Lot Essay
"[Manet's] painting," the critic Thoré-Bürger wrote in 1864, "is a kind of challenge"--an assault, he insisted, on public taste (Thoré-Bürger, "Salon de 1864," Salon de W. Bürger, Paris, 1870; quoted in P. Gay, Art and Act: On Causes in History--Manet, Gropiusm, Mondrian, New York, 1969, p. 33). Manet had just exhibited his inspired Le torero mort (Rouart and Wildenstein, no. 72; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) and Le Christ aux anges (Rouart and Wildenstein, no. 74; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) at the conservative Salon des Artistes Français, and although Thoré-Bürger remained critical of the young painter, he clearly recognized his stylistic innovations and willful disdain of academic formulae. A year earlier, Manet had gained considerable notoriety when his celebrated Déjeuner sur l'herbe (Rouart and Wildenstein, no. 67; Musée du Louvre, Paris), rejected by the Salon jury, was exhibited at the first Salon des Refusés. Working between the center and the periphery of the Parisian art world, Manet staged his transgression of academic painting as a defiant public act.
Manet (fig. 1) was an unlikely rebel, as least as far as social class was concerned. As Theodore Reff observes:
Born and bred a Parisian, he came from a prominent, well-to-do family in which the traditions and social graces of the old bourgeoisie of the July Monarchy were still valued. On his father's side, his ancestors had been wealthy landowners and local officials at Gennevilliers and respected magistrates in Paris for several generations; on his mother's, they had been equally distinguished diplomats and army officers. From them Manet acquired a taste for fashionable society and, equally important, the means to satisfy it. "He confessed to me," wrote Zola in his first essay on the artist, "that he adored society and discovered secret pleasures in the perfumed and brilliant delights of evening parties."
In the apt phrase of Peter Gay, Manet was a "rebel in top hat" (ibid, p. 37)--at once an audacious painter, a dandy, and an accomplished boulevardier.
Manet's champion and defender, Emile Zola, captured the sophisticated tastes and discerning intelligence of his friend in a literary portrait of 1867:
Edouard Manet is of average height, more short than tall. His hair and beard are pale chestnut; his eyes which are narrow and deep-set are full of life and youthful fire; his mouth is characteristic, thin and mobile and slightly mocking in the corners. The whole of his good-looking, irregular and intelligent features proclaim a character, both subtle and courageous, and a disdain for stupidity and banality. And if we leave his face for his person, we find in Edouard Manet a man of extreme amiability and exquisite politeness, with a distinguished manner and a sympathetic appearance. (E. Zola, "Edouard Manet," L'Artiste: Revue du XIXe Siècle, 1867; quoted in T.A. Gronberg, Manet: A Retrospective, New York, 1988, p. 64)
Similarly, the poet Théodore de Banville described Manet as a consummate gentleman possessing exquisite grace and charm:
Ce riant, ce blond Manet
De qui la grâce émanait,
Gai, subtil, charmant en somme,
Dans sa barbe d'Apollon,
Eut, de la nuque au talon,
Un bel air de gentilhomme.
(Quoted in P. Gay, op. cit., p. 34)
And for the journalist Firmin Javel, Manet the artist may have emulated Velázquez, but Manet the man "dressed, ate, and lived like Monsieur Bouguereau" (quoted in ibid., p. 37).
The present painting is a searching analysis of Manet the artist and man, a character study of worldly elegance and artistic prowess. The quintessential painter of modern life, as Charles Baudelaire imagined him, the artist is dressed in contemporary attire--a frock coat, a fashionable cravate pierced by a stickpin, and a hat. As Manet's friend George Moore decribed him: "Although by birth and by art essentially a Parisian there was something in his appearance and his manner of speaking that often suggested an Englishman. Perhaps it is his dress, his clean-cut clothes and figure" (quoted in A. Hanson, Edouard Manet: 1832-1883, Philadelphia, 1966, p. 159).
One of only two true self-portraits by the artist--Manet had included himself among the figures in La musique aux Tuileries of 1862 (Rouart and Wildenstein, no. 51; National Gallery, London) and Le bal de l'Opéra of 1873-1874 (Rouart and Wildenstein, no. 216; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C>), but only one other painting, Portrait de Manet par lui-même (fig. 2), also of 1878-1879, qualifies as a self-portrait in the traditional sense--the present picture is a tour-de-force of painterly technique. Although Madame Manet considered the portrait to be a sketch, and Moreau-Nélaton opined that "too much passion informed the hand that painted it so freely, making it impossible for the artist to seriously address the subject before him" (E. Moreau-Nélaton, op. cit., 1926, p. 51; quoted in C. Moffett, Manet: 1832-1883, New York, 1983, p. 405), much of the power of this great painting derives precisely from the artist's spontaneous brushwork and the apparent non-finito of the left arm and hand, the palette, and the brushes. For Manet associates the act of painting with the materials of his craft, prying the demands of representation away from the physical substance of paint and the autonomous presence of form with an attitude that Georges Bataille once characterized as "supreme indifference" (G. Bataille, Manet, New York, no date, p. 82).
Manet à la palette is in every sense a study in subtle contrasts of color and tone. Against a rich brown background that immediately locates Manet's practice within the artistic lineage of the Old Masters, the dramatically illuminated figure takes full possession of the pictorial space. Caught in a moment of intense concentration as he draws his brush towards the surface of the canvas which he is ostensibly painting, the figure of the artist is a cypher for the viewer's own experience of visual mastery. Manet insists that the viewer register the slightest modulations of color along the dark end of the tonal register, from the deep brown background to the dark hat, cravate and palette. Similarly, at the moment that the face and jacket appear to dissolve into a field of undifferentiated pink, flesh, and ochre tones, Manet summons forth a summary outline or a brilliant highlight to add structure and plasticity to the figure. The demands which Manet places on his audience are great, but he rewards the discerning spectator in kind.
Manet's talent as a virtuoso and connoisseur was wildly acclaimed, earning him the enviable position of mentor to an entire generation of artists. In Frédéric Bazille's L'atelier de la rue La Condamine of 1869-1870 (fig. 3), it is Manet who examines the painting on the easel, with Monet and Bazille at his side. And in Henri Fantin-Latour's Un atelier aux Batignolles of 1870 (fig. 4), Monet, Renoir, Bazille and Emile Zola, among others, gather at Manet's studio to watch him work his magic. Manet, of course, had his own pantheon of great men and frequently acknowledged his debts to the Old Masters in his work. Manet à la palette, for example, reprises a visual conceit invented by Velázquez in Las Meninas of 1656 (fig. 5). Manet had copied works by the Spanish artist in the Louvre as early as 1859, and had ample opportunity to study Las Meninas during his trip to Spain in August 1865. Manet occupies the foreground in the present work just as Velázquez does in Las Meninas, both artists actively confronting the viewer in the act of painting. Although Manet avoids the complexity of Velázquez's schema, in which the object of the artist's gaze and the subject of his painting are elided, he retains the Spanish artist's sense of psychological immediacy, collapsing the space between the act of representation and the object that is represented. Cézanne would soon follow suit (fig. 6).
(fig. 1) Henri Fantin-Latour, Portrait de Manet, 1867
The Art Institute, Chicago
(fig. 2) Edouard Manet, Portrait de Manet par lui-même, 1878-1879 Bridgestone Museum of Art, Tokyo
(fig. 3) Frédéric Bazille, L'atelier de la rue La Condamine, 1869-1870
Musée d'Orsay, Paris
(fig. 4) Henri Fantin-Latour, Un atelier aux Batignolles, 1870
Musée d'Orsay, Paris
(fig. 5) Velásquez, Las Meninas, 1656
Museo del Prado, Madrid
(fig. 6) Paul Cézanne, Portrait de l'artiste à la palette, circa 1890
E.G. Bührle Foundation, Zurich
Manet (fig. 1) was an unlikely rebel, as least as far as social class was concerned. As Theodore Reff observes:
Born and bred a Parisian, he came from a prominent, well-to-do family in which the traditions and social graces of the old bourgeoisie of the July Monarchy were still valued. On his father's side, his ancestors had been wealthy landowners and local officials at Gennevilliers and respected magistrates in Paris for several generations; on his mother's, they had been equally distinguished diplomats and army officers. From them Manet acquired a taste for fashionable society and, equally important, the means to satisfy it. "He confessed to me," wrote Zola in his first essay on the artist, "that he adored society and discovered secret pleasures in the perfumed and brilliant delights of evening parties."
In the apt phrase of Peter Gay, Manet was a "rebel in top hat" (ibid, p. 37)--at once an audacious painter, a dandy, and an accomplished boulevardier.
Manet's champion and defender, Emile Zola, captured the sophisticated tastes and discerning intelligence of his friend in a literary portrait of 1867:
Edouard Manet is of average height, more short than tall. His hair and beard are pale chestnut; his eyes which are narrow and deep-set are full of life and youthful fire; his mouth is characteristic, thin and mobile and slightly mocking in the corners. The whole of his good-looking, irregular and intelligent features proclaim a character, both subtle and courageous, and a disdain for stupidity and banality. And if we leave his face for his person, we find in Edouard Manet a man of extreme amiability and exquisite politeness, with a distinguished manner and a sympathetic appearance. (E. Zola, "Edouard Manet," L'Artiste: Revue du XIXe Siècle, 1867; quoted in T.A. Gronberg, Manet: A Retrospective, New York, 1988, p. 64)
Similarly, the poet Théodore de Banville described Manet as a consummate gentleman possessing exquisite grace and charm:
Ce riant, ce blond Manet
De qui la grâce émanait,
Gai, subtil, charmant en somme,
Dans sa barbe d'Apollon,
Eut, de la nuque au talon,
Un bel air de gentilhomme.
(Quoted in P. Gay, op. cit., p. 34)
And for the journalist Firmin Javel, Manet the artist may have emulated Velázquez, but Manet the man "dressed, ate, and lived like Monsieur Bouguereau" (quoted in ibid., p. 37).
The present painting is a searching analysis of Manet the artist and man, a character study of worldly elegance and artistic prowess. The quintessential painter of modern life, as Charles Baudelaire imagined him, the artist is dressed in contemporary attire--a frock coat, a fashionable cravate pierced by a stickpin, and a hat. As Manet's friend George Moore decribed him: "Although by birth and by art essentially a Parisian there was something in his appearance and his manner of speaking that often suggested an Englishman. Perhaps it is his dress, his clean-cut clothes and figure" (quoted in A. Hanson, Edouard Manet: 1832-1883, Philadelphia, 1966, p. 159).
One of only two true self-portraits by the artist--Manet had included himself among the figures in La musique aux Tuileries of 1862 (Rouart and Wildenstein, no. 51; National Gallery, London) and Le bal de l'Opéra of 1873-1874 (Rouart and Wildenstein, no. 216; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C>), but only one other painting, Portrait de Manet par lui-même (fig. 2), also of 1878-1879, qualifies as a self-portrait in the traditional sense--the present picture is a tour-de-force of painterly technique. Although Madame Manet considered the portrait to be a sketch, and Moreau-Nélaton opined that "too much passion informed the hand that painted it so freely, making it impossible for the artist to seriously address the subject before him" (E. Moreau-Nélaton, op. cit., 1926, p. 51; quoted in C. Moffett, Manet: 1832-1883, New York, 1983, p. 405), much of the power of this great painting derives precisely from the artist's spontaneous brushwork and the apparent non-finito of the left arm and hand, the palette, and the brushes. For Manet associates the act of painting with the materials of his craft, prying the demands of representation away from the physical substance of paint and the autonomous presence of form with an attitude that Georges Bataille once characterized as "supreme indifference" (G. Bataille, Manet, New York, no date, p. 82).
Manet à la palette is in every sense a study in subtle contrasts of color and tone. Against a rich brown background that immediately locates Manet's practice within the artistic lineage of the Old Masters, the dramatically illuminated figure takes full possession of the pictorial space. Caught in a moment of intense concentration as he draws his brush towards the surface of the canvas which he is ostensibly painting, the figure of the artist is a cypher for the viewer's own experience of visual mastery. Manet insists that the viewer register the slightest modulations of color along the dark end of the tonal register, from the deep brown background to the dark hat, cravate and palette. Similarly, at the moment that the face and jacket appear to dissolve into a field of undifferentiated pink, flesh, and ochre tones, Manet summons forth a summary outline or a brilliant highlight to add structure and plasticity to the figure. The demands which Manet places on his audience are great, but he rewards the discerning spectator in kind.
Manet's talent as a virtuoso and connoisseur was wildly acclaimed, earning him the enviable position of mentor to an entire generation of artists. In Frédéric Bazille's L'atelier de la rue La Condamine of 1869-1870 (fig. 3), it is Manet who examines the painting on the easel, with Monet and Bazille at his side. And in Henri Fantin-Latour's Un atelier aux Batignolles of 1870 (fig. 4), Monet, Renoir, Bazille and Emile Zola, among others, gather at Manet's studio to watch him work his magic. Manet, of course, had his own pantheon of great men and frequently acknowledged his debts to the Old Masters in his work. Manet à la palette, for example, reprises a visual conceit invented by Velázquez in Las Meninas of 1656 (fig. 5). Manet had copied works by the Spanish artist in the Louvre as early as 1859, and had ample opportunity to study Las Meninas during his trip to Spain in August 1865. Manet occupies the foreground in the present work just as Velázquez does in Las Meninas, both artists actively confronting the viewer in the act of painting. Although Manet avoids the complexity of Velázquez's schema, in which the object of the artist's gaze and the subject of his painting are elided, he retains the Spanish artist's sense of psychological immediacy, collapsing the space between the act of representation and the object that is represented. Cézanne would soon follow suit (fig. 6).
(fig. 1) Henri Fantin-Latour, Portrait de Manet, 1867
The Art Institute, Chicago
(fig. 2) Edouard Manet, Portrait de Manet par lui-même, 1878-1879 Bridgestone Museum of Art, Tokyo
(fig. 3) Frédéric Bazille, L'atelier de la rue La Condamine, 1869-1870
Musée d'Orsay, Paris
(fig. 4) Henri Fantin-Latour, Un atelier aux Batignolles, 1870
Musée d'Orsay, Paris
(fig. 5) Velásquez, Las Meninas, 1656
Museo del Prado, Madrid
(fig. 6) Paul Cézanne, Portrait de l'artiste à la palette, circa 1890
E.G. Bührle Foundation, Zurich