manet's manifesto--2/10/25

10 Feb 2025

manet's manifesto--2/10/25

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Today's selection-- from Paris in Ruins by Sebastian Smee. Manet's famous painting, Music in the Tuileries (1862).

“In 1862, at the height of his Spanish infatuation, Edouard had painted Music in the Tuileries, a crowd painting that doubled as a kind of manifesto. Although much smaller (and this was surely intentional), it was Manet's answer to Courbet's The Painter's Studio, a twenty-foot-wide painting that, with his usual orotundity, Courbet had subtitled ‘A real allegory summing up seven years of my artistic and moral life.’ The Painter's Studio attempted to present a kind of synopsis of French society, conveying Courbet's aims as a painter and paying tribute to his friends and supporters. Courbet had painted it in 1855 for the great Exposition Universelle. Alas, the jury for the Beaux-Arts portion of the exhibition, seen by almost a million people, had excluded the painting.

“Seven years later Edouard had wanted to do something similar—but in his own style and with less bombast. Music in the Tuileries was his first major depiction of contemporary life in Napoleon Ill's Paris. In a style that, for its time, was startlingly brisk and unpolished, it shows a well-to-do crowd, arrayed almost like royal cour tiers, gathered under the chestnut trees in the Tuileries Garden, an extension of Napoleon III and Eugenie's palace, where concerts were staged twice weekly. Edouard loved the setting. He used to go there with Baudelaire, sketching children and their nannies, before retiring together to the cafes on the boulevards. When he set out to paint Music in the Tuileries, Edouard had in mind a painting then thought to be by Velazquez: The Little Cavaliers, which imagines a meeting of seventeenth-century Spanish artists, including Velazquez and Murillo. It inspired Manet to transpose the conceit to his own milieu. In the same way that Velazquez, in his great masterpiece Las Meninas, had put the viewer in the position of the scene's central characters—Spain's king and queen—Manet deliberately omitted the orchestra that the crowd had come to hear. So there are no musicians and no instruments and no way of knowing if the concert has finished or is about to begin. Instead, Music in the Tuileries is a group portrait of the gathered audience—which is to say, of Manet and his friends. Among the group identifiable in the foreground are Bazille and Baudelaire, both of whom Manet had first met at the salon of Commandant and Madame Lesjosne. (Courbet's earlier manifesto painting had also included Baudelaire.) The Lesjosne salon had connected Manet to Paris's burgeoning creative avant-garde, including Zola and Nadar. Madame Lesjosne is one of the two seated women in the foreground, Manet's sly hint at the maids of honor in Velazquez's masterpiece. The other is the wife of the composer Jacques Offenbach.

“Manet also included Offenbach himself; his brother Eugene; Theophile Gautier and Baron Taylor, both passionate promoters of Spanish art; Fantin-Latour; the poet and sculptor Zacharie Astruc; the novelist Champfleury (a great champion of Courbet); and Aurelien Scholl, a republican dubbed the ‘journalist of the boulevards.’ These friends and associates were almost all passionate republicans, opposed to Napoleon III. So for Manet to set his ‘manifesto painting’ not in his Studio, as Courbet had done, but in a festive, open-air setting right beside Napoleon III's seat of power was a subtle statement of political opposition. If Manet was a modern court painter—a ‘Velazquez of the Boulevards,’ as he would later be dubbed—he wanted it known that these people, not the entourage of sycophants around Napoleon III, constituted his court.”