'reface

fusing to write about all three arts in a simultaneous

chronological sequence. In the architecture chapter I

have stressed connections with the painting because these
are not always made manifest, and in any case I am not an
architectural historian. I am extremely aware of the
omissions in this chapter and elsewhere, but in any book

of this kind a great deal has to be left out.

There are no references in the text, but the bibliography

(~ 01"0"-c-

~~

..,-.
-

~~'-"-e_S~

'0'-~

\A
CHAPTER ONE

Manet at the Salon des Refuses: The Birth of Modern Art

at the end provides sources and a guide to further

reading. My own debts are considerable, and will be

recognized by specialist scholars, who will appreciate

better than anyone that a book like Modern European Art

can be written onlrwith the help of others. In this respect
I should like to make a particular acknowledgment to my
teachers, colleagues and. students at the Courtauld
Institute, to all of whom I am in different ways extremely
grateful.
ALAN BowNESS

London, 1971

In Paris in the spring of r863 a young painter, Edouard

Manet (1832-83), submitted a picture to the jury of the
Salon, which, along with hundreds of other works, was
refused. The disgruntled artists appealed to the Emperor
of France, Napoleon III, who agreed that there might
have been a measure of injustice in the jury's decisions.
He gave permission for an exhibition of the rejected

paintings and sculptures: this was the Solon des Refuses,

which marked a turning point in the history of art, and
the most convenient date from which to begin any

history of modern painting.

The entties in the Salon des Refuses would not seem very
impressive today. With the exception ofManet's painting
and two or three others, the work on view was in"

distinguishable from that in the official Salon- worthy

but uninspired landscapes, portraits and figure subjects,
painted for the most part in rather dark, dull colours.
Then as now - or at any time since the early r9th century

when art production began to rise rapidly- the great

bulk of contemporary art was designed for ready appeal
to popular tastes, and had no lasting qualities.
Yet the Salon des Refusis was important for several
different but related reasons. Firstly, it undermined the

prestige of the Salon, in the eyes both of the public and of

the artists. It is hard now to appreciate the dominant role

played in the mid, 19th century by the Paris Salon, or the

Royal Academy in England, or similar bodies elsewhere.
Their large mixed annual exhibitions provided the
normal channel for the public exposure of artists' works.
There were no alternatives, and for an artist to say that

he was not going to exhibit at the Salon was rather like an

artist today saying he does not believe in selling his work,
or would have nothing to do with museums.

But after the Salon des Refuses the situation was never
8

the same. AJ::tists began to arrange their own exhibitions,

Manet at the Salon des Refuses:

The Birth of Modern Art

fDOUARD

MANET

(1832-83)

Le Dtjeuner sur l'herbe, 1863. Oil on

canvas, 6' 11" x 8' 10" (211 x 270).
Musie d'Orsay, Paris

as the Impressionists, for example, did in 1874; and,

more significantly, the activities of the art dealers in . .
creased rapidly in importance. Very quickly there
emerged rhe pattern familiar in advanced capitalist
countries today, where the dealer acts as the artist's agent,
administering his business affairs, and organizing the
public exhibition of his work. There was a marked shift
of attitude from one generation to the next: whereas
Maner could never guite break with the Salon and until
the end of his life still sought Salon success, Monet, eight
years his junior, with the support of dealers like Paul
Durand-Rue!, could afford to be completely independent.
And this is the second reason for theimportance of the
Salon des Refuses- as a sign of the growing independence
of artists. Painters and sculptors had once worked for
patrons- kings, princes of the church, aristocrats,
wealthy merchants. It would not have occurred to them
to demand the kind of freedom a modern artist takes for
granted. But the more independent spirits - a Michel . .
angelo or a Caravaggio, for example - rebelled against
the restraints ofpatronage, and slowly conditions changed.
At first artists were still prepared to accept the judgment

89)

AlEXANDRE CABANEL (1823-

Birth of Venus, 186;. Oil o

canvas., 4' 3" x 3' 8'' (129.5 x 111.5)

Musfe d'Orsay, Paris
of their fellow ...practitioners, and the 18th century was
the great age of Academies, when the authority of men
like Joshua Reynolds was recognized by artist and public
alike.
But submitting one's work even to one's peers became
intolerable, which partly accounted for the outburst in
Paris in 1863. Painters have increasingly demanded
complete freedom to do what they want, with no
obligation to please anybody. This freedom is sometimes
more theoretical than real, and entails demands that
perhaps no artist but a Michelangelo could in fact meet.
It is, however, a characteristic of modern art, and a major
factor in its development.
This brings us to the third and perhaps most funda,
mental reason for the particular importance of the Salon
des Refuses. It marked the debut ofEdouard Maner as the
leading young artist in Paris, taking over the position
that had been Gustave Courbet's (1819-77) for almost
fifteen years. Manet, more than any of his contemporaries,
was thinking in a new way about art- a way, moreover,
which is recognizably modern. Such a judgment can
best be clarified and justified by a consideration of the
picture which was the sensation at the Salon des Rifush,
and of the reasons for irs having seemed so disconcerting
a work.
Le Dijeuner sur l'herbe (Ill. 1) shows two fashionably
dressed young men with two undressed girls taking
lunch in a woodland setting. Nudes were common
enough at the Salons- perhaps the most admired picture
at the official Salon in I 863 was the Birth of Venus
(Ill. 2) by Alexandre Cabanel (I823-89)- but to juxta'
pose nudes with elegantly attired men smacked of

II

in the Artist's Studio the barrier between the spectator's

world and the world inside the painting is broken down

Manet at the Salon des Refuses:

The Birth of Modern Art

by the artist's stare. It is as if Manet wanted to point out

the essential artificiality of picture-making, to disabuse
us of the idea that the world of the painting is a real
world with an independent existence.
Manet' s interest in paintings of artists in their studios

is significant for this reason. He would certainly have

regarded Velasquez' Las Meninas as one of the greatest

EDOUARD MANET (r832-83)

1hing at Saint.-Ouen, near Paris,
6o-61. Oil on canvas, z'6 11 x
r" (77 X12J). The Metropolitan

useum

pictures ever painted, and here the theme of the artist's

awareness of his own art is for the first time tentatively
stated. This idea becomes the explicit subjectofCourbet's

of Art, New York (Mr

I Mrs Richard Bernhard Fund,

57)

impropriety. In addition, one of the girls stares provoca"

rively out of the picture, not so much in invitation, as to

remind the spectator that it is only a painting he is

looking at.
Maner was probably unaware ofhis picture's potential.
He was not a communicative artist, and the only real
evidence we have of his ideas is in the paintings them..selves. He seems to have been genuinely surprised at the

public reaction to his work. He was after all following a

traditional composition and subject- did not the Concert
Champftre, one of the most popular pictures in the
Louvre, show a similar scene? And had not Maner also

borrowed from a well-known engraving afier Raphael

in working out the design:
Maner was in fact a traditionalist, but of a special kind.
He was attracted neither by the conventional art of the

Salon, nor by the naturalism that appealed to his more

adventurous contemporaries. There were qualities in the

art of the past - and especially that of Velasquez, of

Rembrandt, of Rubens and of Titian- that he admired,
and wanted to re..-introduce into modern painting. An

early landscape like Fishing (Ill. 3) might appear to be

nothing more than a pastiche of Rubens, just as the

Spanish Artist's Studio (Ill. 4) frankly crosses Velasquez

EDOUARD MANET (1832~83)

'anish Artist's Studio,.186o. Oil on

~tvas1 18" x 15" (46 x 38). Private
ollection

with the recently rediscovered Vermeer. These pictures

show the young Maner learning by imitating the Old

Masters, yet unmistakably reveal his personal touch.
For there is a quality of self..-awareness about even these

early pictures: the young couple in the corner of Fishing

seem to be the artist and his wife, in fancy dress, inviting
us to consider the contrivances of the picture. And again

enormous picture, L'Atelier du Peintre (Ill. 5), which

Manet saw in r855 when he was still a student in the
studio of Thomas Couture (r8r5-79). The Atelier was
too difficult and subtle a picture for the audiences of
r855, who, like many of their successors, could see little
in it but an assertion of selC.love on the artist's part. But

while we may admit Courbet's egotism, we must

acknowledge that he was as concerned with the freedom
of others as with his own.
Courbet's Atelier was clearly important for Manet, but
not in easily definable ways. Courbet's fame rested on his
realism, and he claimed the term realist when he thought
it could be of use to him. But the Atelier is not a realist
picture; it does not show what Courbet's studio was
actually like while he was at work, or imply that there
was ever such an incongruous assembly of people in the

5 GUSTAVE COURBET (r8r9-77)

L'Atelier du Peintre, 1855. Oil on
canvas, 11.' 11" x 19' 7" (359 x 596).
. Muste d'Orsay, Paris

Manet at the Salon des Refuses:

The Birth of Modern Art

6 EDOUARD MANET (1832-83)

The Old Musician, 1862. Oil on
canvas, 6' 2"x8'

2"

(18JX248).

The National Gallery of Art, Wash'

ington D.C. {Chester Dale Co[,
lection, 1962)

14

studio at any one time. In other words, this is not a

picture like the Funeral at Ornans or the Stonebreakers,
with which Courbet made his name. In such works he
had painted exactly what he saw, without regard for
pictorial conventions or social implications.
The Atelier's subtitle, Real Allegory, summing up seven
years of my artistic life, helps to clarify Courbet's intentions.
The painting was to be an artistic testimony, on several
levels of meaning, open to interpretation by the spectator.
But essentially it demonstrates that the artist can draw
only from his own experiences, that all his acquaintances
-the models who pose for him, his friends and supportersare subservient to his own creative drive. In the centre of
the picture, in the centre of the studio, is a landscape to
which the artist puts the finishing touch: this seems to
represent an order of reality more permanent, more truly
real, than anything going on in the studio itself.
That Maner thought much about Courbet's picture
seems evident. One has only to consider the way in which
two of Maner's most ambitious early works, The Old
Musidan and La Musique aux Tuileries, relate respectively
to the lefi: and right halves of Courbet's Atelier. The Old
Musician (Ill. 6) is a random assembly ofManet's modelsthere is no other explanation for the grouping of figures
with no apparent psychological justification - the gypsy
girl, the absinthe drinker, the Velasquez Philosopher,
the Watteau,type child. They are raw material for
Manet's early painting: that is the only reason for their
eXistence, just as it is for the motley assortment of models

on the left of the Atelier, whom Courbet dismissed as

'the others - those whose lives are of no consequence'.
La Musique aux Tuileries (Ill. 7), on the other hand,
shows Manet, on the extreme left, among his friends in
the fashionable Paris of the early 1 86os. It seems at first
sight a more or less faithful rendering of an actual scene,
until we realize just how artificial the whole composition
is. The haunted figure of Baudelaire appears in both
paintings, though neither Manet nor Courbet shared
that sense of personal damnation which was so funda,.
mental to their poet friend.
Maner in particular was much impressed by Charles
Baudelaire (1821-67) whom he met in 1858. For a
short while the two became intimates and Manet's whole
attitude to an was permanently coloured by Baudelaire's
ideas. Baudelaire was greatly concerned with the
'painting of modem life'; at its most obvious, this meant
taking one's subject,.matter from contemporary Paris,
accepting modern dress (which was thought inappro'
priate to great painting or sculpture), and making
ambitious figure compositions out of things seen at the
theatre or in the cafe. At its deeper level, it meant a
search for that quality of modernity in art which was to
be Manet's panicular achievement.

EDOUARD MANET (1832-83)

La Musique aux Tuileries, 1862.

Oil on canvas, J0 X46Yz" (76x
11

118). By courtesy of the Trustees oj

the National Gallery, London)

IS

8 EDOUARD MANET (18)2-83)

Olympia, 1863. Oil on canvas,
4' 3" x 6' 211 (130 x 190). Musie
d'Orsay, Paris

This modernity can be explained in yet another way,

one that relates directly to Baudelaire. Baudelaire made a
cult of the dandy, and to a certain extent Manet followed
his example, as a young man always dressing most
elegantly, and in later life perhaps somewhat vicariously
transposing his own dandyism into an interest in
women's fashions, which he shared with the poet
Mallarme. Dandyism was admired not for its own sake,
but because the dandy was playing a part, disguising
his own feelings beneath his often extravagant costumes.
To hide one's personal feelings may seem at first a

strange artistic ambition, but at certain times in the

history of art this becomes essential. The r 86os was such
a time, as was to be the decade of the 1960s a century

Victorine Meurent as she poses for Le Dijeuner or for

Jenny Claas and the beautiful Berthe Morisot, for whom

Manet had a more than passing affection: their with'
drawn expressions suggest depths of hidden feelings.
And Le Dijeuner dans l'Atelier (Ill. xo) of the same year,
1869, confronts us like an insoluble equation: what do
these figures signifY- the grey,clad serving woman, the
elderly man smoking a pipe, and the boy who gazes at
us, resting against the improbably laid luncheon table<
The whole composition is a compound of the calculated,
the artificial, the unreal; all the elements of painting -

Olympta (IlL S), the thoroughly Baudelairean picture

with which Manet confirmed his position as leader of

colour, tone, texture, shape, space- are here demonstrated

with the mastery of a supreme painter.
.

the Parisian avant. . garde at the Salon of 1865.

One gets a clearer idea of the emotional coolness of
Manet's art when one considers his major paintings of

Another major work, the Execution of the Emperor

Maximilian (Ill. 11), painted only weeks after the event
in Mexico in the summer of r867, is altogether too

the later t86os. In The Balcony (Ill. g) the two couples

are held enmeshed in the very complexity of the com'

intended it as the political manifesto that some critics

later. The excesses of abstract expressionism brought a

cool, impersonal reaction; in the same way Manet knew

that to break with the Romanticism of Delacroix and

Ingres he needed to create an art which would permit
him to establish a distance between himself and his
audience. Hence the distancing stare of his model

9 EDOUARD MANET (1832-83)

The Balcony, x861Hig. Oil on canvas,

s' 7

11

X 4 1II (1JO
d'Orsay, Paris

16

1245). Musfe

position - a pattern of elongated rectangles with crossing

diagonals, announced in the railings of the balcony itself,

and repeated in the shutters and in the fans held in
gloved hands. The two women are the Oriental-looking

10

EDOUARD MANET (r832-83)

Le Dijeuner dans /'Atelier, x86g.

Oil on canvas, 3'11"x5' (118x
154 ). Bayerische Staatsgemiildesamm.-lungen, Munich

emotionally detached for us to believe that Manet

have suggested. But just as The Balcony echoes Goya's
Majas on the Balcony, so does the Execution echo Goya's
Third of May, 18o8, which Manet had seen on his brief
visit to Spain in r86;. Maximilian's death gave Manet

!7

Manet at the Salon des Refuses:

The Birth of Modern Art

11 EDOUARD MANET (r832-83)

Execution of the Emperor Maxi.milian, 1867. Oil on canvas, 8'3'' x
10' (252 XJos). Stadtische Kunst'
halle1 Mannheim

I8

the excuse for painting Goya's subject again, but in the

modern manner.
With a succession of such extraordinarily original
masterpieces, Maner established a new kind of painting
in the I 86os. He justified the greater measure offreedom
given to the artist by asserting a more complete control
over the work of art itsel Great art of the past had been
made for the glory of God, or in accordance with an
idea ofthe perfectibiliry ofman, or in the service ofNature.
Manet's art seems to turn inwards, to be made for art's
sake alone. His painting was generated by the art of the
past in a manner that went beyond the normal practice
of learning from one's predecessors. The issues it con.cerned itself with were central to the nature of painting
itself, and set in motion the chain of thinking that led
directly to the radical experiments in artistic language
made in the 2oth century.
In his own time, however, the implications ofManet's
paintings went largely unremaiked. He seems indeed to
have lost confidence a little in the I 87os, when his work
cieaily shows the influence of younger painters like
Monet. His last major painting, Un Bar aux Folies.Bergire (Ill. 13), has the graviry and finality of a statement
made only after a long period of indecision.
A few people did see the point of Maner's paintings of
the '6os. One was Paul Cezanne, who was to build on
Maner's foundations in his struggle to find a viable way
of painting nature. Another was the poet Mallarme who

12 :EDOUARD MANET (18~2-8~)

On the Beach at Boulogne, 186g. Oil
on canvas, 12% 11 x 25%" (33 x 65).
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
(Collection Mrand Mrs Paul Mellon)

was to initiate a comparable post.-Baudelairean revolu.tion in poetry. Stephane Mallarme (I842-98) got to
know Manet intimately in the late I870s, and made ir
his daily habit to call at the painter's studio after he had
finished his day's teaching.
Mallarme greatly admired Manet's painting, which
confirmed the direction in which his own poetry was
moving. Both artists were looking inwards, but in an
objective rather than a subjective v.:ay. Creating a poem
was for Mallarme the only duable, meaningful act in an
otherwise godless, irrational existence. It became a
distillation of experience so precious as to be almost
impossible to achieve, and for most of the period of
intimacy with Manet, Mallarme was unable to write
poetry. When he staited again his work was markedly
more abstract, concerned above all with formal values,
exactly as in Manet's painting. Poetry is made with
words, not ideas, Mallarme told Degas, who fancied
himself as a writer of sonnets; and in his rare essays on art
Mallarme was at pains to stress that a picture is made of
oils and colours, and is not a substitute for or representa,..
tion of anything.
Another side of Manet's art fascinated the poet: his
introduction into the making of a painting of the element
of chance. There can be no explanation for the appear...
ance of certain early works ofManet's- The Old Musician,
for example - unless we accept that he was interesred in
random composition. Figures touch without over.lapping, thus flattening the space but in an altogether
arbitrary manner. Sometimes the images may approxi.mate to our visual experience, as for example On the Beach
at Boulogne (Ill. 12), which is, however, fai from being a
naturalistic rendering of the scene. There is something
quite erratic, illogical, absurd, about the construction of

19

.w

IJ

EDOUARD MANET

(I8J2-8J)

Un Bar aux Folies..-Bergi:re, 1882.

Oil on canvas, ]'z 11 x4'3" (g6x
IJO). The Courtauld Institute Ga[,
leries, London

20

this picture, as if an element of chance had been permitted

to challenge the artist's conttol.
Mallarme was obsessed with the idea of chance, and
it forms the subject of his last published work, Un coup
de des n'abolira le hasard (A dice throw never will abolish
chance). Quite apart from the increasing absttaction of
late Mallarme (which reaches an exttaordinary apogee
in the posthumously published L'CEuvre), and the visual
aspect of the poem's presentation (its typographical
experiment is the main source for ~concrete poetry'),
Un coup de des is concerned with the role of chance in the
creative act. A man is drowning ( the artist), a dice is
thrown ( chance), a constellation of stars emerges
( the poem). The image of the drowning man may
well have been suggested by Maner, who, according to
Mallarme himself, likened starting work on a new
picture to a plunge into water by a man who cannot swim.
The significance of all this may not be immediately
apparent, but some things will become clear in the
succeeding pages, for many of the innovations of 2oth
century painting may be traced to Maner, as the com . .

parable growth and development of modern poetry may

be to Mallarme. Both men were themselves deeply
influenced by Baudelaire, but they belong to our own
time, whereas Baudelaire was still enmeshed in a guilt,
ridden, romantic past.

14 CLAUDE MONET (I84D--I926)

Women in the Garden, 1866-67. Oil

on canvas, 8' 4" x 6' g" (235 x zos).

Musee d'Orsa}'J Paris

2!