Date: 21-11-2004
Owning Institution: Courtauld Institute of Art Gallery, London
Publication:         Sunday Telegraph Reviews 2004-2012  
Subject:       19th Century    

“Manet Face to Face”, at the Courtauld Institute Galleries, is a refreshingly minimal exhibition. The exact opposite of a blockbuster, it consists of just two great paintings by the same great artist, hung opposite one another in a single and otherwise empty room (empty, that is to say, save for a few wall texts of varying lucidity). Manet’s intriguingly unconventional conversation painting, The Luncheon of 1868, has been loaned by the Neue Pinakothek in Munich. It faces the Courtauld Institute’s own masterpiece of Manet’s last years, A Bar at the Folies-Bergere, of 1881-2.

The pictures differ greatly from one another in style. The handling and predominantly grey-black palette of the earlier work seem almost ascetically sober by contrast with the light tonality, flickering brushwork and multiple accents of bright colour of A Bar at the Folies-Bergere, in which Manet – influenced perhaps by the work of some of his younger contemporaries, who had taken to calling themselves “Impressionists” – sought to evoke the brittle, glittering world of a fashionable Parisian café-concert. But the paintings have much in common too. Each presents a scene from contemporary life framed with disconcerting immediacy.
Each is shot through with a sense of unease and shadowed by mystery. And each was painted to be shown in the public forum of the Paris Salon, “the only battlefield that counts,” in Manet’s view, where pictures were hung in serried rows, many of them high above eye level, according to the alphabetical order of the exhibiting artists’ names. Manet has, in both cases, treated the apparently slight subject matter of genre painting on a nearly monumental scale. For each picture he has also adopted a boldly unconventional composition, dominated by a single looming figure, cut off by the bottom of the frame. This was perhaps his way of publicly flaunting his naturalism and making his works unmissable even at a distance. The effect is certainly one of eyecatching, calculatedly memorable strangeness. The artist’s contemporary, the critic Edmond Duranty, observed that “In every exhibition, from two hundred yards off … one picture alone stands out from the rest; this is always M. Manet’s picture.”

The Luncheon puzzled those who first saw it and is still an enigma. The painter shows a smartly dressed young man, in a natty straw boater, a striped shirt and tie, a dark jacket and light-coloured trousers, leaning casually against the edge of a table laid for lunch. He gazes into space, an intent and slightly wistful look in his eyes. Behind him, painted somewhat out of focus, a maidservant stands holding a silver coffee pot, and she like him stares out from the canvas with intriguing intentness, as if transfixed by something or someone that we will never be able to see. To the right of frame, seated on the other side of the table from the young man, a bearded gentleman in a grey top hat holds a cigar stub in his left hand and allows a thin stream of smoke to pass through his lips. His face is slightly puffy and his left hand is a blur (perhaps the painter’s way of suggesting the man’s state of mild, post-prandial inebriation). Before him is a stoppered wine bottle, a half-filled wine glass, a blue and white porcelain jar and a lovingly painted, gold-rimmed coffeecup perched on a plate. Some uneaten oysters glimmer, their flesh bruised and yellow, while a half-lemon dangles a serpentine coil of peel – a distinctly Dutch touch – and a knife is poised precariously on the table’s edge. Bafflingly, a clutter of armour, including a helmet, sword and elaborately decorated pistol, is piled up on a dining chair, next to a black cat vigorously engaged in licking itself clean.

Manet’s picture conforms loosely to the conventions of the conversation painting – a type of picture historically more popular with English and Dutch than French artists – although it is an unusual example because none of the three characters in it are actually conversing with, or even looking at, one another. John House, in an entertaining essay in the exhibition’s catalogue, has assembled an array of baffled comments by Manet’s contemporaries. Theophile Gautier wondered about the armour, which has never been satisfactorily explained, while Arthur Baignieres complained that it was “a very badly brought up young man who keeps his straw hat on his head and sits in a platter of oysters. More perceptive (albeit still negative) was Jules-Antoine Castagnary, who questioned the peculiar conjunction of coffeecups and uneaten oysters – “these objects hardly go together” – and concluded that they were there because “Manet excels in reproducing what is inanimate” and enjoyed showing off his range. In fact, the critic went on, he painted people as if they were inanimate objects as well: “Just as Manet assembles, for the mere pleasure of astonishing, objects which should be mutually incompatible, in the same fashion he arranges people at random without any reason or meaning for the composition.”

The remark goes to the heart of the painting’s originality, even if it gives Manet insufficient credit for consciously planning his effects of incongruity. X-rays reveal that he had originally sketched out a much more self-explanatory painting, of a family of diners seated at a restaurant table, from which the young boy had risen in order to take his dog – a large greyhound, painted out, but still faintly visible in outline – for a walk. In bringing the work to completion, Manet systematically unpicked those threads of comprehensibility. Other artists of the period who painted similar subjects usually sentimentalised them into scenes of mindless conviviality, but he was clearly after something different. He emphasised not so much the family bonds uniting the people in his invented fragment of social narrative, but the distances between them: the maidservant, separated from her companions by the barrier of class; the man and boy, between whom a charged, reflective silence seems to reign.

Like his contemporaries Flaubert and Zola, masters of literary naturalism, he was drawn to the uneasier aspects of life and it was his one of his innovations to find a place for them in painting. It is also possible, incidentally, that The Luncheon reflects to some degree the awkwardness of Manet’s own family arrangements. Leon, the teenaged boy who modelled for the principal figure in the painting, was the illegitimate son of Suzanne Leenhoff, born to her when she was piano teacher to the Manet family. Manet subsequently married Suzanne – she had been his wife for some years when he painted The Luncheon – and so Leon came to be his adoptive son. Some historians believe Manet was the boy’s actual father although there has in recent years been growing support for the theory that it was actually Manet’s father, a senior judge, who was responsible for the child’s paternity. Leon himself, much later in life, remarked that he never knew who his father was. Manet is unlikely to have meant the picture as an autobiographical document, but it is perhaps significant that he chose Leon as the model for a painting so heavy with the suggestion of suppressed or unspoken thoughts.

In A Bar at the Folies-Bergere Manet explores a different subject, a woman in public rather than a family at home, but reveals a certain consistency of approach, creating a picture that is affecting and mysterious in equal measure. The barmaid stands, weary and sad-eyed, amid the cornucopia of her wares. The row of bottles on the bar in front of her – Bass beer bottles, champagne bottles, bottles of crème de menthe – are all, a little oddly, closed. Maybe there is a painter’s joke concealed in the detail, Manet’s wry way of calling attention to the fact that this is not after all a real bar but a painted bar, a tantalus from which no one can expect an actual drink. The barmaid herself faces the viewer with a tired and disenchanted gaze in which some form of deep but inexplicable unhappiness is implicit. Her reflection has been illogically shifted so far to the right by the painter that it seems to represent not her in the here and now, but another her, at another time, as in medieval paintings combining different narrative incidents within a single image. This other her seems to be serving the blurry likeness of a gentleman in a dark top hat. Perhaps she is also making an assignation with him. There are echoes of much older traditions of painting here. Manet’s barmaid is in fact actually posed like the Virgin Mary and has some of the sadness of the Madonna in her eyes (just as the figures around the table in The Luncheon distantly recall the disciples startled by the revelation of Christ at the Supper of Emmaus). She can be seen as a virgin or as a whore but the artist leaves the matter ambiguous. Perhaps his subject, in part, was the unreliability of such judgements – and the fluid and mutable nature of real, live human beings.