Spanish France - Manet/Velazquez: the French Taste for Spanish Painting - Critical Essay

Art in America, May, 2003 by Arden Reed

"Manet/Velazquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting" is not just a dazzling show but a necessary one. Organized by the Musee d'Orsay in Paris and New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, this critical survey of artistic influence across borders and centuries gathers impressive holdings of its titular figures: more Velazquezes are on loan to New York than at any time since the Metropolitan's 1989 monographic exhibition (14 autographs or attributions), and over 30 Manets--a figure rivaled only by his retrospective 20 years ago at the Met and the Grand Palais. Patient curatorial sleuthing and the ensuing generosity of lenders have resulted in an unprecedented assembly of works from more than 70 museums and private collections in 13 countries. Here is the opportunity to experience what has heretofore been only approximated in books: Manet and Velazquez, side by side.

But this is no mere "Treasures of ..." exhibition. Rather, its curators forcefully argue an important, if not wholly surprising, thesis: in the course of the 19th century, Spanish realism supplanted the Italian Renaissance as the inspiration for French painters and is thereby foundational for modern art generally. By way of demonstration, the show flanked its stellar pair with other Spanish artists--Murillo, Zurbaran, Ribera and Goya--who likewise left their mark on French painters from Delacroix to Courbet, Degas and Renoir. Americans, too, caught this enthusiasm, and after surveying the Spanish impact on French art, the New York version of the exhibition concludes by tracing Iberian influence on Whistler, Eakins, Chase, Cassatt and Sargent.

"Manet/Velazquez" is an exemplary exploration of the nature of artistic influence in modernism, particularly valuable for laying out with exceptional clarity an essential aspect of Manet's early career. We learn how he registered Spanish art and how he filtered it to contemporaries. During the crucial 18608, Spanish inflections appeared throughout Manet's work. His first hit at the Salon was the Spanish Singer (1861), which earned him an honorable mention. In 1865 Manet went to Madrid--his only trip to Spain--and pronounced Velazquez the greatest painter who ever lived. Two years later, he mounted an independent solo exhibition in which Spanish themes marked nearly half the canvases, and stylistic affinities marked even more, prompting one critic to declare him "the Velazquez of the boulevards." (1) And the late Self-Portrait with Palette (ca. 1879) recalls Velazquez's self-portrait in Las Meninas, in a mix of homage and self-promotion.

At the Louvre in 1862, Manet first met Degas when both were copying the Infanta Margarita (ca. 1653), then thought to be by Velazquez's own hand but today attributed to his workshop. Degas's Bellelli Family (1858-67, not in the exhibition) carries compositional traces of both Las Meninas and Goya's Family of Charles IV. Las Meninas likewise influenced the composition of his James Tissot (1867-68) with its picture on the rear wall, easel and curtain framing the scene. Lorenzo Pagans and Auguste De Gas (1871-72) blends Degas's own Hispanism with memories of Manet's Spanish Singer. And as late as the 1890s, Degas's unabated taste for Spanish art led him to purchase two El Grecos.

Other painters emulated Manet's interpretation of Spanish art. Renoir's Romaine Lacaux (1864) revisits the Infanta, sweetened by memories of Murillo's palette. Eva Gonzales's Box at the Theatre des Italiens (1874) recalls Goya's Majas on a Balcony (ca. 1808-12) along with Manet's The Balcony (1868-69), as does Cassatt's In the Loge (1877-78). (2)

For most of the 19th century, the French appetite for Spanish culture was insatiable. In a variant of Orientalism, Parisians viewed Spain as the alluring Other, as if crossing the Pyrenees meant leaving Europe for colorful, exotic, racy, slightly dangerous places. (3) Emperor Napoleon III's marriage to the Spanish Eugenie de Montijo in 1853 only enhanced the trend. Examples of the Iberian craze, both imports and the works of French artists, abounded in music, literature and theater as well as painting: Victor Hugo's Hernani, Alfred de Musset's Tales of Spain and Italy, Prosper Merimee's Carmen, Theophile Gautier's Voyage en Espagne, Giuseppe Verdi's Don Carlo (which premiered in Paris in 1867), the Paris visit of a Madrid dance troupe, whose principals, Mariano Camprubi and Lola de Valence, were painted several times by Manet. Lola de Valence was also the subject of a poem by Baudelaire, the owner of a presumed Velazquez.

Given the impact of Spain on the new painting in France, Napoleon I emerges as an unwitting father of modern art. His Peninsular campaigns (1808-14) initiated the movement of Spanish art to and from Paris far into the 19th century. Choice works were exported from Spain by Napoleon's ministers Soult and Denon, and repatriated after Waterloo. Meanwhile, Joseph Bonaparte, installed by his brother on the Spanish throne in 1808, established a national museum in Madrid, which opened in 1819 as the Prado.