Edouard Manet [antikvár]

EDOUARD MANET CLARITY, candour, urbanity and a virtuoso ability to handle paint—such are the qualities which first strike us in Manet's art. Here, we feel, is an oeuvre which raises no aesthetic problems and demands no special knowledge, which can be enjoyed effortlessly, for its own sake and on its own merits. And yet how wrong our first impressions are! For underneath its bland surface Manet's art abounds in pitfalls and contradictions, so much so that none of the writers who have tried to analyse it agree on the master's special qualities or failings, and his rightful place in the hierarchy of the great is still disputed. Thus, at various times, Manet has been described as 'a frightful realist' (Gautier) and as someone 'unfortunately marked by romanticism from birth' (Baudelaire); as the artist 'who opened up the age we call modern times' (Bataille) and as 'the last of a race . . . the culminant figure who rounds off the classical tradition' (Florisoone); as the 'great master of the Impressionists' (Simon Boubée) and as 'a great painter for whom Impressionism was a deplorable aberration' (Roger Fry); as 'the most astonishing virtuoso of the modern school' (Colin) and as 'uninspired', 'mediocre' and 'mechanical' (Zervos); as a 'prince of visionaries' (Paul Mantz) and as 'totally without imagination' (Florisoone and others); as 'a revolutionary to end all revolutionaries' (Cochin), but also as 'nothing of a revolutionary, not even a rebel' (Colin) and as a ^sale bourgeois' 'consumed by a vulgar ambition for "honours"' (Clive Bell). Now, although some of these opinions are patently ridiculous, many undeniably contain a modicum of truth. The task of reconciling the various anomalies and of distinguishing a coherent pattern in Manet's development is far from easy. But it becomes possible if we realize that there is a deep-seated dichotomy in Manet's character and that the artist, like the man, has more than a single face. For instance, he was both a devoted and domesticated husband as well as an impenitent coureur; a pious Catholic as well as a sceptical humanist; a waspish wit as well as a kind-hearted friend; a gullible innocent as well as a cunning schemer; an ardent Socialist as well as a conforming bourgeois; a hard-working artist as well as an elegant flaneur 'who