In His Hands, Everyday Objects Were Anything But

“I don’t know any artist as difficult to figure out as Edouard Manet.” So said Bill Johnston, the curator in charge of shepherding a touring show called “Manet: The Still-Life Paintings” into the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. Organized by the American Federation of Arts and the Musee d’Orsay in Paris, where it made its first and only other stop, the exhibition shows off 55 pictures by the famous French painter, chosen for the views of everyday objects they contain.

The objects may be everyday, but the pictures certainly aren’t.

After a good few hours spent with the Walters show, I couldn’t agree more with Johnston’s take on Manet: I came away exhausted by the hard work of looking and thinking that the painter had made me do--once again.

I remember my first significant encounter with Manet.

It was nearly 20 years ago, at the long-gone and much-lamented Jeu de Paume museum in Paris, after an autumn spent doing the art-historical Grand Tour of Europe. I ended up in front of Manet’s famous “Balcony,” and realized that compared with this picture, the thousands of other paintings I’d been gorging on were mostly simple greeting cards. And then I had my first-ever flash of independent art-historical insight: I felt sure that Manet’s special toughness had something to do with how he used black paint.

Over the two decades since then, I’ve come across many other art historians coming to grips with Manet. The obscure, laconic difficulty of his paintings has made him a favorite of what is sometimes called the New Art History; the content-minded scholars of that movement have gone some way in explaining how his curious paintings reflect and comment on the tumultuous society that roiled all around him in 19th century Paris. But none of that has given us much leverage on his still-life paintings, or on those oddly heavy blacks.

Rather than telling us much about his politics or how he fit into his place and time, the fascinating thing about Manet’s still-lifes is just how traditional, and therefore inconsequential, their subject matter really is. Manet was and is most famous for pictures like his “Luncheon on the Grass” and “Olympia,” in which he overturned the conventions of the art establishment by showing undressed women as bluntly naked ladies, instead of decorously veiling them in the allegorical, mythological or moralizing euphemisms of the academic nude.

But, as the Walters show helps underline, this controversial artist also spent more energy than just about any of his peers on images of the domestic stuff around him. Almost one-fifth of his more than 400 oils consist of little pictures of flowers or food whose subjects could hardly be more traditional. By the later 19th century, such images had become standard fare for bourgeois purchase and appreciation.

In an essay in the current exhibition’s catalog, Musee d’Orsay Director Henri Loyrette spells out the general rebirth of interest in still-life in Manet’s day. This helps put to rest the idea that Manet’s still-lifes are heroic stabs at overthrowing the standard “hierarchy of genres” of the French academy, which insisted that big set-piece pictures full of figures were the things that really mattered. At the Walters, Johnston hasn’t been able to find evidence that any Manet still-lifes were exhibited to the annual Salon shows of official art, where they would have had the chance to go head to head with the historical and allegorical pictures favored by the establishment. Instead, Manet’s pictures of the everyday were usually sold or given away for the private enjoyment of his strongest supporters, most dedicated collectors and dearest friends. Some were even kept by the painter for his own study and delectation.

If the subjects of these pictures were tame and unremarkable, there was clearly something else about the little canvases that made them count as fine examples of the best that Manet felt his art could do.

“Still-life is the touchstone of the painter,” said Manet. When he came to paint a celebratory portrait of one of his rare pupils, he showed her in the midst of painting a thoroughly Manetian still-life, even though it seems it was a genre she’d yet to try her hand at. “A painter can say all he wants to say with fruit or flowers or even clouds,” is another famous quote--but just what was it that Manet was so keen on saying with his bouquets and bowls of fruit?

If the Walters exhibition is anything to go by--and it should be, since it includes about half his surviving still-lifes--it looks as though Manet used the genre to isolate a strand of radical technique from his more ambitious people pictures, and push it as far as he possibly could.

The best canvases at the Walters are not, in anything like a straightforward sense, pretty pictures. As often as not, Manet’s colors are clotted and dour--those famous blacks at work again--and his technique can seem offhand, almost cavalier.

The ebony handle of a kitchen knife is a brooding, somber hole in one picture of some dead fish, its blade dark gray and dull, without a hint of showy sparkle. A black eel in another fishy setup has the same effect; it’s a twisted, barely brushed-in gash in the surface of the picture as much as a cheerful, shiny slither across a kitchen table.

A melon sits, foursquare and sullen, dead center in a later work, not juicy and mouthwatering but closed and vegetative.

In 1880, Manet sold his “Bunch of Asparagus” to an admirer, who promptly overpaid him for it by 200 francs. “This one was missing from your bunch,” quipped Manet after sending him another tiny canvas of a single stalk in thanks. But that stalk is so barely there, so cursorily suggested by the merest hasty stripes of paint, that these must be the best-paid brush strokes ever. And the result is more morbid, flaccid, even detumescent, than cheerily alive. (Sometimes an asparagus spear is more than just an asparagus spear.)

Even Manet’s famous peonies don’t shimmer with summer light and life the way they do in the earlier Dutch bouquets that were the obvious model for them. Their petals are clottings of thick white oil paint, often set off against a somber background, with the pair of shears that guillotined them from their stems laid out nearby, rendered once again in Manet black.

But note one crucial thing in all of this: When we look at Manet’s pictures, we don’t actually see abstract patterns of white paint or of black. That kind of purely formal reading of a representational picture as an abstract pattern is almost always contrived and disingenuous. We see a knife that Manet has simply captured in dense black paint; a petal, first, and then or at the same time the thick white paint that Manet uses to render it. And yet, more perhaps than ever before in 500 years of Western art, the balance of subject to the paint that makes it up starts to break down.

In earlier moments of bravura oil painting by, say, Rembrandt or Frans Hals, the miracle is in how perfectly the visible brush stroke stands in for the thing it represents; you move back and forth between paint and thing, and are wowed at their improbable, almost magical equivalence. A dab of white is both a visible flick of paint and the luster on the pearl, in absolutely equal measure.

That’s precisely where things begin to fail in Manet.

Each individual brush stroke continues to talk about the thing it represents, but only barely. You know, more or less, that a single swath of paint is standing for the petal on a bloom, but it doesn’t give you any detail on the thing it represents. A Manet brush stroke manages to point at what it shows, but then its work is almost done. That’s why it seems to me that, in looking at a Manet still-life, you’re not supposed to celebrate his paint’s success, but fret about how near it comes to failing. In looking at this show, it’s most fun to ignore the comfortable-seeming beauty of Manet’s now-familiar style--to imagine that you’re looking at a lovely object, beautifully rendered--and to try instead to recapture the risky ugliness it must have had when he first tried it out.

“Concision is the thing,” said Manet, but sometimes he’s so concise he’s almost mute.

But the crucial point about Manet, it seems to me, is that the long-standing compact between painted mark and the subject it depicts, and therefore between painter and viewer, was still at the heart of what his art was all about. He was working within the terms of the tradition that he’d inherited, even as he pushed them to their limit. His brush strokes still stood in for things, in much the same way Rembrandt’s did--but only barely. And his critics knew what he was aiming at; they simply refused to go along with him.

When his successors among the Impressionists came along, however, many critics simply couldn’t read their scattered marks as having any kind of meaning at all. Where a Manet nude, however incorrect, was a legible act of picture-making, a Monet landscape was indecipherable, merely paint splashed on a canvas.

Despite the radicalism of some of Manet’s other subjects, to my eyes the still-lifes at the Walters set him out as what he really is: the last great experimenter in the grand old way, rather than the first of the true Moderns.