H-France Review Vol. 3 (November 2003), No. 128
Gary Tinterow and Geneviève Lacambre, Manet/Velázquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting. With Deborah L. Roldán and Juliet Wilson-Bareau. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2003. xi + 592 pp. Illustrations, appendices, chronology, notes, bibliography, and index. $75.00 U.S. (cl.) ISBN 1-58839-038-1. $50.00 U.S. (pb.) ISBN 1-58839-040-3.
Review by Suzanne Singletary, Philadelphia University.
By its very title, Manet/Velázquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting--the hefty catalogue that accompanied this year’s splendid exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City and the Musée d’Orsay, Paris--raises complex issues concerning the nature of artistic influence, as well as the vagaries of cultural “taste.” During much of the nineteenth century not only French painters but also writers such as Hugo, Baudelaire, and Mérimée, as well as composers like Bizet and Verdi, appropriated Spanish themes and sources. This aesthetic vogue for anything Spanish originated during the early part of the century, merging seamlessly with the Orientalist craving for the exotic “other.” Poet/critic Théodore Gautier, himself inspired by Spain, attributed this trend to the Romantics, with Victor Hugo’s Les Orientales and Spanish drama Hernani, Alfred de Musset’s Tales of Spain and Italy, plus Prosper Mérimée’s novels, such as Carmen, and his comic plays, Théâtre de Clara Gazul, comédienne espagnole. During the Second Empire, the Spanish craze was further fueled by Napoleon III’s Iberian empress Eugénie de Montijo de Guzman, influencing fashion, decoration, and popular illustrators, such as Constantin Guys, no less than the “high” arts.
Considering how pervasive was the allure of Spain and its acknowledged importance for artists, it is surprising that the subject has never been treated with the exhaustive detail that this exhibition and catalogue afford. While Spanish influence was not solely responsible for the erosion of classical themes and the beau idéal, and its replacement with contemporary subjects treated realistically, Spanish art was crucial in “the triumph of Realism in the 1860s” (p. 3). This transition was also bolstered by seventeenth-century Dutch art and, after mid-century, by Japanese preference for scenes of every day life, favored in ubiquitous ukiyo-e prints. Dutch and Japanese models have received far more unified treatment than Spanish.[1] This catalogue fills a historical void by casting a spotlight upon the pivotal phenomenon of Iberian influence and dissecting its many strands. The eleven essays, two appendices, chronology, and entries on individual works are written by an impressive cast of European and American scholars who chart the emergence of Spanish influence from the Napoleonic era to the beginning of the Third Republic in France and, to a limited extent, in America.
In his introductory essay, “Raphael Replaced: The Triumph of Spanish Painting in France,” Metropolitan Curator of European Paintings Gary Tinterow provides a thorough overview of the theme, with selected topics amplified in the remaining papers. Tinterow reconstructs the rise of the Spanish school from near obscurity to center stage and brackets its reception with the availability of this material in museums and private collections. Tinterow relates a fascinating tale of booty, restitution, and political maneuvering, with Spanish art treated as both symbol and commodity and museum acquisitions seen as barometers of national strength.
Spanish art was virtually unknown in France in the 1780s when Louis XVI’s director of buildings, Comte d’Angiviller, initiated the conversion of the Grande Galerie du Louvre into a royal picture gallery. To correct the conspicuous absence of Spanish painting in the royal collection and stymied by Spain’s prohibition against exporting art, D’Angiviller scoured Parisian private collections, uncovering a good representation of Murillos. At that point Murillo far outnumbered Velázquez (Spain still being the main repository of his art), Ribera was nonexistent, while Zurbarán and El Greco were completely unknown in France.
When the Museé Français finally opened in 1793 on the first anniversary of the storming of the Tuileries and the capture of Louis XVI, its mission had vastly changed from the aristocratic gallery envisioned by d’Angiviller. Instead, the museum represented the democratic aspirations of the French nation: the more encyclopedic its collections, the greater the stature of the new government. In tune with the moralizing temper of Neoclassical art, the museum’s task was to teach and would, in the words of Jean-Marie Roland, minister of the interior, “become the most powerful demonstration of the French Republic” (p. 13). Such ideological fervor sanctioned seizing art as booty during Napoleon’s many military campaigns and augmented the Louvre’s collections in general, and the Spanish school in particular, via “war, confiscation, occupation, and tribute” (p.13). We learn of the crucial role of French ambassadors to Spain, notably Ferdinand de Guillmardet (1798-1800) who introduced Goya to France in the form of his own portrait, a small Maja and a set of the satirical etchings, Caprichos (“caprices”)--all likely consulted by his godson Eugène Delacroix and his circle. Ambassador Lucien Bonaparte, brother of the first consul, authorized wholesale looting to inflate French holdings, conveniently acquiring bounty in art and diamonds for himself--including three Murillos and a Velázquez--all in the name of the Republic. During the French occupation of Spain, 1808-12, Vivant Denon, director of the renamed Musée Napoléon (formerly the Musée Central des Arts), vied with Spain’s newly enthroned king, Bonaparte’s older brother Joseph, for treasures hidden within palaces, cathedrals, monasteries, and suppressed convents. The commander of the French army, Marshal Jean de Dieu Soult, sacked Seville in 1810, sequestering an inventoried 999 paintings in the Alcázar palace that were earmarked for Joseph’s projected museum in Madrid, as well as the Musée Napoléon. In the process, Soult amassed a personal cache of Murillos and Zurbaráns, forming the nucleus of an estimated 200 Spanish works that would become a magnet for Romantic artists when relocated to Soult’s Parisian hôtel.
Restitution of pilfered goods was decreed after the Bourbon Restoration in 1815, resulting in a vastly diminished Louvre collection. Many restituted works became the core of the Museo del Prado, founded in 1819. Pilgrimages to Madrid by French artists followed, lured by the promise of Velázquez, particularly his masterwork Las Meninas, that had previously been secreted in the Hapsburg palaces. Unquestionably, the key event in the surge of Hispanism in France was the 1838 opening of King Louis-Philippe d’Orléans’s Galerie Espagnole in the Louvre. Orchestrated by Baron Taylor, the Spanish Gallery assembled 400 paintings, from late sixteenth-century works by El Greco and Morales to masterpieces by Zurbarán and Murillo to major canvases by Goya, to become, in effect, a competitor with the Prado itself. The Galerie Espagnole, purchased with state funds, returned to the Orléans family after the 1848 Revolution that toppled the July Monarchy. According to Baudelaire, during its brief ten-year span the Galerie Espagnole “had the effect of increasing the volume of general ideas that you had to have about art” (p. 38). Noted for its anti-classicism, Spanish models fortified artists forging a new realism, such as Corot and Millet, while also suiting medievalizing tendencies of juste milieu painters like Chasseriau.
Spanish art’s challenge to classicism assumed political resonance in the work of Gustave Courbet, devotee of the Galerie Espagnol. Ironically, Spanish predilection for the banal and even unsavory, evident in the parade of everyday “types” peopling Louis-Philippe’s Gallery, not only undermined academic hegemony, it was tantamount to challenging the state. “Taste” for Spain not only accomplished the “triumph of Realism,” but also acquired political connotations in years following the 1848 Revolution. Indeed, Jeannine Baticle raises a key question regarding the “secret motives” (p.188) that led the Second Republic to relinquish the Gallery’s contents in July 1851, scant months before Napoleon III’s coup d’état.
Tinterow proposes a painterly lineage of Hispanism, stemming from arch-Realist Courbet and absorbed by Manet who, in turn, became the catalyst for Degas, Renoir, Fantin-Latour, and Eva Gonzales, plus Americans Cassatt, Sargent, Eakins, and Whistler.[2] By seeing Spain through Manet’s eyes, Tinterow argues, these sources became more covert, but nonetheless were integral to the progress of modernity. Though Manet’s predilection for Spain was multi-determined, and may have owed more to Baudelaire than Courbet, Tinterow rightly stresses the pivotal leadership role of Manet among the burgeoning realists.
Complementing Tinterow’s study, Musée d’Orsay Conservateur Général Geneviève Lacambre focuses upon which works were accessible to artists via originals, painted copies, and--as a result of the print media explosion--reproductions in books, newspapers, and magazines. In the 1830s the Magasin Pittoresque featured biographies of Murillo, Ribera, and Goya, accompanied by engraved replicas of selected works. Goya’s entry was illustrated by several Caprichos and mentioned his fresco cycle of grotesques, the Black Paintings. The periodical L’Artiste reproduced Zurbaran’s St. Francis in Meditation even before its exhibition in the Galerie Espagnole. Beginning in 1849, Charles Blanc published his opus, Histoire des peintres de toutes les écoles, serialized in 631 installments over two decades. Illustrated with wood engravings, Blanc’s monographs on Velázquez, Ribera, Murillo, Zurbáran, Cano, El Greco, and Goya included the location of key works in galleries and private collections, as well as prices at public sales. Blanc published a volume devoted entirely to Spain in 1869. Later anthologies traded engraved facsimiles for photographs. A “museum without walls” followed the first emergence of a popular visual culture in Europe and greatly impacted the reception and assimilation of Spanish art.
Juliet Wilson-Bareau’s essay, “Manet and Spain,” expands the central thesis of the catalogue, investigating the seminal role of Spain in Manet’s reconstruction of the paradigm of painting to form a modern idiom. The perception of Velázquez changed from a courtly portraitist to a painter of “tramps, beggars, thieves, philosophers, alcoholics--the wretches in the teeming ranks of the underclass” (p. 212). This view fused with Baudelaire’s call for a “painter of modern life,” first formulated in the poet’s review of the 1846 Salon. As described by Gautier, Manet’s 1858-59 The Absinthe Drinker (A Philosopher) aspired to the challenge of modernity, melding a seedy urban “type,” inspired by Baudelaire’s poem “Ragpickers’ Wine,” with Velázquez’s well-known renditions of classical philosophers, Aesop and Menippus, as indigent outcasts (known through Goya’s etched copies). Manet’s strategy of splicing sources and references, achieving a collage-like aesthetic, accounts for the jumpy, discordant quality in many works from early 1860s. Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, the succès de scandale of the Salon des Refusés, interfaces modern individuals and old master guises, producing a witty collision of old and new. This gambit is reiterated in the two Spanish-inspired works, exhibited with Le Déjeuner, Mademoiselle V… in the Costume of an Espada and Young Man in the Costume of a Majo--described by Wilson-Bareau as “Hispanic wings for an Italian High Renaissance altarpiece” (p. 224). Wilson-Bareau underlines a key shift in 1862 when Manet problematizes the act of performing that underscores the models as identifiable individuals who are posing. She intriguingly connects the complex conceptual/visual interplays in these works to Goya, whose Caprichos Manet much admired. This association unravels a powerful thread of modernity, running from Goya to Manet and later to Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp.[3]
The consequence of Manet’s only trip to Madrid in 1865 was a period of close adaptation of Velázquez, principally in portraits of actors and philosophers, followed by freer assimilations in which the memory of Velázquez and Goya penetrated his working method on an almost subliminal level. Wilson-Bareau makes an intriguing and previously undetected connection between Manet’s portrait of Zola and Velásquez’s The Dwarf Don Diego de Acedo, “El Primo.” Likewise, The Fifer (1866) is a deft amalgam of popular Epinal prints and Japanese ukiyo-e, with Velázquez’s Pablo de Volladolid, that finds Manet truly transcending his sources in an image whose abstraction and specificity merges the “fugitive and the eternal,” Baudelaire’s definition of modernity.
Overall, this comprehensive catalogue not only contributes to our understanding of the formation of Hispanism in French art, but also of its far-reaching consequences in the emergence of modernity. The exhaustive research assembled here provides an invaluable sourcebook for scholars working in this area. Just as significant, by foregrounding Spanish art as a cultural and artistic phenomenon, these essays raise provocative questions that are not directly addressed. The myriad ways that Spain was filtered through the sensibilities of individual artists deserves further exploration. As such, the stage is set for future investigations.
LIST OF ESSAYS
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Gary Tinterow, “Raphael Replaced: The Triumph of Spanish Painting in France”
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Geneviève Lacambre, “The Discovery of the Spanish School in France”
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Ignacio Cano Rivero, “Seville's Artistic Heritage during the French Occupation”
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María de los Santos García Felguera and Javier Portús Pérez, “The Origins of the Museo del Prado”
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Juliet Wilson-Bareau, “Goya and France”
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Ilse Hempel Lipschutz, “Goya and the French Romantics”
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Jeannine Baticle, “The Galerie Espagnole of Louis-Philippe”
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Stéphane Guégan, “From Ziegler to Courbet: Painting, Art Criticism and the Spanish Trope under Louis-Philippe”
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Juliet Wilson-Bareau, “Manet and Spain”
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H. Barbara Weinberg, “American Artists’ Taste for Spanish Painting”
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Mitchell A. Codding, “A Legacy of Spanish Art for America: Archer M. Huntington and The Hispanic Society of America”
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Dominique Lobstein, Appendix 1: Nineteenth-Century French Copies after Spanish Old Masters
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Matthias Weniger, Appendix 2: The Dresden Remains of the Galerie Epagnole: A Fresh Look (at the) Back
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Deborah L. Roldán, Chronology
NOTES
[1] See Klaus Berger, Japonisme in Western Painting from Whistler to Matisse (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992) and Petra ten Doesschate Chu, French Realism and Dutch Masters: The Influence of Dutch Seventeenth-Century Painting on the Development of French Painting between 1830-1870 (Utrecht: Haentjens Dekker & Gumbert, 1974). For other studies of Hispanism in France, see Les Peintres Français et l’Espagne de Delacroix à Manet (Musée Goya-Castres, 11 July-5 October, 1997) and Mario Bois, Manet Tauromachies et Autres Thèmes Espagnols (Paris: Editions Plume, 1994).
[2] Whistler was, in fact, a full-fledged Hispanophile before his contact with Manet. H. Barbara Weinberg’s essay examines American Hispanism by way of France, and Mitchell A. Codding discusses the formation of Archer Huntington’s collection, The Hispanic Society of America.
[3] In “Goya and France,” Wilson-Bareau chronicles the enormous impact of Goya’s Caprichos as early as the 1830s. In “Goya and the French Romantics,” Ilse Hempel Lipschutz discusses the resonance of Goya’s mystique coupled with the idiosyncrasies of the Caprichosthat were considered illustrative of the “real” Spainwith the Romantic taste for the picturesque and the gothic.
Suzanne Singletary
Philadelphia University
Singletarysuzann@aol.com
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H-France Review Vol. 3 (November 2003), No. 128
ISSN 1553-9172
