MANET

Unfortunately, I will not be going to see the Manet exhibition in London. There is no other painter for whom it is so beneficial to see the actual works: brushwork that can seem almost photographic in reproduction only reveals its magic when inspected on the canvas. But other commitments preclude my making the trip and besides, I have see a great many Manets around Europe and in New York and blockbuster exhibitions don’t provide the best viewing conditions.

I have been reading reviews. Some of these have been surprising. I am tempted to give a prize for the most idiotic statement on the painter that I have ever read, to Sarah Crampton in the Telegraph. ‘An artist often dismissed as only for chocolate boxes or posters,’ she writes, ‘suddenly stands revealed as a great and mysterious modernist.’ Who has ever thought Manet as chocolate-boxy or only poster material? Charles Moore used Manet’s brilliance to down grade the Impressionists. This won’t do either. Monet is sometimes dismissed as a pretty-pretty painter when in fact he was an uncompromising extremist, a much more positive thing to be in the arts than in any other field.

In the exhibition at the Royal Academy there is what one reviewer describes as a small oil sketch for The Luncheon on the Grass but which, according to Julian Bell writing in London Review of Books, is a commissioned copy. The full size painting was un succès de scandale for Manet and much has been written about it. Most will know the work depicting two men rather formally dressed picnicking in a forest glade with a totally nude woman, while a second woman in a white gown, wades in a pond in the background. It is an odd work. The painting Olympia exhibited two years later also shocked contemporaries but it is much more straightforward. The courtesan with her cool gaze wears high-heeled shoes and a black ribbon round her neck, which emphasises her nudity. She is deliberately provocative. A black maid brings a bouquet obviously from an admirer. A black cat stands at the foot of the bed. Manet here is indeed the painter of modern life. Prostitution was a major industry in contemporary Paris. The barmaid in The Bar at The Folies Bergeres was probably a prostitute. Degas’ dancers were little different.

If The Luncheon on the Grass were some sort of orgy, it would be more understandable but it is a singularly unerotic work. Nor is it likely that there is some sort of dream content. It has sometimes been compared to Fette Champetre once attributed to Giorgione but now said to be by Titian, which might have inspired Manet’s work. Yet the nudes with the fully clad musicians work there as muses, whether or not they were meant to titillate Venetian society. There is also some formal awkwardness in the Manet. The woman in the pond looks too big for her distant position and the plausible still life of picnic items are less well integrated into the composition than the seemingly incongruous collection of antique armour in The Luncheon, which is one of the major exhibits in the current show. 

Monet also painted a Luncheon on the Grass. It was a very large painting and has been cut up. There is, however, a detailed sketch for it in the Hermitage. Phoebe Poole in her book on Impressionism, states that Monet painted it as a tribute to Manet. But there is another interpretation, which I think is more likely. There is no doubt that Monet admired the older artist greatly, but there is a criticism implied in his picnic scene: Manet has departed from his calling as a painter of modern life and is pastiching an old master. It doesn’t succeed in updating the theme, unlike Olympia which may also have been inspired by a Titian. Monet in his work is showing what a contemporary luncheon on the grass is really like.

I find it hard to judge that Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass is anything other than a rather silly work. But then such a consummate genius is allowed one failure.