PARIS - Let’s begin on a positive note with that gorgeous redhead in the woods. She’s a shocker, even now, stark naked and turned to meet our gaze. Something seems to have distracted her outside the picture frame; her look has cracked the wall between her and us. She’s in our space.
The painting - Edouard Manet’s “Dejeuner sur l’Herbe” - was notoriously rejected from the Salon here in 1863. The sketchy glade, that second woman bent over a stream , occupying some vague nowhere place, freshening herself up as if before sex or perhaps just afterward: it’s all a puzzle. Like modern life.
Which was partly Manet’s point. Europe’s latest blockbuster,
“Manet, the Man Who Invented Modernity,” has opened here to some giddy reviews and a few tepid ones, but in any case to the predictable mobs. They cluster before the great “Dejeuner” and also before “Olympia,” Manet’s morphing of Titian’s chaste Venus into a dead-eyed whore.
Like the woman in the woods, she leaps across the transom, across the centuries, with her black neck ribbon and cat, dismantling the increasingly rickety edifice of high French art.
The most subversive but ravishing of painters, Manet encapsulated
Paris at its 19th-century cultural peak. H is circle included Baudelaire, Zola, Champfleury and Monet, who all recognized in his cynical genius the crucial bridge between French art’s, and this city’s, past and future.
Robert Hughes, the art critic, on the occasion of the last big Manet survey here nearly 30 years ago, wrote that Paris was “unthinkable without Manet; Manet unimaginable without Paris.” Still true. To see Manet today is to see not only ourselves but also how we see ourselves.
The retrospective, through July 3, was organized by the Musee d’Orsay, where many of his best works have long lived. So it could hardly have failed.
But it does. I can’t recall a major retrospective more clumsily devised. It’s a loveless exercise in curatorial pedantry, its cramped galleries larded with works by second-rank figures . A tedious section on Thomas Couture, in whose studio Manet trained, starts the show. Two Coutures would suffice. A mini-retrospective saps the soul.
Manet, an upper-class dandy who succumbed to syphilis and rheumatism at 51, in 1883, squandered much of his later energy on brassy portraits of society dames. The dozen or so here are partly compensated for by a room of late still lifes, which accounted for one-fifth of Manet’s total output. Still lifes sold well, and Manet was happy to oblige a hungry market. He also gave many away , staking his reputation on grander projects about modern life and contemporary history.
But clearly he luxuriated in his otherworldly ability to make a few lush strokes approximate, say, the mauve and gray tip of an asparagus or the fading pink glories of dying white peonies. Organizing exhibitions requires tact and a deft touch. You know it when you see it.
And when you don’t.
But let’s salvage a few more gems from the rubble. Manet was a fantastic painter of seascapes and quays . I was struck also by the gravity of his religious pictures. A funny thing: standing before his “Christ Mocked,” painted as if Jesus were a small, pale and vulnerable man, I noticed a clone of Manet’s model for Jesus waltzing into the room. It made me realize that the true supernatural is not the magic an artist conjures up in paint: Manet was painting real people. Modern art acknowledges its own artifice, he was saying. Faith is ineffable.
It helped that Manet painted like an angel and had a wicked sense of humor. Richard Dorment, the art critic of The Daily Telegraph of London, neatly dissects the wry intricacies of “Chez le Pere Lathuille,” which shows a mustachioed gigolo wooing a dowager. She recoils, slightly, lips tight in embarrassment but ready to succumb. It is ruthless and clinically accurate.
Manet’s adoring, amusing portraits of Berthe Morisot, among the show’s better moments, attest to the influence of the newly invented camera . They’re like snapshots, akin to his ingenious painting of the execution of the Emperor Maximilian, the dead man forever obscured by that smoky puff of rifle fire . It brings to mind a war photographer’s onthe- scene image no less than it does Goya’s “Third of May.”
Manet’s message? That the whole modern world is dangerous, shifty and strange.
The camera is just a byproduct and symptom of this altered condition. We must struggle for comprehension; art can help, up to a point. But the old bearings don’t moor us. We’re on our own.
No wonder his paintings seem as fresh as ever.
