Deborah Goldberg
Manet and Degas: Formulating Modernism
Deborah Goldberg - Manet and Degas: Formulating Modernism
- So Deborah, Deborah Goldberg, has a PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University and is an art historian and writer. Deborah teaches at the School of Visual Arts and lectures regularly at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art. She wrote the catalogue of the exhibition “Isamu Noguchi, Patent Holder: "Designing the World of Tomorrow” at the M.T. Geoffrey Yeh Art Gallery at St. John’s University, and she coedited and contributed a chapter to the book “Alexandre Archipenko Revisited: "An International Perspective,” so Deborah, we are, and I am wanting to do more art lectures and more contemporary art lectures, and I’m just absolutely thrilled to have you as a presenter and a participant and a lecturer on lockdown, so thanks a million, so I will hand over to you whenever you’re ready. Thank you, and Karina, thank you very much for being here this evening.
- Thank you, Wendy. Thank you, Karina. I’m excited to be here. Happy New Year, everybody, and I hope that some of you had an opportunity to see the exhibition focusing on Manet/Degas at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which just closed on Sunday, but it also was at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. I luckily got to see it in both locations, and this is a picture of the first wall in the exhibition. The exhibition set up the friendship and rivalry of these two artists, who were only born two years apart, Manet born in 1832, Degas born in 1834. They both debuted their art at the Salon, which was an academic place to show in Paris, but Degas left the Salon by 1870 and became one of the founding members of the Impressionist group. This exhibition built on research done for a prior exhibition looking at the private collection of Edgar Degas, and since many of the works in this exhibition were in Degas’ collection, which we’ll talk about, also, with this exhibition, you really saw Manet’s love of Spanish art, which was the subject of a show, “Manet/Velázquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting,” which was also at the Met in 2003 and “The Private Collection of Edgar Degas” exhibition was in 1997. The exhibition had a lot of purples in it. You see this on the front wall of the exhibition, and these purples come from two paintings that we’ll see later, Degas’ “Absinthe Drinker” and Manet’s “Plum Brandy.” You also see the interesting creative use of graphics here with a different font for Degas versus Manet, where you see a more traditional font for Manet and the Helvetica, more contemporary font, for Degas, and I’d be curious what your thoughts are about which artist is more contemporary or avant-garde, or it’s a hard choice with this exhibition.
As I mentioned, these artists were contemporaries. They also were in Paris after the Franco-Prussian War, so they were drafted into the National Guard to help protect Paris and served as volunteer gunners. They came from very well-to-do families. Manet’s father was a senior civil servant. Degas’ father was a banker. Manet had studied in the atelier of Thomas Couture. Degas studied at the École des Beaux-Arts. You see, the exhibition began with these two self-portraits, Manet presenting himself as a painter with his palette and paintbrushes, and Degas on the right, presenting himself as a draughtsman, holding a drawing tool called a porte-crayon. I found this painting on the right to be one of the most fascinating works in the exhibition, “Monsieur and Madame Manet” by Degas from 1868 to ‘69, which I show opposite a portrait of Manet standing from the same period, and the first gallery of the exhibition showed how Degas did some 10 drawings, some of them were on display in the Met exhibition, showing his friend in a very casual way. Only one shows the artist’s tools or a stretcher behind him, so he’s showing him very laid-back in an unconventional way, and this is all before Impressionism, and what we’re going to look at with my lecture is how these two artists really were the founding leaders of modernity or modernism in the arts in terms of looking at everyday life or showing new ways of showing subject matter, and, in particular, Degas did these portraits of his friend where he’s really quite relaxed, and this is all before Impressionism and with the Impressionists, they were really fond of the subject of leisure, and you already see leisure as a subject here, and what’s interesting about the work on the left, it’s done with ink wash, which is a medium that Degas rarely used, and that’s a medium that Manet was more known for, and this drawing on the left was a gift to the niece of Manet when she got married. Her name was Julie.
She actually was the daughter of Berthe Morisot, another painter of this era, whom we’ll look at, who married Manet’s younger brother Eugène. Another thing we’ll look at today is that Degas collected Manet’s work, but we don’t know of Manet collecting Degas’ work. We also don’t know of Manet making any portraits of Degas, but Degas made several portraits of Manet, and this painting on the right is showing Suzanne Manet, who was the wife of Manet’s, her maiden name was Leenhoff, playing the piano, and this was a gift from Degas to the Manets, but Édouard was upset with it and cut off the right side. We don’t know what was on the right side, and Degas had it framed in his home. He actually took it back. He was so furious that Manet destroyed it or slashed it, and Degas took it back. He returned a painting of walnuts that Manet had given him, and then he brought this painting home and framed it and had it hanging in his home for years, and then, at the very end of his life, he patched it with a piece of canvas ready to add more to it, perhaps, but he never corrected the painting, and it’s a very provocative work, and it shows the Manets in their home on the rue de Saint-Pétersbourg in the 8th arrondissement in Paris, where they did receive their friends. They had salons, these evenings where Madame Manet played the piano. She actually had been the Manet family’s piano teacher and was a few years older than Édouard, and they would have salons in their home that were hosted by Édouard Manet’s mother, who eventually lived with them, and actually, the Degas family also had salons, or musical evenings, that were held in Degas’ father’s home on Mondays, so I think that’s interesting. In this era, you could spend two days a week, one day at the Manet home, one day at Degas’ father’s home, and this was part of the routine, so these artists were part of each other’s lives weekly, maybe twice a week, and the exhibition looked at how they shared friends and subject matter, but also were challenging each other, as we’ll see.
Julie Manet, I’ll just show you a closeup, Julie Manet, the niece, described this incident after visiting Degas’ home in 1895. She said, “I admired the portrait of my Uncle Édouard, "which I had never seen. "The portrait was the cause of a quarrel. "Monsieur Degas had done Aunt Suzanne at the piano "and my Uncle Édouard lying on a sofa listening to her. "Finding his wife’s portrait highly unflattering, "Manet cut it off. "Monsieur Degas was rightly angered by this action "and took away the canvas, "which is now in his sitting room,” end quote, and from the exhibition, “The Private Collection of Degas,” Ann Dumas, the curator, wrote, “In the double portrait by Degas, "Manet’s body language "expresses the particular state of mind "of one who is physically present but psychically absent. "Degas’ portrayals "of the moods and tensions in human relationships "are psychoanalytic essays in visual form,” end quote, and that’s something that I think is really unique to Degas is that he shows psychology. He shows tension in his work. Often, he has the most interesting parts of his composition off to the side or off to the right, in particular, and I’d like to know what you think was originally on the right side of this composition and what upset Manet so much that he would slash this work. Was he unhappy with the way Degas portrayed his wife? This is how Manet portrayed his wife in the same era. Maybe he’s rectifying what he thought was not appropriate in Degas’ work. It’s interesting. He was not unhappy with the way he’s portrayed, where he’s not really focusing on his wife playing the piano, but he was upset, and cut through where his wife’s profile is seen, but this is how he portrayed his wife in the same era playing the piano.
And I just want to show you, later in the exhibition, you could see this photograph of Degas in the foreground with his friend, the artist Paul-Albert Bartholomé, and you see the painting on the wall before Degas added that extra piece of canvas, but he also had it hanging next to a Manet painting of a ham with a knife next to it, so maybe he was making a witty installation showing this slab of ham with the knife next to a painting that was cut. Also, there’s a print on the wall by Manet of Polichinelle, so just to show you how Manet’s work was prominently displayed in Degas’ home. They overcame this squabble, we know, as well, and I also think it’s interesting that it’s cut on the right. Stephan Wolohojian, one of the curators of the Met show with Ashley Dunn, said in an interview for WNYC, “Clearly, it was something that resonated "for years and years after in Degas’ mind, "but we’ve also considered that fabulously strange cropping "that resulted in it. "The fact that something that was much more centred "becomes decentered, "something that was much more focused "becomes less clear "as being so much a part of Degas’ painting "and his maturity. "One could even maybe argue "that Manet let him see something that he didn’t yet "at the time in his career recognise,” end quote. I want to show you that Degas frequently brought asymmetry into his work. On the right, I show you a painting that was done a few years earlier, in 1865, which we’ll look at more closely in a few minutes, of a woman seated beside a vase of flowers. It’s believed to be the wife of Degas’ friend Paul Valpinçon, but why is she pushed off to the right? You’ll see that she also has a similar expression to Manet on the couch, a very pensive expression, and what is the subject of this work? Is it the flowers? Is it the woman on the right? Why is she not identified? This is a very unusual painting for Degas, even focusing on flowers.
That’s something he was not known for. You’ll see, with Manet’s work, he often has beautiful details and focusing on still life in individual works or even as parts of compositions, so this is a very atypical work for Degas and a very early work for him where he’s showing himself as a realist. This is a term that was used for Manet, for an earlier artist, Gustave Courbet, who was their contemporary, and Degas still called himself a realist years later, even though he was a founding member of the Impressionist group. You also see dramatic cropping later on in these works that precede Impressionism, and actually, “The Dancing Class,” on the lower right was shown in the first Impressionist exhibition. These are both from around 1870, and you see really interesting parts of the composition pushed off to the side. For example, I’m sorry, just to go back, you see that the ballerinas are cut off in the painting that I show you at the top, “The Orchestra of the Opera,” and really, the focal point of the composition is the bassoonist in the foreground who’s… It’s actually a portrait of Désiré Dihau, and there’s another portrait in the upper left of the composition of the composer Emmanuel Chabrier, who actually performed at the Salons at the Manet home, but what a strange way to put a portrait in in the upper left-hand corner. This really interesting framing of this face in the upper left is something I want you to look at that Degas often uses pictures within pictures or even the mirror, as you see in the ballet scene, just ways to frame different parts of the composition, and also, another thing he does is often have people looking away from us. You see the man in the chair in the painting “The Orchestra of the Opera” is turned away from us.
You also see the ballerinas sometimes are seen from behind or even the reflection in the dancing class shows one of the ballerinas from behind. Manet and Degas met between 1861 and ‘62 at the Louvre when they were both looking at a painting that at the time was believed to be by Diego Velázquez. Now, we know it’s from Velázquez and his workshop, a “Portrait of the Infanta Margarita Teresa,” and Manet was really surprised that Degas brought an etching plate into the galleries of the Louvre, and he felt it was a very audacious thing for someone to be literally working on the ground of and incising into the ground of an etching rather than working with a drawing in front of a painting at the Louvre, and on the left, I show you Degas’ final print, and he did not have an intermediary drawing, so you see he has not reversed the composition, so it matches the painting that was believed to be by Velázquez, and on the right, I show you a print that Manet also did from the same work where he did do that reversal process. You also see he has a strong emphasis on the texture in the background that’s coming from the knowledge of Goya and how he put crosshatching into his work, an earlier Spanish artist, so I want you to look out for those influences from Goya and Velázquez, particularly in Manet’s work, and also the use of black was very important for Manet, and here is the plate opposite… Actually, I’m sorry, I have the wrong label here. Opposite Manet’s work on the right. Please excuse that, and then, this is how they were displayed in the exhibition, and this next gallery of the exhibition was looking at how both artists looked to old masters for inspiration.
They were looking at the same sources. They were going to the Louvre and making copies after earlier artists’ works. They also were going to the Bibliothèque nationale and doing copies from works of art there. In this exhibition, there was the study for “Déjeuner sur l'herbe,” a study that’s in the Courtauld Collection, and I show it on the left opposite the final work that’s at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, and I’ll show you the final work, and this is the first work that really captures the attention of the public in terms of Manet’s work, even though he was recognised in 1861 at the Salon and got an honourable mention, this is a work that really caused a great scandal. It actually was rejected from the Salon in 1863, and it got into a Salon of the Rejected, or the Salon des Refusés in 1863, a one-time exhibition that was created for artists who were rejected from the Salon. It was so popular that more people were going to the Salon des Refusés than to the Salon. It was the only time it ever happened in the history of the Salon, and why was this work so radical? Well, it’s showing a model, Victorine Meurent, the woman in the nude in the foreground, who was Manet’s favourite model. You’ll see her elsewhere in his art, but she’s stark naked in a public park in Paris with the two men who are wearing contemporary university clothing. The two men are based on Manet’s brothers as well as the brother of his wife, Suzanne. His name was Rodolphe Leenhoff. There’s also a woman in a state of undress in the background. You’ll see a beautiful still life in the foreground, in the foreground on the left, showing the woman’s clothing that’s been cast off with a basket of fruit and bread. Also, you have an attention to technique where Manet’s making you aware of the oddity of that woman in the background who seems to be just pasted into the composition.
There doesn’t seem to be a transition. This was shocking at the time to show a contemporary scene, people in contemporary clothing in a contemporary park. This woman is not a goddess. I just want to show you that Manet and Degas often were looking to a range of artists for inspiration, so Manet also looked to Titian’s “Pastoral Symphony,” an earlier arcadian scene from the Renaissance, for inspiration, to show the nude women with clothed men. They also both looked to the artist Marcantonio Raimondi, and I show you the Marcantonio Raimondi print “The Judgement of Paris.” It’s based on an earlier work by Raphael, and it has a grouping of river gods in the lower right-hand corner that are the source for the treatment of the people in the foreground in Manet’s work, but the Met exhibition also showed this drawing on the lower right by Degas that is after the same source, and Degas went to the Bibliothèque nationale, and he too did his own sketch from that work, and so that was really compelling to see how both artists were responding to the same artists. Also, Manet knew of Courbet, Gustave Courbet, the realist who made this shocking work of two women on the banks of the Seine, one woman with her skirt hiked up. There’s the suggestion that a man had been with them. His hat is in the boat. There’s a bouquet of flowers, so Gustave Courbet already was making racy works just a few years before, but you see that Manet takes it even a step further by showing this woman stark naked, in particular, in the foreground with these two men. In the next gallery of the exhibition, the curators showed family portraits, and this one I found quite fascinating, this Degas painting, the “Family Portrait: The Bellelli Family,” that he did over numerous years. He started it in Florence where he went to visit his father’s family, and you can see the father is turned away. This is his Aunt Laura, his cousins, his uncle, and his uncle is turned away from us. You also see the severe cropping of the dog leaving the room.
That’s something I want you to look out for, this cropping that might, maybe it was pushed on in Degas’ work by seeing his own painting slashed. Who knows? But Degas often had very interesting ways of putting subject matter at the borders of his compositions or having pictures within pictures. He even has one of his own pictures hanging behind his Aunt Laura of his grandfather who had just died, Hilaire Degas, but it’s done in an old master way, and anyway, this is also one of the largest works that Degas ever did. It’s 79 1/8 inches by 98 ¼ inches, so very large painting. In his correspondence, Degas mentioned the influence of numerous artists: van Dyck, Giorgione, Botticelli, Rembrandt, Mantegna, Carpaccio, and you can see that nobody is looking directly at anyone else. The mother’s looking in one direction. One daughter’s looking forward. Another one seems to be torn between the mother and the father, and the father is turned away from us, and as you see, the dog is running out of the composition. Another work that shows great tension in Degas’ work that was later in the exhibition is this painting, “Interior,” also an early work. Degas said this was a genre painting. He described it as, “my genre painting,” and it actually was called “The Rape” at one point, and it’s a man who seems to, a menacing man on the right side of the composition. You can see Degas often pushes interesting parts of the composition off to the side.
He has very dramatic lighting as well, and there’s a woman who’s bent over in her lingerie off on the left side of the composition. It’s not clear if Degas was responding to contemporary literature, to Edmond Duranty or Émile Zola as a source for this composition, but it just shows you how Degas was getting away from academic subject matter in his work in the 1860s after he first showed in the Salon in 1865. I also want to point out that this sense of psychology and tension in Degas’ work had an impact on later artists. For example, Edward Hopper, an American painter, in his work, “New York Movie,” from 1939, it’s believed he might have looked at this Degas painting that at one point was on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It’s now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, but you see that Hopper shows a woman off to the right side in this movie theatre, and you also see dramatic lighting as well, so that’s something to think about, the legacy of these artists, particularly with someone like Hopper. Another very important work early on in Manet’s career is “Olympia” that was on view at the Met for the first time in its history. This was a big deal the first time lending this painting to the United States, and it shows a contemporary sex worker. It’s the same model, Victorine Meurent, that we saw in “Luncheon on the Grass,” and I want to talk about why this was so scandalous. Manet actually did not show it when he made it. He waited and showed it in 1865, and he did get it into the Salon. It’s believed that he’s looking at contemporary poetry, one being a poem by his friend Charles Baudelaire, “The Jewels,” that talks about a prostitute wearing just her jewellery and her shoes, nothing else, but also, he could have been responding, and actually, that poem was censored. It was in “The Flowers of Evil,” so it was censored after being published in 1857 and was missing from the next edition of the book.
Also, that he was possibly looking at another contemporary literary source, Alexandre Dumas’ “The Lady of the Camellias” from 1848, so there’s a lot of literature on this painting. Manet was aware and had already copied this painting by Titian that he had seen in Florence, the “Venus of Urbino” from 1534, and you see there’s a dog at the foot of the bed rather than a cat. You also see that a lot of changes of Titian’s “Venus of Urbino” is a goddess. Manet’s woman is a contemporary prostitute. Actually, Olympia was a pseudonym for an upper-class prostitute. We also see that there’s a Black maid in the composition of Manet’s work. She’s wearing Western clothing, although she has a foulard, a head wrap that would’ve been worn by Black women in Paris. The woman also has coral earrings. We’ll look at that in a second. I just want to point out that other artists who treated nudes in this era, like Alexandre Cabanel, they were showing Venuses. They were showing goddesses. This is a painting of “The Birth of Venus” from 1863 by Cabanel, and you see that there are halftones. She’s voluptuous. She’s sexy. Manet’s “Olympia” is harshly illuminated. There are no halftones. You see this dark outlining of her body. People described her at the time as looking dirty. Also, people would’ve recognised that the model was Manet’s favourite model, Victorine Meurent, so we really can’t suspend our disbelief here. I just want to show you a few details. You also see that her hair kind of merges with the background, so it’s not very clear of her age or even her gender, initially.
She looks very young, but she’s not very voluptuous, as you would traditionally see with the nudes of this time. You also see that she grasps her genital region in this very harsh way, and you see that very emphatic outlining that made her look dirty. Also, the cat is a sexual innuendo, so the cat had replaced the dog that you saw in Titian’s work, and this is one of the responses from the time by the lithographer Honoré Daumier. The painting was hung high at the Salon. People couldn’t get at it. People were astonished by it, so there were many caricatures at the time, and then just here’s a closeup I show you of the maid who’s wearing pearl earrings, which were a sign of Black femininity that was brought to our attention with this exhibition that in terms of the fashion that she’s wearing. I just want to show you a slightly later work by Frédéric Bazille, who was a contemporary of Manet’s, where he shows a Black servant, but half nude in an Orientalist fashion, still wearing the head wrap. Bazille then would switch to showing more contemporary subjects after seeing Manet’s work, so what Manet is doing is quite radical showing this woman. She’s not half nude. She also, actually, we now know her identity through an exhibition that was mounted at the Wallach Gallery at Columbia University in 2018. Her name was Laure. She was a professional model. She didn’t work that far from or live that far from Manet’s studio. She was a subject of three works by Manet, including this work that was in the Met exhibition, where she’s a nanny in a public park, the Tuileries Gardens. She’s off to the right of the composition.
Also in the Met exhibition was this painting of a biracial woman who was Charles Baudelaire’s girlfriend, Jeanne Duval, who also has the pearl earrings, and Denise Murrell, who mounted the exhibition “Posing Modernity: "The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today” in 2018. She wrote in her catalogue, “Manet’s three images of Laure and his portrait of Duval, "all painted in 1862 to ‘63, "therefore underscore the degree "of racial and economic diversity "among the general population within Manet’s environs "as well as the multiethnic mix "of Manet’s close social and artistic circles,” end quote, and also, what’s interesting is that with this exhibition we’re now looking, and also, with Murrell’s exhibition in 2018, we’re looking at this Black model in a new way that she represents the growing Black community, that Black people were the enslaved community. They were freed in France before they were in the United States. Also, the Emancipation Proclamation of Abraham Lincoln was issued in 1863, so maybe Manet is commenting on this by showing this Black maid in the room. You see that she’s bearing, she’s holding this bouquet of flowers, which is a symbol of, or symbolic of a gift from a client. In the 2018 exhibition at the Wallach Gallery, Elizabeth Colomba, who’s an artist who lives in New York City, originally from Paris, her family’s from Martinique, she did this large-scale painting, “Laure, Portrait of a Negress,” imagining Manet’s model walking in the neighbourhood on her way to Manet’s studio, and you see there’s a black cat as well as a little dog, so maybe there’s a reference to Titian, and, of course, the black cat that’s in Manet’s work.
Also, the fact that you have the cobblestones and the rain is a response to this very important Impressionist work by Gustave Caillebotte, “Paris: A Rainy Day,” and Elizabeth Columba, who is getting a lot of acclaim, her work is actually featured in this month’s “Vogue” magazine, and one of her works has recently entered the Met’s collection, she shows Black women who’ve been overlooked and also is making up for the fact that there aren’t that many Black women in art, so she’s taking old master techniques and often combining sources from multiple works of art into her paintings that are masterly done because she’s been trained in an academic way. Also, Manet’s work has had an impact on later artists, including Fernand Léger’s work, “The Three Women,” that’s in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and you see this title once had “Le Grand Dejeuner” in it. Now, today, it’s just known as “Three Women,” but you see the black animal at the foot of the bed, and you see this work is both in response to “Olympia” and “Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe” as well as to Mondrian’s work in terms of the geometric abstraction as well as Léger’s own personal style that’s derived from Cubism, and even Paul Gauguin did his own copy after Manet’s “Olympia,” and this painting that I share with you from 1891 actually entered Degas’ collection, and he owned this painting as well as a Gauguin painting, “The Ham,” that was based on Manet’s ham that I showed you earlier, and Degas hung this work in the entryway to his home. Gauguin painted the work after Manet’s painting entered the collection of the Musée du Luxembourg after a subscription was set up to raise money to bring it into a contemporary institution, and Degas donated money so that it could be acquired by the Musée du Luxembourg. It’s now hanging, or now it’s part of the Musée d'Orsay collection, and Degas purchased the Gauguin painting at a public auction.
Degas also owned a crayon tracing after “Olympia” as well as two etched versions of “Olympia.” In the same salon of 1865, Degas showed this work, “Scene of War in the Middle Ages,” that very few people, even, no one took notice of. It’s a very peculiar subject. Is this a response to the Civil War? It also has been known as, with the title “The Misfortunes of the City of Orléans” that could be the, is the source city for New Orleans and Degas’ mother’s family was from New Orleans, so is he commenting on that? It’s not clear, but he really laboured over this work. It’s collaged together. It’s a painting on paper, and people did not take notice of it, and maybe that’s why he left academic subject matter to work with realism, so I show you how it was installed at the Met with the painting I showed you earlier of a woman seated beside a vase of flowers, right to the left, and here are the two works side-by-side, so these are dramatically different works in 1865 for Degas. In the next gallery, you saw Manet’s “The Dead Toreador” opposite a Degas work of a fallen jockey, and it’s believed that Degas responded to Manet’s work, which was inspired by Goya. It’s actually cut down from a larger work, and it’s one of the great pairings that was in the exhibition, and also, it’s a very early work that Degas did where he’s focusing on horse racing, which was a very important subject for him. It also was a subject that Manet took up as well, and what’s really fascinating about the Degas work is that he kept coming back to it throughout his life, so he began it in 1866, then reworked it between 1880 and ‘81, and then came back to it again around 1897, and he used his brother as the model for “The Fallen Jockey.”
He’s also showing a very dangerous sport of the steeplechase, and actually, something that we should talk about is that a lot of new subjects were broached by these artists, and, in particular, horse racing was becoming very popular in France at this time, and Degas was a particular fan of horse racing and would be going to the races quite regularly, particularly visiting his friends, the Valpinçons. I just showed you possibly Madame Valpinçon in the last slide. Degas’ brother Achille modelled for “The Fallen Jockey,” and his brother had died in 1893, and it’s interesting that he came back to the canvas, but didn’t alter his brother’s face, but altered other parts of the composition, and here I show you these two works. In the next gallery, you see horse racing as a subject broached by both artists, and Manet liked to show the more dramatic part of horse racing, the height of the event, and Degas often show these in-between moments. It’s something he also did with his dance paintings, and here you see another example of a man seen from behind and also very unusual cropping with this kind of near and far perspective. I also want to point out that photography would eventually have an impact on Degas’ work. Here are photographs that were published in 1887 by Eadweard Muybridge showing the horse in motion, and these were the first photographs to show that when a horse runs, you really could see how his feet left the ground, and prior to the publishing of these photographs and knowledge of these photographs that were done in Palo Alto, California by the British photographer Eadweard Muybridge, people did not know how a horse looked when all four feet were off the ground, and you can see that Manet did not know that in the way he shows the horse’s legs in his composition that I share with you, “The Races in the Bois de Boulogne,” and the curators of the Met exhibition wonder if this man in the lower right-hand corner of Manet’s work could possibly be a portrait of Degas because Manet and Degas did go to the horse races. They were friends.
They shared that love of horse racing, and I think it’s interesting that the man is facing away from us, so curiously, was Manet thinking about how Degas often had his people looking away from us, like his uncle or the man in the horse racing scene that I show you on the lower left. Also, Degas was the first of the two artists to show the picture-within-a-picture in his composition, so here’s a portrait of a collector on the right that was placed next to this magnificent portrait by Manet of Émile Zola, who was a great champion of Manet’s work, but you see the pictures-within-a-picture with these bulletin boards in both compositions, and so I just show them to you, so just a really great installation of these works side-by-side, and then, the work by Manet, you see that “Olympia” is in this composition. Maybe she’s even looking at Zola. It’s not clear if it’s a photograph or an etching that’s on the bulletin board. There’s also a Japanese wood block print and a print based on a Velázquez work, a Bacchic scene. You also have a Japanese screen. Japanese art was having a huge impact on artists in Paris in this time. Manet was one of the leaders responding to Japanese art with Japan opening trade to the West for the first time in 300 years. Here is a brochure, a booklet that Manet wrote defending, I’m sorry, that Zola wrote defending Manet’s work that’s on the table, and then, a book that’s being held by Zola is believed to be by Charles Blanc, a book that was like an encyclopaedia of artists’ work that was published, and artists often went to it when they wanted to find a resource.
Manet’s work had been rejected from the Salon of 1866, and he knew that he would not be included in a World’s Fair, the Exposition Universelle in 1867, so he ended up using his inheritance to build a pavilion across the street from one of the entrances to the fair, in which he showed 50 of his works, and Zola, earlier that year, had written an article in which he defended Manet and said, “The future is his,” and foresaw that the “Déjeuner sur l'herbe” would one day hang at the Louvre, and it did eventually enter the Louvre’s collection in 1834. The painting was right… Here I just show you some of the details with the booklet written by Zola. This painting was actually done in Manet’s studio, not at Zola’s office space or at Zola’s apartment, so it is an artificial setup here, but it has so many fascinating details. You also see this incredible treatment of black as well as the paint being so obvious in the painting of… Here, I’m just going to show you a few details, but look at the pants. One of the critics at the time mentioned how the pants are made of paint, so Manet was showcasing his brushwork in his compositions way before Impressionism, and people took notice of it. The painting was hanging at the Met side-by-side with the work that Degas did of his friend, the artist Tissot, which is a much more casual treatment of his friend showing maybe that they are a little closer in terms of their relationship in the way Tissot looks out at us versus Manet’s Zola looking off to the side. I just wanted to show you also here is Victorine Meurent in “Young Lady in 1866” in an artificial setup in Manet’s studio in a bathrobe, and that it’s a young lady with a parrot. It’s called “Young Lady in 1866,” but it’s Manet’s response to a Gustave Courbet work, “Woman with a Parrot,” where she’s just showing it all, but Manet shows this woman in an in-between moment.
She has her necklace on. She has her shoes on, but she’s wearing her bathrobe. She’s holding violets, a symbol of romance, a gift from a lover, but yet she’s holding a monocle, a man’s monocle, so maybe a man has been with her, and this is believed to be an allegory of the senses with the monocle representing sight, the violets representing scent. You also have sound with the parrot, and then, taste with the citrus fruit, and then, there’s so many other great works in the exhibition, but I want to allow time for conversation, but the next part of the exhibition looks at or looked at Berthe Morisot, who ended up marrying Manet’s brother, and she was invited into the Impressionist group. She was one of two women in the group besides Mary Cassatt. She was French, and she was a subject of, I believe, 11 portraits by Manet, so it’s believed that he was in love with her even though he was married to Suzanne and stopped painting her once she married his brother, and actually, here’s one of the paintings showing his friend Berthe Morisot in “The Balcony” along with two other contemporaries, the landscape artist Antoine Guillemet and the violinist Fanny Claus, and actually, Manet’s godson Leon is in the background, and when Manet married Suzanne, she brought a child to the relationship of unknown paternity. Manet never adopted this child, Leon, but he is featured in numerous works, including this one, and actually, the way he treats him here is actually based on an earlier work by Velázquez called “The Little Cavaliers” that’s in the Louvre, but why don’t I now take time for some questions?
Q&A and Comments:
So I’ll stop sharing, and we didn’t even get to Impressionism, but we can talk about that when we have our conversation, so we have a few people who’ve written that they’ve seen the exhibition. The exhibition is not coming to London.
Yes, one of you mentions, Rose mentions that Berthe Morisot did a painting, “The Cradle.” Yeah, Morisot frequently painted women in interiors or gardens looking at motherhood as a subject. She was a mother. She had it all. She had a brother-in-law who was a famous artist. Her husband accepted and supported her work as an artist.
Mary Cassatt, on the other hand, who was a very good friend of Degas and was brought into the Impressionist group, she also portrayed mothers and children, but she never got married and never had children of her own. Oh, so the earrings I identified, they’re actually coral earrings that were worn by both Laure and Olympia as well as by Jeanne Duval, and they’re believed to be symbolic of Black femininity.
Q: Oh, the question is why did Gauguin paint Manet’s “Olympia”?
A: Well, it was a very scandalous work. It was one of the most talked-about works, I believe the most talked-about work at the Salon of 1865, and Paul Gauguin, actually, in 1891, the year he painted his version of “Olympia,” he went to Tahiti, and his favourite subject was to look at nude women, and he frequently looked to a range of sources to arrive at his final paintings. He looked to Egyptian art. He looked to Javanese art. He looked to Japanese wood block prints, but it’s very important that he painted Manet’s “Olympia” and even did his own take on it as well. Okay, oh, so the Degas painting, the question is about “The Fallen Jockey” that…
Did he keep a diary? I know the most recent literature about that painting is a show that the Met had a few years ago called “Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible” that was at the Met Breuer when the Met rented the old Whitney Museum of American Art, so if you want to read more information about that, the painting is in the National Gallery in Washington. They might have information about how they know that the work was returned to again and again, but it’s a fascinating story. Yes, all the canvases are in oil. I did show you a work on paper, the “Scene of War in the Middle Ages” by Degas. Later on in the Met exhibition, there were a number of pastels by Degas. Also, there were a number of prints and drawings in the show as well. Oh, and the question about Manet and Degas, so actually, Manet never left the Salon system. He was known as a realist. He was invited to join the Impressionist group that were artists who broke free of the Salon system or never could show their most ambitious works at the Salon, but he never joined the Impressionists and never was called an Impressionist, although I see that often that people call him an Impressionist, so he never exhibited with them. They had eight major exhibitions between 1874 and 1886, and Degas, as I mentioned, liked to be called a realist or an independent artist, but the Impressionists and Manet were following a call for new subject matter by Charles Baudelaire.
Charles Baudelaire, the poet and the author, who was a good friend of Manet, wrote a very important essay, “The Painter of Modern Life,” in the late 1850s to early 1860, and published it in 1863 where he was calling for artists to focus on very contemporary subject matter, contemporary fashion, to get away from the garb of the past and to look at the contingent, the transitory, to look at very fugitive subject matter, ephemeral subject matter, and these artists were responding, but the Impressionists were their own separate group. They had their own exhibitions, and they were looking at modern Paris, the new Paris that was created under Emperor Napoleon III with the help of the superintendent of Paris, Baron Georges Haussmann, and they were looking at some of the same sources, like Japanese art and photography as well, and also, something that’s particular to the Impressionists is that some of them liked to paint outdoors, en plein air. Degas was not known for doing that. He liked to work in his studio. Later in the Met exhibition, you saw examples of work that Manet did outdoors when he went to visit Claude Monet in 1874 at his home at Argenteuil, a rented home on the Seine River. I don’t know of the exhibition coming to Canada. I believe it only had two locations, the Musée d'Orsay and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I don’t know if there are any other questions, or Wendy, if you have any questions.
No, thanks. Thank you very, very much for this really outstanding presentation. Really excellent. I’m thrilled that I was able to see it, and I’m absolutely thrilled that you were able to share it with our team, and I just wanted to say to you that you and I had a chat, and I wasn’t in New York, and you mentioned two exhibitions that I should go and see, and I was so disappointed that I was going to miss it, and then I had to get back to New York, actually, just for 24 hours, for a meeting, and I ran off. Actually, I went off to MoMA, and I saw the most… That Picasso exhibition, “Picasso in Fontainebleau,” was so incredible, so I want to thank you for that tip.
Yes, that’s an outstanding show that’s at the Museum of Modern Art right now focusing on Picasso’s work in the summer of 1921, and it’s the first time all the works he did that summer, or as many that they can pull together have been reunited and to show how he was jumping between a neoclassical mode and a Cubist mode, and it’s part of a larger celebration of Picasso’s work that’s happening worldwide with it being the 50th anniversary of Picasso’s death.
Well, thank you, so yeah, so thank you for pointing that out to me, and are there any other exhibitions that you could recommend to our New York audience-
Well, also-
in New York right now?
Yes, there’s a beautiful Ed Ruscha show that should be closing soon at MoMA looking at one of the few living artists associated with Pop Art. He’s based in L.A. He’s in his mid-80s, and most of his art is language-based, but he also has dealt with vernacular architecture in Los Angeles as his subject matter. Very witty work that shows his love of Dadism and Surrealism, very, very clever work, funny work as well, and also, a fashion show at the Met, “Women Dressing Women,” looking at only women designers, and actually, some new acquisitions for the Met. I think half of the show has never been shown before, so it’s new things that the Met has acquired and filling in the cracks of fashion history.
Oh, brill, and is the Chloé exhibition on still in New York?
Yes, I believe that’s on at the Jewish Museum as well. I .
That’s, that is brilliant. Excellent, well, once again, Deborah, a million thanks. That was really outstanding and a real treat for our audience, so you can relax now.
Oh, yes. Oh, yes-
How much work that was.
there’s so much more that I could have shared with you that the exhibition was huge, and it really wasn’t about Impressionism; it was more about how these two artists’ lives intersected, but in the latter part of the exhibition, the curators dealt with some of the subject matter that we more likely associate with Impressionism, like café scenes, the ballet, Degas’ bather scenes, and even looking at how Manet dealt with the bather as a subject, and then, the last gallery showed works that Degas acquired, that he had a really incredible collection of Manet’s work, and the curators mentioned this sort of asymmetry that Degas did the portraits of Manet, but Manet did not do the portraits of Degas, unless that is a portrait in that jockey scene or that horse racing scene.
Right.
And also-
Exactly.
that Degas had such an outstanding private collection of art. He cherished Manet’s work, and they got over that squabble at the beginning.
I love that. Honestly, slashing a painting is no, is a serious insult.
Yes.
So, you know, but managing to overcome that and still to continue the friendship, I think that’s pretty cool.
Right-
So-
And also, to even own that Gauguin painting after “Olympia” and put it right in his front hall.
[Wendy] Exactly.
[Deborah] Incredible.
Exactly, exactly, so lots to think about, lots of take-home value. Thank you very, very much, so to everybody in South Africa and Israel and our neck of the woods, I can say goodnight because it’s already, it’s past 10 o'clock in the evening, and to you, I can say enjoy the rest of your day.
Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you, Deborah.
Have a great-
Thanks a million. Bye-bye, everyone.