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"Manet
/ Velázquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting"
Musée d'Orsay, Paris
16 September 2002–12 January 2003
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
4 March–29 June 2003
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| All digital images are
courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Deborah
L. Roldán, curatorial assistant to the exhibition, and
Sabina Potaczek, Senior Press Officer, of the Metropolitan Museum
kindly assisted in obtaining installation photographs. |
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| Fig.
1 View of entrance to "Manet / Velázquez: The French
Taste for Spanish Painting," with Manet's The Tragic
Actor (Rouvière as Hamlet, 1865–66; National
Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C.) and Velázquez's Pablo
de Valladolid (ca. 1632–35; Prado, Madrid). |
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The thrilling pair of paintings that
greeted the visitor to "Manet / Velázquez: The French
Taste for Spanish Painting" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
set the tone for a magnificent visual tour through two different centuries,
cultures, and—despite the argument by the curators Gary Tinterow
and Geneviève Lacambre to the contrary—ways of painting.
Hung side by side in an ample vestibule, Manet's The Tragic Actor
(Rouvière as Hamlet, 1865–66; National Gallery
of Art, Washington, D. C.) and Velázquez's Pablo de Valladolid
(ca. 1632–35; Prado, Madrid) had the same reverse chronological
order as the title, which signaled that the show was concerned with
nineteenth-century French modernism (fig. 1). The opening text stated
that the exhibition would "chart the means by which French collectors
and museums acquired Spanish works and the ways in which French artists
came to understand, appreciate, and emulate Spanish Golden Age painting."
The new taste for Spanish seventeenth-century painting by French nineteenth-century
painters, collectors, and critics was then fitted into modernism's
canonical shifts: from Italian to Spanish art, from Renaissance to
baroque painting, from idealism to realism, from porcelain-like surfaces
to the sketch aesthetic of impressionism. |
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The quality
of the art did not taper off in the following nine galleries. A lengthy
and copiously illustrated catalogue accompanied the exhibition; the
longer English version reflects the additional works shown in New
York (see my review of the catalogue
in this issue of 19th-Century Art Worldwide). Thanks to the
sponsor Accenture, the Metropolitan Museum also created a website
for the exhibition (via www.metmuseum.org),
on which one can see images of the Prado museum as a nineteenth-century
artist might have seen it, and make additional comparisons between
the Spanish and nineteenth-century pictures in the exhibition. |
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"Manet / Velázquez"
offered a new visual experience—direct comparisons between Spanish
seventeenth- and French nineteenth-century paintings from various
collections—but no new ideas. The French discovery of Spanish
painting and the impact of the Spanish Gallery in the Louvre museum
on French modernist painting had already been the subject of nineteenth-century
aesthetic discourse. These arguments were then elaborated upon by
twentieth-century scholars, such as Ilse Hempel Lipschutz (Spanish
Painting and the French Romantics, 1972), Jeannine Baticle and
Cristina Marinas (La Galerie Espagnole de Louis-Philippe au Louvre,
1838–1848, 1981), and Joel Isaacson (Manet and Spain. Prints
and Drawings, exh. cat., 1969). |
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Moreover, three recent exhibitions
devoted to nineteenth-century interest in Spain and Spanish art offered
fresh examinations of the topic. The Musée Goya in Castres
organized two shows with catalogues, Les peintres français
et l'Espagne. De Delacroix à Manet (1997) and Velázquez
et la France. La découverte de Velázquez par les peintres
français (1999), which present many unfamiliar works by
lesser-known artists who traveled to Spain or studied Velázquez's
paintings. In the 1993 exhibition catalogue Spain, Espagne, Spanien.
Foreign Artists Discover Spain, 1800–1900, edited by Suzanne
Stratton (New York: The Spanish Institute), I challenged this traditional
argument that nineteenth-century French artists "discovered"
and had special insight into Spanish art. In that essay, I examined
the French literary traditions of an exotic, different Spain, the
citations of later French authors who perpetuated this characteristic
imagery of Spain, the dependence of French artists on French authors
to formulate their expectations of Spain and Spanish art, and the
role of tourism on French artists' decisions to visit and represent
Spain. |
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What the exhibition did achieve for
the first time was to gather an impressive group of relevant masterpieces
by Spanish seventeenth-century painters, and Goya, along with those
by French nineteenth-century artists. This logistical and financial
feat could only have been realized through the cooperation of three
major museums holding many of the key works: the Museo del Prado,
the Musée d'Orsay, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Curiously,
the Prado did not take the exhibition (instead, it mounted a show
devoted to Manet). The Metropolitan expanded the Musée d'Orsay's
version of the show, with twice the number of Spanish paintings and
a substantial number of American nineteenth-century paintings. |
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The hanging of the vestibule and that
of the first gallery demonstrated the two different methods of persuasion
used by the curators: confrontation and recall, or, the one-to-one
comparison of "source" and "interpretation"; and
the accumulated memory of relevant images on later artistic production.
Since an original work of art cannot be in two places at once, the
curators had to choose between hanging rooms thematically or by making
formal comparisons; they favored the first approach, but there were
selective comparisons, mostly in rooms with several works by the same
artist, for example, Goya and Manet. For cases in which the work to
be compared hung elsewhere in the exhibition, a small black-and-white
reproduction on the wall panel stood in for the original. |
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The first gallery, quite large, presented
a range of Spanish seventeenth-century paintings that were documented
to have been in France in the early part of the nineteenth century;
it underscored the organizers' belief that collecting and public museums
were critical in forming this aesthetic taste. The organizers emphasized
the importance of the Prado museum, which opened in 1819, for the
foreign reception of old master Spanish painting. In their own institutions,
the curators at both the Prado and the Metropolitan found "panoramic"
photographs of the Prado's nineteenth-century installations, one of
which figured in the exhibition. Such documents of museum display
during the 1800s are rare. |
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From the small female portrait, now
attributed to Claudio Coello (late seventeenth century; Musée
Ingres, Montauban) but called a Velázquez when Ingres acquired
it in Rome before 1818, to Velázquez's Democritus (ca.
1629; Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen), considered to be by Ribera
until the 1880s, the visitor could perceive the unsteady basis of
much French knowledge about Spanish painting during the nineteenth
century. Still, the organizers claimed that "direct contact with
Spanish painting (sometimes mediocre or not even Spanish) inspired
French artists and the triumph of Realism." But faced with paintings
that can no longer be considered Spanish—such as the Dead
Soldier (The National Gallery, London) then given to Velázquez
and a likely source for Manet's Dead Toreador (1863–64;
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.)—the visitor must have
wondered what the curators meant by "knowledge" of Spanish
art or its "influence." |
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Spain itself did not figure in this
art-historical narrative; it had only a passive role as the object
of French desire. However, evidence exists that many Frenchmen who
acquired Spanish paintings in Spain depended on Spanish scholarship
and/or contacts to locate and purchase (or pillage) them. This information
must be integrated into our understanding of how French taste for
Spanish art was shaped. Among these private collectors were military
men like Marshal Soult, who came to Spain during the Napoleonic occupation
of 1808–14, and Baron Taylor, who came during the French Bourbon
intervention of 1823 and the Orléans intervention of 1834–35.
These men not only had political and economic advantages that allowed
them to acquire art in Spain, but the arriviste Marshal Soult
amassed a more authentic group of Spanish paintings than did experienced
connoisseurs, an irritating fact that troubles the exhibition's notion
of taste and how it is formed (fig. 2). |
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The Napoleonic invasion of the Iberian
Peninsula from 1807–14 may have been an embarrassment to the
organizers—as it was to contemporary French liberals—because
it is not well explained here. Non-specialists of my acquaintance
did not follow the connection between Soult's collecting and the French
invasion and occupation of Spain, briefly explained on a wall panel.
Similarly glossed over is the illegality of the formation of the Spanish
Gallery—a collection of more than 400 paintings exhibited in
the Louvre from 1838 to 1848—by secret agents of the French king
Louis-Philippe. The covert acquisitions in Spain by these agents,
Baron Taylor and the artist Adrien Dauzats, were partly determined
by location (chosen for ease of smuggling canvases out of Spain),
price, and time, especially after Spanish officials became aware of
their activities. The French appreciation for Spanish Golden Age painting
that has long been ascribed to the Galerie Espagnole had everything
to do with the political and economic circumstances in Spain that
made such art available in relatively large quantities for relatively
modest prices, much more than it had to do with pre-existing taste. |
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The second, small gallery, "First
French Responses," offered an eclectic mix of copies and original
subjects by artists from around 1820 to 1850 (excluding Courbet).
The copies by Chassériau (1838; private collection) and Delacroix
(1824–27; Musée des Beaux-Arts; Béziers), after
what were thought to be Spanish seventeenth-century paintings, might
have been better understood with some historical context for the practice
of copying the old masters in nineteenth-century artistic training.
The inclusion of François Gérard's St. Theresa
(1828; Maison Marie-Thérèse, Paris) (fig. 3) begged
the question: if only one work in an artist's oeuvre is known or seen
to have been influenced by Spanish art—here, for its "intensity
of the saint's expression and the dramatic chiaroscuro"—can
we call this "influence" or "taste," or would
the terms "fashion" or "fad" be more appropriate?
The confrontational, even sexual character of this picture could have
been addressed to distinguish it from Spanish representations of this
Spanish saint. Furthermore, Millet's absolutely rigid Virgin of
Loreto (1851; Musée des Beaux-Arts, Dijon) is wholly unlike
Murillo's supple figures, while in his Assumption of St. Barbara
(1841; Musée des Beaux-Arts, Angers), the grotesque hand and
rough, pasty brushwork more resemble those of late Goya, than Ribera. |
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The next small room, "Goya and
France," surveyed what French artists knew of and borrowed from
Goya's art, particularly the print series Los Caprichos, originally
published in 1799 (fig. 4). As the organizers argued primarily for
the impact of Spanish painting and painting technique, the prints
are tangential at best. |
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The large fourth and fifth galleries,
"Spanish Paintings in France at Mid-Century," with their
inclusion of works by such French modernists Manet, Degas, and Courbet,
provided the climax of the exhibition as well as the primary material
for its argument. The Spanish Gallery was the largest, highest quality,
and most public collection of Spanish painting to be seen in nineteenth-century
France, and it has long been believed to have profoundly impacted
these avant-garde French painters. Yet neither the promising quotation
from Baudelaire about the Galerie Espagnole—"it increased
the general volume of ideas you had to have about painting"—nor
the chronological lag between the 1848 closing of the Spanish Gallery
and the significantly later production of nearly all the French modernist
paintings was explored. |
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More disappointing was the organizers'
surface treatment of the principal visual (especially technical)
consequences that this taste for Spanish painting is said to have
had on nineteenth-century French art. A singular opportunity was missed
here to sensitize, educate, and challenge visitors to greater visual
perception and thus historical analysis, in front of the sources of
influence as well as their modernist and more conservative
nineteenth-century interpretations. This was the rare exhibition,
with such a high caliber of loans, that could have supported a serious
investigation of "influence," the way it worked in the nineteenth
century, and how certain artists, like Manet and Degas, transformed
traditional references to the old masters. Instead, visitors got the
same comparisons between the same artists published years ago, without
any significant contributions. |
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For example, the well-known and still
stunning juxtaposition of Manet's Monk at Prayer (1864–65;
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) with Zurbarán's St. Francis
in Meditation (ca. 1635–40; National Gallery, London) received
only the most superficial analysis (fig. 5). Here the curators did
point out a difference: Manet changed the original position of the
monk's head, making the figure quite unlike that in Zurbarán's
picture. However, they did not offer any possible significance for
the change, and the public might just have assumed that Manet was
trying not to copy exactly. They might have discussed how Manet's
downward glancing figure conveys a more earthly thought, while the
slightly upturned face of Zurbarán's figure was a conventional
sign of spiritual belief or ecstasy. Also, the head of St. Francis
appears shrouded in shadow, creating a mysterious, even menacing impression,
which could have launched an exploration of seventeenth- and nineteenth-century
interpretations of Zurbarán's painting as deeply pious, even
frightening in its spiritual intensity. Manet's canvas, on the other
hand, did not convey religious expression to his contemporaries. Moreover,
the brushwork of the two artists is visibly different. Manet's paint
is unctuous and creamy, reinforcing the flatness of the canvas, while
Zurbarán's is thicker and drier, and his figure appears much
more powerfully modeled in three dimensions. |
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Too often, one read catch phrases
on the wall panels like "masterful brushwork" to link a
French modernist with a Spanish old master, without further analysis.
In the vestibule's duel between Manet and Velázquez, visible
differences in technique could have been fruitfully analyzed and explained.
Manet's black paint glistens in separate and visible touches on the
surface, entirely different from Velázquez's matte, continuous,
and rather flat black tones. Manet could not have learned to paint
his blacks from Velázquez. In modeling the figure's hands,
Manet applied distinct strokes of lights and darks that break up the
surface and flatten the forms; this contrasts with the more integrated
chiaroscuro and illusionistic modeling of the hands painted, however
broadly, by Velázquez. The former is a modernist approach that
begins to divorce the signifier (brushstroke) from the signified (form),
while the Spaniard's technique here followed conventional figurative
painting practice. |
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Moreover, not all loose or "masterful"
brushwork is the same, even among the Spanish old masters. Consider
the blue cloak of the principal figure in Ribera's St. Sebastian
Tended by the Devout Women (c. 1621–31; Museo de Bellas Artes,
Bilbao), in which the brown ground shows through the roughly applied
blue paint to suggest shadow in the folds, and whitish scumbling over
the blue indicates highlights. This loose or rough brushwork helps
to model the saint's figure, without challenging its legibility or
the narrative, as it would in a modernist canvas. Ribera's facture
is unlike that of Manet or of Ribot (whose Torture of Alonso Cano
1865 is seen as influenced by Ribera's painting), but might be compared
to Degas's scratchy brushwork. And the wall panel cited Charles Blanc's
description of the St. Sebastian, "the skin is so realistically
rendered that it seems palpable," without further explanation,
a common problem with any reference to "realism" (capitalized
or not): once the term is used, it shuts down further discourse, for
it is assumed to be transparent, to mean the same thing to everyone. |
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The sixth gallery, "Spain as
Subject / French Realists," segregated certain painters—Dehodencq,
Ribot, Legros, Regnault—from the other realists (Courbet, Manet,
Degas) in the preceding room, despite the fact that they all painted
Spanish subjects. The division here had to do with value judgments:
the artists in the seventh gallery are generally considered less original,
more academic, or second rate. Nevertheless, Alfred Dehodencq's Bullfight
in Spain (1850; Musée des Beaux-Arts, Pau) attracted much
attention from some of these "modernists," and Antonin Proust
claimed that Manet considered it the truest picture of Spain he had
ever seen. In the same room, Goya's extraordinary Black Paintings
were mentioned as having been exhibited in Paris at the 1878 Universal
Exposition, but those darkly fantastic paintings seem more likely
to have affected the emergent symbolists than the brushwork of the
impressionists. |
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A small seventh gallery devoted to
Velázquez's influence was surprisingly dull, despite containing
variations on the interesting theme of the artist in his studio by
Corot, Manet, and Degas. These small canvases had to compete against
the large works of the two preceding rooms, and overcome the absence
of paintings by Velázquez, other than the Louvre's Petits
Cavaliers (which not all scholars accept as even a workshop piece).
Only Las Meninas would have made sense here, and this fabulous
painting the Prado will not lend. |
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The eighth, spacious gallery was devoted
to the works of American painters. Only Mary Cassatt's pictures were
split between two rooms: In the Loge (formerly known as Woman
in Black at the Opera, 1877–78; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)
was hung with works by Degas and Manet, but it looked out of place
near the Spanish old masters as her early Spanish genre paintings
did next to Whistler's full-length portraits in the American room.
The reasoning behind the inclusion of American artists in a show about
French taste is that the American artists who studied in France also
absorbed the French taste for seventeenth-century Spanish art. None
of the American responses to Spanish art and culture that existed
prior to 1850—Washington Irving's writings or the hosting of
Spanish paintings at the Pennsylvania Academy of Art—are discussed,
as though no American perspective existed. In view of such diverse
works by artists of distinct training, aims, and means of expression
as Whistler and Eakins, the visitor might have left the exhibition
wondering whether every artist working or studying in nineteenth-century
France was "influenced" by Spanish Golden Age painting. |
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A small side gallery with computer
terminals to access the exhibition website also displayed Manet's
prints related to Spanish themes. The discontinuity with the artist's
other works made this room seem like an afterthought, and, like the
Goya room, its graphic emphasis diverged from the organizers' argument
that Spanish seventeenth-century painting had a catalyzing effect
on modernist painting, especially its technique. |
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Despite these criticisms, visitors who attended
the show surely reveled in the superb quality of the art on view,
and for those unfamiliar with the scholarly literature, the exhibition
adequately surveyed a large, complex topic. Specialists, however,
found that it neither advanced their understanding of the factors
driving this aesthetic taste, nor did it fully exploit the visual
potential and intellectual challenge of comparing pictures by such
different painters and cultures. |
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Alisa Luxenberg
Associate Professor of Art History
University of Georgia, Athens
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