Manet’s relationship with Baudelaire was always doomed to dissatisfaction. Baudelaire was a poet, not a painter, and he was a decade older. For all the influence he exerted on the younger generation of painters, he was too infatuated with his old hero Delacroix to really see what the next generation hungered to express, or to comprehend the ways in which they sought to express it.
Manet therefore looked toward his fellow painters for the kinds of stimulus and approbation he could never quite get from Baudelaire. No one, in this sense, was more useful to him than Edgar Degas.
—
MANET KNEW THAT HE had found, in Degas, not only a friend, but a brilliant acolyte. This was encouraging—at a time when Manet sorely needed encouragement.
But Manet was no fool, and he must have known that to think of Degas as a kind of protégé, a loyal sidekick, was to court trouble. Temperamentally, Degas was in no way suited to such a role. And then as well, he knew how ambitious Degas was. As they circled each other in these first few years, Manet had many opportunities to reflect on Degas’s skills. The two men often went to the racetrack together in the mid-1860s. Several deft sketches by Degas show Manet standing in his top hat, his weight on one leg, a hand elegantly at rest in his jacket pocket, peering intently into the distance—a picture of casual elegance. These and other drawings, which Manet saw on visits to his studio, were almost frighteningly virtuosic. Degas was as good a draftsman as Ingres, but his sure hand could also, if he chose, convey the energy and spontaneity of Delacroix.
Indeed, from the beginning of the 1860s, Degas had been quietly building on strengths—both technical (drawing and composition) and temperamental (a steely determination)—that were in many ways lacking in Manet. Manet’s drawing was often a bit iffy. He struggled with compositions and with the rules of perspective. He had to resort, more than once, to taking a knife to paintings that failed to cohere—because the perspective was out of whack or the image unbalanced—and selling off the separate parts.
Degas’s awkward attempts at etching in the Louvre may have given Manet an early sense of superiority in technical matters, but that initial dynamic was soon overturned. Degas’s sheer brilliance put him streets ahead of Manet in matters of technique. Watching, at once impressed and unnerved, Manet no doubt felt his deficiency even as he registered, and secretly relished, the huge impact he was having on his young friend.
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MANET AND DEGAS BELONGED at the time to a growing circle of artists, writers, and musicians, for the most part in their late twenties or early thirties. Their favorite meeting place during the second half of the 1860s was the Café Guerbois. The Guerbois consisted of two long rooms joined end-to-end. The first, fronting onto the street, was presided over by a female cashier. It was decorated in the generic Second Empire manner, much like the nearby cafés on the boulevard des Italiens. There were mirrors, and the walls were painted white with gilt trimmings.
It was here that, once or twice a week, various members of the Batignolles group, as it was named (after the district they met in), would gather around two tables reserved specially for them. Other members of the group included the artists Fantin-Latour, Alphonse Legros, Alfred Stevens, Giuseppe De Nittis, Pierre Renoir, Frédéric Bazille, James Whistler (when he wasn’t in London), and occasionally Claude Monet and Paul Cézanne. But not all the group’s members were painters: the photographer Nadar was a regular, and so, too, were the poet Théodore de Banville, the musician Edmond Maître, and several critics and writers, including Émile Zola, Théodore Duret, and Degas’s friend and co-conspirator Duranty.
These large, regular gatherings had a reliable, semi-organized feel. But there were other nights, too, when smaller clusters of two or three would meet for coffee or a game of billiards in the back room. Here, the atmosphere was darker, more intimate. The room had lower ceilings supported by rows of columns. It was big enough to contain five massive billiards tables placed all in a row, and it was usually smoky. In the dim gaslight, people appeared from a distance as blurry silhouettes, playing cards, relaxing on red banquettes, ducking in and out of view behind columns.
The proprietor, Auguste Guerbois, was sympathetic to these artists and writers and their various travails. He welcomed their presence. Looking back thirty years later, Claude Monet remembered the atmosphere of the place, and the tenor of the conversations: “Nothing could have been more interesting than these talks, with their perpetual clashes of opinion. You kept your mind on the alert, you felt encouraged to do disinterested, sincere research, you laid in supplies of enthusiasm that kept you going for weeks and weeks, until a project you had in mind took definite form. You always left the cafe feeling hardened for the struggle, with a stronger will, a sharpened purpose, and a clearer head.”
Manet—whose name had only recently been confused with Monet’s in a review—benefited hugely from the camaraderie of these occasions. “Supplies of enthusiasm” were exactly what he required.
Every such group, no matter how informal, tends to establish a kind of pecking order, and there’s no doubt that Manet was the Batignolles group’s informal leader. For all his problems with the critics and the public at large, his status among like-minded fellow artists seemed unassailable. Not only was he charming and congenial as a man, but he had credibility as an artist. Among progressive artists, poets, and writers, no one had been more bold, no one braver, no one more admirably pigheaded than Manet. Certainly, no one was more talked about.
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DEGAS WAS ACUTELY CONSCIOUS of Manet’s standing in the Batignolles group. But since he enjoyed a closer connection to Manet than almost all the other members of the group, he could also bask, to some extent, in Manet’s glow. Degas cut a lively and restless figure at the Guerbois. In the back room, around the billiards tables, he rarely sat down, preferring to dart in from the periphery with his barbed and brilliantly ironic remarks. He was intolerant of fools. He despised sentimentality. But he was modest and funny—people said he was a brilliant mimic. Despite his privileged background, he lived a Spartan existence, dedicated entirely to his art. If he had his “nose in the air,” wrote the art critic Armand Silvestre, it was “the nose of a searcher.”
Away from the cafés, the Manet and Degas families had become closely intertwined. Léon, at fifteen, was working as a runner for the bank owned by Degas’s widower father, Auguste. The two painters, meanwhile, attended intimate evening soirées several times a week. Auguste Degas liked to reciprocate the hospitality of the Manets by hosting regular musical soirées at his own home. And lately, both artists had begun to frequent musical evenings hosted by the mother of the three charming Morisot sisters, Berthe, Edma, and Yves.
If Manet’s charisma made him the dominant figure at the Guerbois, he and Degas were more evenly matched in the intimate settings of these weekly soirées. In the more feminine realm of these bourgeois interiors, Degas’s quick wit seemed particularly brilliant, his brooding presence magnetic. His superior feeling for music, too, must have been noticed by Suzanne and the other performers. He may not have been as naturally convivial as Manet, but he was more widely read, and he had succinct, well-informed things to say on subjects that often left Manet indifferent.
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WHEN YOU FALL UNDER the spell of someone, there is often a dual movement within you: Even as you succumb to the other person’s powerful influence, you feel an equal and opposite impulse to bolster your own identity, to fortify yourself—in a sense, to push back. If your own sense of who you are is still to some extent unformed, as was Degas’s at this point, you must hurry on and form it.
You must do this, however, under duress, since the other person is all the while exerting his seductive influence and, in the process, unintentionally reminding you of all the ways in which your earlier self was weak and insufficient. This dynamic is a tremendous spur to creativity. But it makes for volatile relations.
In the 1860s, even as Degas was growing closer to Manet, not just socially but artistically,
addressing some of the same subjects and inching toward him in style, he felt an increasingly urgent need to carve out aesthetic differences between them.
One major difference began to push through around 1865, and slowly, it hardened into a clear line between them. It was visible on the canvas, but the difference had less to do with painterly style or subject matter, and more to do with a philosophical attitude. It boiled down to each artist’s very different feeling for truth.
For Manet, truth was slippery and manifold. Consequently, he enjoyed the surface play of social interactions, of flirtations, and of wit. He was always dressing up his subjects in fancy costumes, and he relished the fluidity of individual identity, the essential unknowability of people beneath their various masks.
Degas’s inclination—an inclination that he began about now to bolster and fortify so that very quickly it became almost a personal signature, a seal—was exactly the opposite. He had developed a determination to pierce the festive veil; to skewer the truth. He carried around a persistent sense of hidden truths that must somehow be exposed to the light. If Manet came to feel threatened by this, it was no doubt because there was so much in his own private life that he deliberately kept away from the light.
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AS HE BROODED, and as he meditated on Manet, Degas seems to have noticed that not all was as it seemed with his talented friend. Manet was renowned as a ladies’ man, but he had a wife, Suzanne, and they cared for a boy, Léon. Evidently, he had been involved with Suzanne for many years. They lived with Manet’s mother, and they introduced Léon as Manet’s godson, or else as his half brother. The arrangement was hard to parse. They had married very soon after Manet’s father, the respected judge, had died in 1863. Had they simply been waiting for him to go? It certainly looked that way.
Auguste Manet had stopped reporting for work in 1857, having lost the ability to speak. He was suffering from paresis, a fatal, neurological form of tertiary syphilis, that also reduced him to blindness. He would live for five more years, but he never spoke again. “You would be moved to tears if you could see him,” wrote his wife, Madame Manet, to one of his colleagues prior to his death.
Manet had hidden his affair with Suzanne so effectively and for so long that when he mentioned he was going to Holland to get married, even close friends were surprised. “Manet just gave me the most unexpected news,” wrote Baudelaire in a letter. “He is leaving tonight for Holland and will be bringing back a wife.” Since Baudelaire scarcely knew anything about it, it’s doubtful that Degas, who at this point had known Manet for only a year, had any inkling at all.
Léon was eleven when the wedding took place. He claimed later that he never knew for certain who his real father was. Nonetheless, he became Manet’s favorite model, and over the years he appeared in seventeen canvases, more than anyone else who modeled for Manet. The boy’s shifting appearances in all these images have contributed to the aura of fevered speculation that today surrounds his identity. Some scholars have argued that Léon was actually fathered by Auguste Manet. But the theory, which was advanced in 1981 by Mina Curtiss and developed in 2003 by Nancy Locke, remains hard to credit. Curtiss’s contention was based on rumor. Locke, years later, built her case around the mystery of why Léon was never legitimized, even after Manet and Suzanne were finally married. The mystery is resolved, she argued, if Auguste Manet was the father, because this would mean that Léon was born not just out of wedlock but as a result of adultery. (Under French law at the time, a child born as a result of adultery could not be legitimized.)
There is, however, another, simpler explanation for why Léon was never legitimized. In the Manet family’s social milieu, legitimizing a child born out of wedlock—and eleven years after the fact—was simply not done. It was done frequently by Manet’s more bohemian Impressionist colleagues, but their families were not so highborn. The implications for Léon’s future were admittedly grave. He remained ignorant, or at best confused, about his parentage. Even at his mother’s funeral he left a business card identifying himself as her younger brother. He was denied, too, the excellent education to which the Manet name would have entitled him. When he could have been at university or in the military, he had to resort to taking a job as a runner for the bank owned by Degas’s father.
In declining to go through the process of legitimizing Léon, Suzanne may have been guilty, as Manet’s early biographer Adolphe Tabarant wrote, of “excessive respect for hypocritical morality, for ‘what-will-people-say.’ ” But the submarine pull of such social strictures—especially for an outsider, as Suzanne was—can be stronger than law.
Manet evidently agreed to abide by the whole elaborate deception, but he was also wounded by it. Tabarant was convinced that it “pained and poisoned his life.” And indeed, Manet’s many portraits of Léon, which guaranteed much time in his company, do have an air of compensation about them.
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IF IT WAS TRUE that Manet’s example had been the most important factor in making Degas want to be truly modern, to express his own time, to be “up-to-date,” it was also the case that Degas was developing his own ideas about what being modern meant. For him, above all, it entailed new psychological conditions and a new way of being in the world, of forming and maintaining a self. Degas had perceived a divide between interior life and outward appearances, a divide that seemed difficult to bridge, difficult even to account for. (His insights were in many ways an early version of the conditions—the sense of psychic dislocation—dramatized later by Picasso and Francis Bacon.) He was developing a sense that his subjects would reveal most about themselves when they were caught, so to speak, off guard—when they were ambushed, or somehow surprised into giving up their secrets. And so, inspired in part by the arbitrary cropping and asymmetries of Japanese prints, he began, from about 1865, to toy with dislodged, crowded, or unbalanced compositions. His paintings were still heavily grounded in drawing—his great forte—and on traditional modeling that proceeded gradually from dark into light. But slowly, something new, and something only he, Degas, could have produced, came into being.
In 1865 he painted a breakthrough portrait, A Woman Seated Beside a Vase of Flowers (now in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art). He depicted the woman in question—probably the wife of Degas’s friend Paul Valpinçon—as if caught in a state of unguarded self-absorption. What’s immediately striking about the composition is its asymmetry. The figure has been shoved to the side of the horizontal composition by an enormous bunch of late-summer flowers. This and in fact everything else about the painting, right down to the woman’s hand lifted hesitantly to the corner of her mouth (a gesture Degas used repeatedly after this), contributes to a feeling of hesitation or thought in transition. Compared with the distortions and dramatizations of facial expression that became routine in twentieth-century portraiture, the innovation seems very subtle. But it was entirely new in portraiture.
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THIS IS WHERE DEGAS’S relationship with Edmond Duranty becomes important. Unlike Manet, who had a series of fruitful relationships with writers, beginning with Baudelaire and continuing on through Émile Zola and Stéphane Mallarmé, Degas was suspicious of writers in general. But when he met Duranty in 1865—the same year he painted A Woman Seated Beside a Vase of Flowers—there was something familiar about him; something he could relate to. Duranty was a journalist whose articles on art, written in crisp and well-schooled prose, appeared in Le Figaro. He was rumored to be the bastard son of Prosper Mérimée, the author of Carmen (the novel upon which Bizet based his opera), but no one was quite sure. With Champfleury, he had established a periodical in 1856 called Le Réalisme. It collapsed after only six issues, but Duranty continued to write about the fine arts, and about painters’ attempts to come to grips with modern subjects.
For Duranty—and Degas—being modern meant committing oneself to an ideal of disinterested truth-telling. By cultivating an air of almost scientific detachment, they believed they could suffocate sentim
entality and banish cliché. In his writings on art, Duranty saw no contradiction between championing the cause of realism and, at the same time, admiring the masters against which the realists rebelled. In this, as in so much else, he and Degas were at one. Duranty shared Degas’s love, for instance, of the aloof neoclassicism of Ingres. Reflecting lingering old-school tastes that he and Duranty held in common, Degas worked hard at this time to entrench a style that was cooler and calmer, less passionate and painterly than the dashing model presented by Manet.
Among the many interests Degas shared with Duranty, the one that engaged them most was physiognomy, or the notion that facial expression can be studied as an index to character. The two men discussed the subject frequently. And in 1867, two years after they met, Duranty published a pamphlet, titled On Physiognomy, which seems to have grown directly out of his conversations with Degas.
Physiognomy was a mainstay of earlier-nineteenth-century literature, and it had long been accepted as a necessary component of training in art. It had been popularized as a science by the Swiss poet and scientist Johann Kaspar Lavater in the late eighteenth century, and Lavater had, in turn, derived his ideas from the seventeenth-century artist and theorist Charles LeBrun. LeBrun’s 1696 volume, Characteristics of the Emotions, was a guide to an extensive range of facial expressions, and it was used as the basis for an art school exercise called the tête d’expression—a study of the face intended to evoke a particular state of mind: melancholy, for instance, obstinacy, shock, or boredom. His book was illustrated with drawings of various facial “types” set against neutral backgrounds. It became available in a pocket edition and was much sought after by artists.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, much about LeBrun and even Lavater’s ideas looked stale and unsophisticated. And yet the idea that a person’s character and social station could be read in his or her face had greater currency than ever. There were social and political reasons for this. Since the 1789 revolution, social hierarchies in France had undergone seventy years of unstinting, often violent upheaval. With the deck of class violently shuffled by a series of political disruptions, and industry rapidly changing the face of the city, fears of conspiracy and criminality were rife among the bourgeoisie and the upper classes. Not even fashion and dress brought clarity to the situation, since people could no longer be depended upon to dress in ways that reflected their social standing. Instead—and increasingly—people’s clothes expressed their social aspirations. Those whose status had once been relatively settled wanted reassurance. They needed to feel the city was legible, knowable, and at least potentially under control. (It’s not by accident that the genre of the detective novel, in which a hero endowed with preternatural abilities at reading clues solves puzzling crimes, emerged at the same time.) In these new, unstable social circumstances (which are a large part of what we mean by modernity), the pseudoscience of physiognomy was immensely appealing. It was reassuring to feel, as did Baudelaire’s friend Alfred Delvau, that merely by closely observing the faces of one’s fellow citizens “one could divide the Parisian public according to its various strata as easily as a geologist distinguishes the layers in rocks.”
The Art of Rivalry Page 13
