they put there? ... because Manet possesses
in the highest degree, a feeling for the colored spot;
because he excels in reproducing what is inanimate, and
that, feeling himself superior in still lifes, he finds himself
naturally brought to do as many as possible."
Appreciation of Manet as a still-life painter was, therefore,
linked to the formal or abstract properties of his painting.
His "feeling for the colored spot" originally pointed
out by his champion Zola directed attention away from
aspects of the work related to content or meaning, and
allowed critics to praise him for excelling "in reproducing
what is inanimate." For those who largely disparaged his
achievement, this "talent," while recognized, also relegated
his work to a lesser category of success.
Manet's elevation of still life to a status equal to the figure,
while not well understood or appreciated in his own
time, seems not only an essential underlying principle of
his work but also central to his concept of the modern. Still
life achieves its stature in his work by his highly selective
approach and by the specificity of the objects he paints. He
invites the viewer to find meaning in them. What distinguishes
Manet's painting Portrait of M. and Mme Auguste
Manet (1860, Musée d'Orsay, Paris), for example, from
being simply a double portrait is the vivid presence of a
basket in which the artist's mother buries her hand. In creating
this unusual portrait (fig. 2), it seems quite possible
that Manet drew upon his experience of copying Titian's
Madonna of the Rabbit (1530) (fig. 3) in the Louvre. Couture
enjoined his students to study the Venetians, and a number
of paintings by Manet manifest his love of Venetian
painting. In Titian's painting the kneeling figure of the
Madonna places her hand on a rabbit while on the ground
beside her rests a basket, beautifully rendered. It would
appear that Manet has conflated the prominent gesture of
the Madonna and the very real, concrete, and particular
presence of the basket to make parallel use of an object in
order to bring his image into the present, and into the
material world of his own time. Even the shawl that gently
covers the Madonna's head seems echoed in Manet's portrait,
of which Françoise Cachin has remarked that "all the
vitality seems to be concentrated in the luxuriant detail—the
basket of yarn, the white linen, the blue satin of the
mother's bonnet ribbon." It is in fact the basket of yarn
that relates the two figures to each other and that provides
the bright notes of color in the painting. Perhaps predictably,
when it was shown at the Salon of 1861, the critics
denounced Manet's realistic
portrayal of his parents as heartless.
Manet's readiness to borrow
or make allusions in still life is
perhaps nowhere more readily
apparent than in his stunning
response to Chardin in The Brioche
(1870) (fig. 5), a painting directly
inspired by Chardin's painting by
the same title (1763) (fig. 4),
acquired by the Louvre in 1869.
Manet replaces the eighteenth-century
master's delicate sprig of
orange blossom that crowns the pastry with a pink rose of
breathtaking beauty, and counters Chardin's carefully
modulated surrounding tones with a brilliant white
fringed napkin. Such a bravura response to the master so
universally admired would not be attempted by other contemporary
emulators of Chardin like Philippe Rousseau or
François Bonvin. Rather than entering Chardin's world,
Manet, in effect, invites Chardin into his. His innovations—a
fringed napkin and the elegant table—ask us to
consider Chardin's brioche in a modern setting: the fashionable
Paris of the Second Empire. Similarly the heap of
contemporary clothing and hat of the still life in Le Déjeuner
sur l'herbe (1863, Musée d'Orsay, Paris) bring the nude
inspired by Titian's Concert champêtre (ca. 1510, Musée du
Louvre, Paris) from classical Arcadia into the contemporary
world in the naked persona of Manet's own quite recognizable
model, Victorine Meurent. Whether figures or still
life, Manet's images, couched in tradition, speak to the new
and the current. In every sense Manet's contemporaneity
reflects the sophisticated, well-read, well-connected
Parisian we know him to have been.
It is not only the up-to-date or fashionable objects
Manet chooses to include in his paintings that bring them
into the modern world but also his means of describing
them—means that were inspired in part by the recent
revival of interest in Dutch and Spanish painting.
Although in the 1850s Manet had toured Europe to see the
great collections of Amsterdam, Anvers, Brussels, Haarlem,
Dresden, Basel, Florence, and Venice, several factors
in the 1860s brought him the opportunity for an intensified
exposure to Spanish painting. Foremost among these
factors were the expansion of the Louvre, the new availability
of train travel to Spain, and the significant increase
in published articles on Spanish art. The 1850s saw the
addition of new wings to the Louvre and the renovation and
reinstallation of many galleries, culminating in the opening
by Louis-Napoléon of the "New Louvre" in 1857.
The succeeding decade saw many new acquisitions to the
collections. Manet frequented the Spanish galleries of the
Louvre. He also had the opportunity to see works by
Velázquez (or at least attributed to him) at the Galerie Martinet
in Paris in 1863.
Although Spanish painting was virtually unknown in
France until the early to mid-nineteenth century, in the
early 1860s an increasing number of articles on both Goya
and Velázquez began to appear. In the Gazette des beauxarts,
its editor Charles Blanc followed the review of the
1863 Salon with the article "Velázquez in Madrid,"
recounting his own recent trip and including a ringing
accolade: "Truth, that is Velázquez's inseparable companion,
that is his muse." Blanc admired Velázquez's constant
consultation of nature, his "master," and he
applauded his realism. Historian as well as critic,
Théophile Thoré (as W. Bürger, a name he assumed in the
1850s), collaborated on the French edition of William Stirling's
Velázquez and His Works, which was published in
France in 1865. In this volume he asserts that he considers
Velázquez greater than Titian, Correggio, Rubens, and
Rembrandt—describing him as "today, not only in France
but in the world the most prodigious painter who ever
lived." It was not only Velázquez's truth to nature the
critics admired but his technique, his "touch." Thoré
praised his handling of paint, and wrote that "one could
count the brushstrokes and follow them in all their directions."
In sum, Thoré (as Bürger) considered Velázquez
the greatest painter who ever lived, admiring his approach
to painting, which had been described as peint de premier
coup. Thoré, who reviewed the Salons for most of the 1860s,
advocated painting for its own sake, claiming that aesthetic
value lay not so much in the subject as in the means chosen
to express it. He had been one of Manet's earliest and
most thoughtful reviewers, speaking out in support of his
work in 1864. While Thoré believed that Manet was fundamentally
influenced by Velázquez and Goya, he also
praised his "qualities of a magician, luminous effects, flamboyant
hues." In addition to Thoré, Manet's friend
Théophile Gautier expressed similar views in 1861: "The
arts teach and moralize by their beauty alone, not by translating
a philosophical or social formula. For the truly artistic
person, painting has only itself as its purpose, which is
quite enough." The very critics who extolled art for art's
sake also expounded on the genius of Velázquez and created
a context for seeing his art as directly relevant to any investigation
of reality and truth to nature.
The excitement over Spanish painting seemed to reach
a peak in 1865, the year when Gautier wrote, "If you
haven't been to Madrid, you don't know this astonishing
artist ... Velázquez alone makes the trip worthwhile."
Speaking practically, he advises, "now that the train makes
it easy to cross the Pyrenees, our young artists would do
well to go there to study." Manet, who had studied at
length the only works by Velázquez in the Louvre, including
a work no longer attributed to him called The Little
Cavaliers, had exhausted the resources at hand. To go to
Spain became for him an idée fixe. In August 1865 Manet
wrote to his friend Zacharie Astruc, whose familiarity with
Spanish language, art, and culture was extensive, that he
was leaving for Spain "immediately, the day after tomorrow,
perhaps; I am extremely eager to see so many beautiful
things and to ask the advice of Master Velázquez."
From Spain Manet wrote to Fantin-Latour, "How I miss
you here and how happy it would have made you to see
Velázquez who all by himself makes the journey worthwhile....
He is the supreme artist; he didn't surprise me,
he enchanted me." Astruc had provided an itinerary and
bountiful advice about where to go and what to see.
Manet met Théodore Duret, who was to become a friend
for the rest of his life, in a restaurant in Madrid. In the portrait
Manet painted of Duret three years later in Paris (fig.
7), Manet's stylistic references to
portraits by Velázquez and Goya
reflect their shared experience and
their mutual admiration for Spanish
painting. We even know that they
visited the Prado together, signing
their names in the guest book. In
his portrait of Duret, Manet directly
quoted Goya's full-length portrait of
Manuel Lapeña. Interestingly
enough, the small size of Duret's
portrait was Duret's own suggestion,
while the fact that he is depicted full length was Manet's
idea. In this painting Manet does not locate Duret in the
real world but in a pictorial space, where nothing but light
and air circulate around the figure, an approach Manet
admired in Velázquez.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Impressionist Still Life
by ELIZA E. RATHBONE AND GEORGE T.M. SHACKELFORD.
Copyright © 2001 by The Phillips Collection.
Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be
reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Copyright © 2001 The Phillips Collection.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 0-8109-0613-9
Not merely a survey of impressionist still-life painting, as suggested by its title, this handsome and valuable catalog of an exhibition at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, that then travels to Boston, is an intelligently wrought overview of this genre in late 19th-century France. Apart from the luminous favorites of the impressionists, their great realist predecessor Gustave Courbet and their post-impressionist successors are also amply represented in the show's 92 works. Accompanying the catalog are five essays that explicate the development and formal qualities of these paintings within a context of art historical tradition and social currents. Although the essays are of some service in articulating the sources and influences leading up to this period, the significance of the enigmatic Manet, and the achievement and impact of Cézanne, none of these discussions comes to grips with the quintessential Impressionism of Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, and Morisot. The dereliction, however, of the not equally accessible essays is more than compensated for by the refined analyses that accompany the excellent reproductions. The thoughtful organization of the paintings into small congeries further enhances the pedagogic and aesthetic value of this eye-delighting opus. Robert Cahn, Fashion Inst. of Technology, NY Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
