Still Fresh As Ever

  • Throughout his life, but especially toward its end in 1883, that lion of early modernism, Edouard Manet, loved to paint still lifes. Even in his portraits, his arrangements of things--books, bottles, crockery, flowers, food--are given a prominence that nearly puts them on a par with people. His art wasn't dominated by still life, as Cubism would be; but the inanimate has a large and vital presence in his work. That much is evident from the beautiful show at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, curated by George Maunet, "Manet: The Still-Life Paintings." What one might not have realized before, though, is the role that still life, and especially the painting of flowers, played as an expressive consolation to him in his last years.

    Manet's paintings rarely sold (luckily, he had some money of his own). For most of his short career--he was 51 when he died--he was ferociously assailed by nearly every critic and journalist in Paris. (Some of them actually liked his still lifes and reserved their scorn for his portraits and figures.) His greatest paintings, Olympia and Le Dejeuner sur l'Herbe, which today are among the unquestioned masterpieces of the 19th century and are seen by many as the twin pillars that mark and hold up the entrance to modernism, were pilloried by every man of taste and jeered at by spectators.

    There were a few exceptions to this honor roll of stupidity, mainly other painters. Impressionists such as Claude Monet, younger than he, saw Manet as their hero and leader--although he never exhibited with their group. Charles Baudelaire was his friend; Emile Zola famously defended him in 1866 and partially based the implausible chief character of his novel L'Oeuvre (The Masterpiece) on Manet--though, less famously, he changed his mind after Manet's death and called him "not a very great painter...an incomplete talent."

    All in all, Manet had much to be bitter about. Shortly before he died, a friend tried to console him with the thought that he would get his due in the end. "Oh, I know all about justice being done one day," Manet burst out. "It means one begins to live only after one is dead." He died of tertiary syphilis, which he may have inherited from his eminently respectable father, who wanted him to do something more respectable than painting. His death, hastened by gangrene of the leg, was horrific and preceded by a long, slow descent into agony.

    And what did he paint during those final years? One last great painting, of a terminally bored barmaid surrounded by a maze of mirror reflections, A Bar at the Folies Bergere. And flowers: many of them exquisite little watercolors (a briar rose, a snail on a leaf) done with rapid, sketchy delicacy, with notes to their recipients, mainly his women friends, written on the same page. Nothing indicates how he was suffering. His love of life and of style was too strong. In their sweet, private brevity, these tiny notes combining script and image are among the most "Japanese" images to come out of a time when japonisme was all the rage--and all the more authentically so for not copying Japanese mannerisms.

    In his larger oils of flowers, often painted from bouquets that friends had brought him in his illness, there are darker notes--sometimes literally so, in the enveloping blackness of their backgrounds, against which the voluptuous white petals of a peony stand out like the skirts of a dying ballerina. In a late painting of lilac blossoms in a vase, you can feel the thick darkness--the darkness of Goya, whose work Manet adored--closing implacably on the fragile white blooms. This may have been as near to deliberate allegory as Manet, the arch-Realist, would go. Or it may not: one can't be quite sure.

    What were Manet's influences? Like any great painter, he had a whole museum locked in memory. He paid particular attention to Spanish painters--Velazquez, Goya--whose work he mainly knew from prints, until he made the journey to Spain (no picnic for a traveler then) in 1865. Clearly he was much taken by the Spanish still-life painter Sanchez Cotan, and by the tradition of the vanitas--images of objects gathered together to symbolize the transience of pleasure and earthly life. And then, particularly, there was Chardin, the 18th century French master of still life, whose benign and composed presence is palpable in Manets like the Bunch of Asparagus, 1880, with its almost miraculous rendering of the blue tips of the asparagus spears. (It sold, fresh off the easel, to a collector named Charles Ephrussi. Manet felt he had been paid too generously, and with his usual wit he sent Ephrussi a tiny painting of a single asparagus spear, with a note: "This one was missing from your bunch.")

    Many of his still lifes were lone objects like that: a half-peeled lemon exposing its snow-white pith, a warty green monument of a melon. But on occasion, especially in the 1860s, Manet would show his full ordering skill in a composition that anticipates what Cezanne came to in the 1880s. Still Life with Salmon, 1866, is such a painting, a wonderful balance between stability and its opposite: you can feel the weight of the fish and the density of the white tablecloth, but the knife in the foreground is precariously balanced, and the blue bowl with a lemon in it has been tipped, self-consciously and for no very apparent reason, toward your eye.

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