by Ross King
Monet's fledgling artistic career had been interrupted when he was drafted into the army in 1860. Most young Frenchmen dreaded military service and took every precaution—including bribery of the relevant officials—to avoid it. Not so, however, the plucky Monet. "The seven years of service that appalled so many," he later boasted, "were full of attraction to me."12 He was sent to Algeria with the Zouaves, a division of the light infantry that took its name and exotic uniform—turban, baggy trousers, cutaway tunic—from an Algerian tribe. Here he savored the light of the African sun and the color of the desert, not to mention (so he later averred) the "crackling of gunpowder and the thrusts of the sabre."13 But after little more than a year his military career ended amid the purple spots and fevered delirium of typhus. Obliged to return to France, he divided his time after his recuperation between his studies in Paris, where he entered the studio of Charles Gleyre, and painting expeditions to the Normandy coast, where he encountered his idol, Courbet.
Claude Monet
By 1865 Monet was sharing an apartment in the Rue Furstemberg with Frédéric Bazille, a friend from Gleyre's studio. However, a month before the Salon opened he had departed with his paintbox and his eighteen-year-old mistress, Camille Doncieux, for the village of Chailly-en-Bière, on the edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau, thirty-five miles south of Paris. The forest's rustic enchantments had been celebrated on canvas by Corot, who had painted there as early as 1822, as well as by Jean-François Millet and Théodore Rousseau, both permanent residents of the area by the late 1840s. Inspired in part by the example of their work, Monet was beginning an immensely bold pictorial enterprise, a twenty-foot-wide canvas onto which he planned to paint, in the open air, capturing the interplay of light and shade among the trees, a series of life-size figures in modern dress relaxing over a picnic lunch in the forest.
Monet hoped to have his mammoth new painting ready for the Salon of 1866. In the meantime, he had succeeded in his first attempt to show work at the Salon, since his two Normandy seascapes—one showing sailboats battling winds in rough, muddy waters off the coast of Honfleur, the second a foaming tide retreating from a rocky beach under a leaden sky—suitably impressed the jurors. Better still, the two works soon received exuberant praise from the public and critics alike. Paul Mantz, chief art critic for the Gazette des Beaux-Arts and one of the most fearsome reviewers in France, heaped compliments on The Mouth of the Seine at Honfleur, singling out its "taste for harmonious colors" and proclaiming it one of the finest seascapes seen at the Salon in recent years. 14
A new star had been born—a star who, most irritatingly for Édouard Manet, shared four fifths of his surname. Manet may have been even more provoked had he known that Monet planned to call his huge new painting Le Déjeuner sur I'herbe. Zacharie Astruc, who knew both painters, volunteered to introduce Manet to the younger man. But Manet, waving his arm dismissively, stoutly refused the acquaintance.15 For while his virtual namesake luxuriated in words of exorbitant praise, his own two Salon paintings were meeting with an altogether different fate.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The Apostle of Ugliness
I WISH I HAD you here, my dear Baudelaire," Manet wrote to his friend, who was still in Brussels, shortly after the 1865 Salon opened. "Insults are beating down on me like hail. I've never been through anything like it."1
Charles Baudelaire was not the most sympathetic person to whom Manet might have turned. Never one to worry about either the critics or public opinion, Baudelaire thrived on controversy and notoriety. "I'd like to see the entire human race against me," he once wrote. Eager to produce an opprobrious reputation for himself and requite the morbid curiosity of the Belgians, he had recently begun spreading the rumor that he had murdered and then eaten his father. "I am swimming in dishonor like a fish in water," he was soon boasting in letters to friends back in Paris.2
Baudelaire could not therefore understand Manet's dismay over yet another vitriolic reception for his Salon paintings. As he put it in a letter to a friend, insults and injustice were "excellent things."3 His response to Manet's plight was a stern letter urging his friend to call to mind artists such as Richard Wagner—an idol of Baudelaire's—who had been forced to contend with both a loutish public and the inane sniping of the critics. "Do you think you are the first man put in this predicament?" Baudelaire upbraided the disconsolate painter. "Are you a greater genius than Châteaubriand or Wagner? And did not people make fun of them? They did not die of it."4
Still, the boorish protests that drove Wagner's Tannhäuser from the Paris stage in 1861 could not compare to the unseemly hubbub that greeted Manet's work at the 1865 Salon, with Olympia (plate 4B) provoking an even more incredulous and fiercely hostile reaction than Music in the Tuileries or Le Déjeuner sur I'herbe had two years earlier. "Never has a painting excited so much laughter, mockery and catcalls as this Olympia," wrote one critic in his review of the show.5 On Sundays, when admission was free, immense crowds poured into Room M, preventing people from getting close to Olympia or even circulating through the rest of the room. An atmosphere of hysteria and even fear predominated. Some spectators collapsed in "epidemics of crazed laughter" while others, mainly women, turned their heads from the picture in fright. "Nothing can convey the visitors' initial astonishment," wrote the correspondent for L'Époque, "then their anger or fear."6
These rancorous attentions soon became too much for the Marquis de Chennevières. In the past, he and Nieuwerkerke had been forced to post guards in front of Ernest Meissonier's paintings to protect them from their crushes of admirers. At the 1865 Salon, Chennevières needed to deploy guards to protect Olympia from the malicious designs of indignant spectators. When even these precautions proved inadequate, the painting was removed from its original location and suspended high above the heads of the visitors—so high, in fact, that a critic for Le Figaro claimed that "you scarcely knew whether you were looking at a parcel of nude flesh or a bundle of laundry."7Olympia thereby completed exactly the opposite trajectory of The Spanish Singer, which had earned such admiration four years earlier that on Chennevière's commands it had been lowered to eye level.
Almost equal to the fury of the public was the loathing of the critics. Théophile Gautier, once again, could find nothing good to say about Manet's work, accusing the painter of deliberately courting controversy: "Here there is nothing, we are sorry to say," he wrote after casting a disdainful eye on Olympia, "but the desire to attract attention at any price." From the pages of La Presse Paul de Saint-Victor snorted: "Art sunk so low doesn't even deserve reproach." Other critics seized gleefully on the figure of Victorine, variously lampooning her as a "female gorilla," "a coal lady from the Batignolles," "a redhead of perfect ugliness," and "a corpse displayed in the Morgue . . . dead of yellow fever and already arrived at an advanced state of decomposition."8
The Morgue was one of Paris's more macabre sights, a special building on the southeast corner of the Île-de-la-Cite where unclaimed bodies, arranged naked on a counter and exposed to a stream of cold water to delay decomposition, could be viewed by family members searching for lost loved ones—or simply by curious members of the public wishing to enjoy cheap and lurid titillation. These same repellent fancies were being gratified, Saint-Victor distastefully observed, by Manet's Olympia, with Room M taking on, he claimed, the unwholesome and unedifying aspect of the Morgue.9 Art had come a long distance from the days when painters had sought the beau idéal and concerned themselves with morally uplifting images.
If the public had found Le Déjeuner sur I'herbe merely ridiculous, a farcical jape that might, at its worst, bring a blush to the cheek of a young maiden, Olympia elicited far stronger responses. Along with their hysterical laughter, the onlookers exhibited, if the critic for L'Époque was correct, "anger and fear." For many Salon-goers in 1865, Victorine reclining on her bed was a threatening sight. Many people found her unspeakably and offensively ugly—a kind of female version of the cretinous-looking "Dumolard" in Millet's Man
with a Hoe. One critic noted her "vicious strangeness," adding that she had "the sourness of someone prematurely aged." Another called her a "grotesque," while a third, in Le Siècle, proclaimed her "ugly" and "stupid" as well as cadaverous. Before the Salon was out, Victorine's supposedly repulsive demeanor had won for Manet the title "Apostle of Ugliness"10—the name by which Delacroix had once been known.
Victorine was thought filthy as well as ugly. The shadows on her hands and feet, crudely painted in comparison to the prevailing style, were mocked as the grime of the shop or factory, with some critics complaining, for instance, that she was "covered in coal"11 and others making speculations about her working-class origins. With Victorine's dirtiness and ugliness came a horror of moral contamination. Not a few onlookers regarded the painting as a shameful obscenity that should never have been put on public view. "Why does one find these paintings in the galleries of the Palais des Champs-Élysées?" asked one exasperated critic.12 Not that Manet had given Victorine a pose that was sexually alluring: Olympia rehashed none of the aphrodisiac expressions—shot hips, bedroom eyes, emphatic breasts and buttocks—found in the nudes of Cabanel and Ingres. Much of the moral outrage and anxiety had to do, instead, with the position of Victorine's left hand, which to many spectators simply looked indecent. The customary Venus Pudica gesture appeared to have been transformed (as Twain thought it had been in Titian's Venus of Urhino) into an act of self-gratification. Various critics pointed out how Victorine's hand was, as one of them put it, "flexed in a sort of shameless contraction." One critic claimed that not all of her fingers were present and accounted for, suggesting a lewd act that he argued "cries out for examination by the inspectors of public health."13
Olympia therefore caused offense for various reasons, some having as much to do with aesthetics as with morality. But one issue in particular—a legal as well as moral one—may have created much of the horrified backlash against Manet's painting. At the exact time the 1865 Salon raged in the Palais des Champs-Élysées, French politicians and the police were busy trying to quell the spread of pornography, or what one observer had called "the facility of the photographic art in representing scandalous situations."14 A lucrative trade in pornographic images had developed by the early 1850s as photographers who began their careers producing académies for painters soon branched out to supply a much wider market with what a book entitled The Squalor of Paris denounced as "cynical photographs boldly showing insolent details."15 Moral outrage against this proliferating trade had been followed by legal sanctions as the Prefecture of Police established a special register to record the names of photographers and models arrested for producing these "street académies." Police crackdowns became ever more aggressive in the early 1860s, with 172 photographers and printsellers arrested in Paris between 1863 and 1865; those found guilty would spend as much as a year in prison. Even so, by 1865 the trade had grown so large that one police raid alone, on June 15, netted 15,000 pornographic images.
The 1865 Salon therefore took place against a background of police raids on suspected pornographers, angry petitions to the authorities (mainly by conservative Catholics), and heated debate on the floor of the Senate. This febrile atmosphere hardly made 1865 the most propitious time to unveil a work such as Olympia. The painting's nudity was far less explicit than photographs illicitly peddled in the streets and aimed unambiguously at scabrous tastes, but to many Salon-goers in 1865, Olympia must have appeared to owe as much to these street académies—many of which showed women reclining on curtained beds in exotic boudoirs—as it did to the Venus of Urhino.
Manet grew increasingly angry and depressed as one appalling review followed another, with Jesus Mocked by the Soldiers receiving a press almost as atrocious as Olympia. And if the reviews themselves were not bad enough, caricaturists such as Cham and Bertall had a field day parodying Olympia in the satirical journals.* Both ridiculed Victorine as a grubby-looking artisan with large feet and a homely grin, and both gave special prominence to the black cat with its suggestively erect tail. Bertall punningly christened the painting "Manette," a clever blending of "Manet" and "minette," which meant both "pussycat" and "young woman." Manet was mocked in the streets as well as in the newspapers. He became the butt of songs and jokes, "pursued as soon as he showed his face," according to one version of events, "by rumors and wisecracks, the passersby in the street turning to laugh at the handsome fellow, so well dressed and correct, who painted such filth."16
Feelings ran so high that Manet even provoked fisticuffs. At the École des Beaux-Arts, where students were divided between admirers and detractors, discussions of Olympia frequently ended with exchanges of blows. One of these disputes was interrupted by the arrival of Jean-Léon Gérôme, who castigated his pupils not for fighting but for mentioning Manet's name. "Look here, gentlemen," he upbraided them, "why are you talking about Manet? You know quite well that it's forbidden."17
One evening in May, in order to forget his troubles for an hour or two, Manet braved the streets to go with Antonin Proust for an ice cream at the Café Imoda in the Rue Royale, a street of florists and other fine shops running south of the church of the Madeleine. When the waiter as a matter of habit brought over the newspapers, Manet snapped at him: "Who asked for the newspapers?" The papers were removed but Manet, his appetite ruined, left his ice cream melting on the table. "He drank a whole carafe of water," Proust remembered, "and then, after a long silence, we went back to his studio."18 That Manet still had the will to face his easel was perhaps something of a miracle.
For those able to fight their way through the jeering mobs to see them, more than a hundred other paintings were hung on the walls of Room M. Gustave Moreau showed two works, Medea and Jason and The Young Man and Death, that evoked the same vaporous dreamworld with its air of cryptic menace as his Oedipus and the Sphinx from a year earlier. His continued popularity with the critics ensured him another medal.
Ernest Meissonier was likewise present in Room M. Newspapers such as L 'Artiste had been reporting as late as April that he would be unveiling Friedland at the Salon of 1865,l9 but these forecasts were extremely optimistic given his working methods. In the end, the only appearance made by Friedland at that year's Salon was its fascinating cameo in Charles Meissonier's The Studio. If Charles's undeniable talent was not guarantee enough, the presence on the jury of Le Patron helped to secure his participation. Having reached the age of fifty in February, Meissonier appeared to be shaping the talents and nurturing the careers of a new generation of painters. Also accepted by the jury was a painting, likewise called The Studio, by Meissonier's other young pupil, the twenty-year-old Lucien Gros.
While Charles Meissonier included a portrait of his father in The Studio, Meissonier père returned the favor by exhibiting, in lieu of the unfinished Friedland, a work painted several years earlier called The Etcher: Portrait of Charles Meissonier, in which he showed his son, then about seventeen, at work on an etching. Meissonier had a particular interest in etchings, executing them throughout his career, and clearly he passed on his knowledge of the difficult technique to his son. Etching is a form of engraving in which the surface of a copper plate is coated with a ground (often a mixture of wax, mastic and bitumen) onto which the artist traces his design using a steel needle. Hydrochloric acid is then applied to the surface, where it eats away at the copper exposed by the needle (the word etching comes from the Dutch etsen, "to eat") and leaves behind grooves, which in turn leave their imprints after the ground is removed, the plate inked, and the paper run through a printing press.
For The Etcher, Meissonier made this workmanlike procedure appear to be, despite its wax pastes and bottles of acid, a gentlemanly occupation. He depicted the young man seated in an upholstered chair before a sunlit window, smoking a cigarette and wearing an embroidered red dressing gown and slippers as he oversaw the biting of his plate. Set in Meissonier's studio, the scene included a canvas adorning an easel and, on the back wall, a tapestry featuring Apollo and his muses
on Mount Parnassus. The presence in the painting of Apollo, the god of poetry and music as well as the leader of the Muses, seems to bode well for the career of the young etcher, as if Meissonier were predicting future triumphs for his talented son.
The Etcher glows with a sunlight that kindles on the open shutter on the left, spills through the mullioned window, defines Charles's face, and diffuses itself dimly throughout the room.20 Such a poetic treatment of the fall of light might easily have come from the brush (and the camera obscura) of Jan Vermeer. The Etcher, in fact, bears such an uncanny similarity to a pair of works painted by Vermeer in 1668 and 1669, The Astronomer and The Geographer, that it is impossible to believe Meissonier did not know these two canvases, or at least engraved reproductions of them. In fact, the painting depicted by Vermeer in the background of The Astronomer, an illustration showing The Finding of Moses, also appears to be represented in Meissonier's The Etcher, further suggesting Meissonier's emulation of the Dutch painter's style.21
Whatever the case, the astonishing lesson in painting a fall of light conveyed in The Etcher only made Manet's apparently clumsy adumbration of Victorine's form—the shadows that reminded the reviewers of smudges of coal—look even more preposterously slipshod. Almost as impressive in this regard was Meissonier's second painting in Room M, The End of a Gambling Quarrel, which featured the two swordsmen sprawled on the floor. However, for the first time in his career Meissonier found his paintings eclipsed. A writer in L 'Artiste once claimed that the priority of the crowds on entering the Salon was to locate Meissonier's paintings—and then to gain access to them through the vigorous use of their elbows.22 In 1865, Room M was, as usual, the most popular destination in the Palais des Champs-Élysées, but the hordes, for once, were not bent on planting themselves before Meissonier's works: they had come, rather, to laugh and jeer at Olympia. Anyone interested in admiring Meissonier's works—or those of the many other painters in Room M—had to contend with the carnival atmosphere created by the raucous crowds exclaiming over Manet's canvases.
