The Judgment of Paris (67 page)

French art as well as French wine looked like it was beginning to travel well. Paul Durand-Ruel had published a catalogue of his collection and, in the first week of November, opened in his London gallery an exhibition of what one English newspaper called "the latest phases of Parisian fashion in art."
¹²
Among them were canvases by Pissarro, Monet, Daubigny, Courbet and Whistler. The relative success of this exhibition was followed by the formation at the end of December of a cooperative venture called the
Société anonyme coopérative à capital variable des artistes, peintres, sculpteurs, graveurs et lithographes
("Joint Stock Company of Artists, Painters, Sculptors, Engravers and Lithographers"). The company's charter, composed by Pissarro, was based on that of a baker's organization in Pontoise, while the aim of the members, according to an article in
Le Chronique des arts,
was "the organization of free exhibitions, without a jury or honorific awards; the sale of the works in question; and the publication, as soon as possible, of a newspaper devoted to the arts."
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The society's first step would be the staging of an independent exhibition, or what quickly became known as the "Realist Salon." It was scheduled to open in April 1874, two weeks before the official Salon.

Besides Pissarro, members of this cooperative society included Monet, Renoir, Degas, Cézanne and Morisot. The membership did not, however, despite various overtures, include Manet. The success of
Le Bon Bock
had convinced him that he was on the verge of making his reputation in the official Salon. His letters at this time were even inscribed on notepaper headed with the jauntily optimistic slogan TOUT ARRIVE ("everything arrives"). An equally compelling reason for his refusal to join the Realist Salon was his low opinion of much of the work produced by its prospective exhibitors. Though he was fond of Renoir and even owned one of his works, he was not especially impressed by the younger man's paintings. He regarded him, a mutual friend later claimed, as "a decent sort of chap who had taken up painting by mistake."
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Much worse, he believed, was Cézanne. Though Cézanne greatly admired Manet's work, the feeling was far from mutual. "I will never commit myself with Monsieur Cézanne," he stubbornly declared as plans for the Realist Salon progressed.
¹⁵

Manet's disgust for Cézanne's paintings may have been partly fed by the younger man's uncouth appearance and charmless personality. But he seems genuinely to have been appalled by Cézanne's canvases, which, despite the debt they owed his own, were profoundly different in their inspiration. If Manet wished to represent his own visual impressions of the external world, whether of modern life or Old Master paintings, Cézanne at this stage of his career was obsessed with transferring onto canvas his own morbid and tormented inner world. As Castagnary wrote (disapprovingly) of Cézanne's work, the natural world was "merely a pretext for dreams" and for "subjective fantasies without any general echo in reason."
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The result of these fantasies had been a series of disconcertingly macabre scenes, such as
The Strangled Woman.
Painted in 1872, it showed a woman in a white dress being throttled by a figure of indeterminate sex whose face is a cruel and sinister mask. Cézanne had also created a number of unsettling images of violent and unrestrained sexuality, including
The Banquet of Nehuchadnezzar,
an orgiastic vision of indistinct nudes writhing together amid the remains of a feast.

Recently Cézanne appeared to have tamed his wilder visions by turning his hand to
plein-air
landscapes at Auvers-sur-Oise, the thatched village northeast of Paris to which he had moved, on the advice of Pissarro, in 1873. Nonetheless, Manet was convinced that throwing in his lot with such a pariah would be a grave mistake. Instead, he planned to submit four paintings, including
The Railway,
to the 1873 Salon. "I will never exhibit in the shack next door," he claimed, spurning the advances of Degas and ignoring the fact that he had exhibited outside the official Salon in 1863 and 1867. "I enter the Salon through the main door," he protested, "and fight alongside all the others."
¹⁷

The venue for the Realist Salon was to be Nadar's former photographic studio in the Boulevard des Capucines, a short walk from both the Café Tortoni and the Galerie Martinet. Though he had abandoned it a year earlier, Nadar still owned the lease on the studio, which consisted of a magnificent set of top-floor rooms with cast-iron pillars, skylights and floor-to-ceiling windows. He generously lent the use of the rooms free of charge despite the fact that their annual rent, at 30,000 francs, had virtually bankrupted him. Inspired by the location, Degas tried to persuade the group to call itself La Capucine ("The Nasturtium"), even going so far as to design a stylized nasturtium, a plant with bright yellow or red flowers, as an emblem. The other members vetoed the idea, and in the end the works would go on show under the long and prosaic title—the
Société anonyme cooperative a capital variable
—that had appeared on the charter.

A catalogue for the exhibition was quickly prepared by Renoir's younger brother Edmond, a budding journalist, while Renoir himself oversaw the hanging of 165 paintings, pastels and engravings by thirty artists. Among them were ten works by Degas, including depictions of dancers and laundresses; nine by Monet; and five by Pissarro. Cézanne chose to show three works, among them a view of Auvers-sur-Oise entitled
The House of the Hanged Man
and a curious phantasmagoria of blazing color and shimmering forms called
A Modern Olympia.
This latter canvas, a pastiche of Manet's
Olympia,
showed a black maid unveiling a nude woman who lies curled on a bed as a bearded man in a frock coat—possibly Cézanne's self-portrait—watches from a sofa, a black cat at his feet. Not a canvas destined to calm the worries of those members of the society, including even Degas and Monet, who had been entertaining doubts about the wisdom of exhibiting alongside Cézanne, its appearance was secured only after much pleading by Pissarro.

The doors of Nadar's studio opened to the public, as planned, on April 15, with visitors paying one franc as an entrance fee (the same as for the Salon) and fifty centimes for the catalogue. Despite notices in as many as fifty newspapers, the Realist Salon did not attract anything like the same numbers that visited the Salon des Refusés in 1863. Yet opening day still saw 175 people ascend the stairs to the studio, and the show's four-week run averaged more than a hundred visitors per day, ultimately attracting 3,500 members of the public. Predictably, the exhibition was greeted by some with mockery and distaste. A number of critics compared the paintings unfavorably with those shown in the Salon des Refusés, which was, sneered the reviewer for
La Presse,
"a Louvre in comparison to the exhibition on the Boulevard des Capucines." Cézanne in particular was singled out for censure and derision. "Monsieur Cézanne," complained the reviewer for
L 'Artiste,
"seems no more than a kind of madman, painting while suffering from
delirium tremens."
He was accused of attacking his canvases while under the influence of "oriental vapors"—that is, opium—and jokes circulated that he and many of his fellow painters accomplished their work by loading pistols with tubes of paint and discharging them at their canvases.

Nonetheless, even critics repelled by the paintings could appreciate the point of the exhibition itself. Despite declaring indignantly that "the debaucheries of this school are nauseating and revolting," the reviewer for
La Presse
still acknowledged that the Realist Salon represented "not just an alternative to the Salon, but a new road . . . for those who think art, in order to develop, needs more freedom than that granted by the administration." These exhibitors were, he proclaimed, "the pioneers of the painting of the future."
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These pioneers found themselves christened with a memorable name on April 25, following a satirical review by Louis Leroy in
Le Charivari.
While compiling the exhibition catalogue, Edmond Renoir had been exasperated by the somewhat monotonous titles, such as
Le Havre: Fishing Boat Leaving Port,
with which Monet labeled his canvases. Faced with yet another Le Havre seascape, a hazily indistinct sketch painted by Monet in the spring of 1872, he demanded a more alluring title, to which Monet replied: "Why don't you just put
Impression!
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Renoir duly named the canvas
Impression: Sunrise.
This title amused and irritated Leroy, for whom, as for so many other critics and Salon-goers, a picture was meant to be a story told in paint, not a fuzzy "impression" of the weather conditions. He therefore dubbed the painters in the Boulevard des Capucines with a pejorative nickname, entitling his article "Exhibition of the Impressionists." The name was immediately seized on by other critics, including those sympathetic to the artists' cause. "If one must characterize them by a word that explains them," wrote Castagnary four days after Leroy's article, "we will have to invent the new term 'impressionists.' They are 'impressionists' insofar as they render not the landscape itself, but the sensation produced by the landscape."
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The "pioneers of the painting of the future" had just been baptized—and no one who entered Nadar's old studio in the spring of 1874 was in any doubt as to who was the godfather. The scathing review in
La Presse
had called the group "disciples of Monsieur Manet," and by June a journal entitled
Les Contemporains
featured on its cover a caricature of Manet wearing a crown and wielding a paintbrush as his scepter. The caption read "Manet, King of the Impressionists."

Manet's decision to send his paintings to the Palais des Champs-Élysées instead of the Boulevard des Capucines had been based partly on the fact that each of his offerings since 1868 had been accepted for the Salon. He was exasperated and dismayed, therefore, when the 1874 jury turned down two of the four works that, under the terms of the new regulations, he was allowed to submit. His rejected paintings were a scene of modern life called
A Masked Ball at the Opéra
and a landscape,
Swallows,
painted the previous summer during a family holiday at Berck-sur-Mer, near Boulogne. Added to the humiliation of rejection was the fact that, since both works had already been sold, they would be returned to their owners ignominiously imprinted with a red R.

Manet's two accepted paintings,
The Railway
and a watercolor of a Polichinelle, went on show when the 1874 Salon opened at the beginning of May. The success of
Le Bon Bock
proved a false dawn as
The Railway
attracted blanket coverage in the press, virtually all of it unfavorable. The enigmatic scene of Victorine Meurent sitting before a cast-iron railing—a much more difficult scene to interpret and appreciate than
Le Bon Bock
—was relentlessly lampooned in journals such
as La Vie parisienne
and
Le Journal amusant.
The satirists variously pretended to believe it depicted lunatics in an asylum, a mother and daughter confined in a prison, or a woman inexplicably clutching a baby seal.
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The reviewers were equally unsparing. All the usual complaints were registered: the clumsy facture, the ignoble subject matter, the general unintelligibility. Even critics well disposed toward Manet struggled to appreciate
The Railway.
Zola, covering the Salon for
Le Simaphore de Marseille,
passed over the work in silence, while Philippe Burty lamented Manet's incompetence at painting hands (not the first time someone had murmured about this perceived shortcoming) and Ernest Chesneau allowed that Manet's "summary methods may look brutal at times." Still, Chesneau argued that this brutal style constituted a bold and honest attempt on the part of Manet to free his art from "technical conventions" and to "express modern life exactly as it is."
²²

The problem for Manet, as ever, was that the jurors, the critics and the public did not, on the whole, wish to see either expressions of modern life or violations of technical conventions. Their tastes were much better represented by the 1874 Salon's greatest attraction, Gérôme's
L'Eminence grise
("The Gray Eminence"), which was awarded the Grand Medal of Honor and sold to an American collector for 60,000 francs. A highly wrought historical tableau of flowing robes and plumed hats, it depicted Cardinal Richelieu's influential and secretive confessor, a gray-frocked Capuchin priest named Tremblay, descending a palatial staircase, his nose obliviously in a breviary as a dozen obsequious courtiers bow before him in one long, cascading flurry. Accomplished with Gérôme's usual virtuoso brushwork, it perfectly answered the public's demands for a painting to tell a comprehensible story and to beguile them with its visual charms.
L 'Eminence grise
therefore provided a bracing antidote for all those disturbed by either
The Railway
or the canvases in the Boulevard des Capucines. It also suggested just how far the "King of the Impressionists" was from deposing the reigning deities and prevailing tastes of the Salon.
²³

Manet's disappointments at the 1874 Salon led him to a kind of show of solidarity with his fellow outcasts, the Impressionists, and in particular with Claude Monet. Manet and Monet had come a long way since 1865, when the former had angrily refused to make the acquaintance of the latter. They got to know one another sometime in the late 1860s, when Manet invited the younger painter to the Café Guerbois, "at which point," Monet later recalled, "we immediately became firm friends." Monet was to look back on these evenings in Manet's company at the Café Guerbois as vital to his artistic development. "Nothing could have been more interesting than our discussions," he claimed, "with their constant clashes of opinion. They kept our wits sharpened, encouraged us to press forward with our own experiments, and gave us the enthusiasm to work for weeks on end."
²⁴
Manet had provided material as well as intellectual support, since in 1871 he had found Monet a house in Argenteuil when the latter returned from England.