The Great Chain of Being

I’ll confess that I will always find the idea of the Great Chain of Being attractive, despite what post-modernists say. Just call me old fashioned. My mind simply works better when trying to find a connect everything to everything else in a coherent universe, especially when it comes to art. Even someone as game-changing and ground-breaking as Edouard Manet cannot escape the net. Born January 23, 1832, Manet finds himself hailed as the father of modern art, the first artist to break with the old sensibilities and depict modern life as it is, shorn of all falsifying mythology. Manet offered The Luncheon on the Grass (Le déjeuner sur l'herbe) (above, from 1863) as a first glimpse of that brave new world. Yet, how much of this is really new? Art historians point out that Manet “borrowed” the composition from a drawing by Raphael of The Judgement of Paris. The strange, “modern” juxtaposition of dressed and nude figures may have come from Manet’s study of the Renaissance paintings in the Louvre. Sixteenth century works The Pastoral Concert and The Tempest, both likely begun by Giorgione and completed by his student Titian, set the stage for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As much as we may want to isolate Manet as a lone genius blazing a trail into the unknown, Manet steps backwards and points to the past to point to the future.

Where The Luncheon on the Grass befuddled, Manet’s Olympia (above), also from 1863, enraged. Manet completely gives up the pretense of mythology as a way of making the female nude acceptable. But how valid was the entire pretense of mythologizing nudes, especially female nudes, to begin with? Again, Manet looked to the Renaissance and Titian, particularly The Venus of Urbino. The gamesmanship of calling a recognizably realistic nude a Venus or Aphrodite and thus giving the painting respectability always seemed a strange gentleman’s agreement. Manet breaks that agreement in Olympia, recognizing that Titian himself most likely never fully signed on either. As “modern” as Olympia appears, her knowing and direct look reflects similar glances in previous artists as well. Goya's Nude Maja, which Manet most likely knew in some form from his study of Spanish paining since Velazquez, challenges the viewer with her eyes more than half a century before Manet’s Olympia does. Manet rejects the idea that confident women comfortable in their skin can only be fictional and simultaneously points back to all the “real” women since the Renaissance.

Manet, however, didn’t turn a blind eye to the art world going on around him. Although he never accepted the label “Impressionist” or agreed to exhibit with the Impressionists, Manet appreciated what the Impressionists were trying to accomplish and became friends with Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Cézanne, and Camille Pissarro. Manet’s Self-Portrait With Palette (above, from 1879) shows Manet trying to keep up with the times and paint in an Impressionist manner himself, momentarily abandoning his clear draftsmanship yet still clinging to his dark, Spanish background. Even more forward-thinking, Manet encouraged women artists Berthe Morisot and Eva Gonzalès when even some Impressionists continued to cling to the all-boys’ club mentality. Manet falls into the cracks between many categories because he doesn’t paint like a true realist and his works are Impressionist in their independent spirit yet not Impressionist in visual style. The inability to lump Manet in with others isolates him. In truth, Manet belongs everywhere, stretching across styles and even across space and time. More than his art, it is Manet’s mind, always searching for new ways of seeing with total disregard for the rules, that helps create the atmosphere in which modern art is born.

Model Student

Édouard Manet must have seen something special in Eva Gonzales to take her on as his only true student. Born April 19, 1849, Gonzales came from a cultured family. Her father wrote novels and her mother played music. Despite that cultured background, Gonzales had to model for Manet and several other Impressionists before gaining entry into their circle. Once initiated, however, Gonzales proved a quick study. Her painting A Box at the Théâtre des Italiens (above, from 1874) shows her sister Jeanne and husband Henri Guérard in a pose similar to Manet’s The Balcony, which showed Manet’s other female protégé Berthe Morisot and her husband, Manet’s brother Eugene. Like Morisot and many other women artists, Gonzales painted many scenes of friends and family, restricted by the mores of the time from the more outrageous subjects Manet and others depicted. Gonzales Box differs from Manet’s Balcony in her inclusion of a musical or theater theme, something close to her heart considering her family history in the arts.

I remember seeing one of Gonzales’ seascapes pushed off to a far corner of the PMA’s 2004 exhibition Manet and the Sea. I’m not sure if it was her Plage de Dieppe vue depuis la falaise Ouest (above, from 1871), but it was something similar. Again, she copies Manet to an extent, but differs as well. Manet’s marks his seascapes with strong narratives—men rowing in boats or ships in rough seas. Gonzales, however, paints from a distance, allowing the haze of the sea air to blanket over the scene. It’s tempting to ascribe the difference to gender, but I think there’s definitely a softer feel to her work that approaches Whistler in some ways. Whistler, too, found wallspace in the Manet and the Sea exhibition, but much more prominently than Gonzales did. Looking back, it seems like it would have been quite easy to move Gonzales’ works without anyone noticing.

Gonzales’ Morning Awakening (above, from 1876) shows how far she moved away from the influence of Manet and his dark, Velázquez –inspired style. There’s a great gentleness to this picture that, for example, Manet’s Olympia, for all its greatness, lacks. Again, I hesitate to label Gonzales as softer and gentler for fear of falling for all the old gender roles, but such labels seem truly to fit in with what she attempted and achieved. Gonzales exhibited her work annually at the Paris Salon, testifying to her acceptance among contemporaries. Sadly, Gonzales died in childbirth when only 34 years old, less than a week after Manet himself died. Because of that short life and relatively short oeuvre, Gonzales usually falls to the second or even third tier of Impressionists. What she could have done with years of maturity and motherhood under her belt is a question that will never be answered.