The World of Manet 1832-1883 [antikvár]

I The Reluctant Revolutionary Edgar Degas filled this sheet with sketches of his friend Manet in preparation for an etching. The blonde-bearded 32-year-old painter sits patiently for his colleague, as he did several limes. An urbane, fastidious aristocrat who was seldom seen in public without his carefully brushed top hat, Manet hardly looks like the man who would scandalize Paris society, almost singlchandedly overthrow the art establishment, and revolutionize painting. Shortly after Étlouarti Manet's death, his friend, the painter Edgar Degas, remarked: "We did not know that he was this great." The comment is understandable: Manet the man had hidden Manet the artist; the removal of the former suddenly revealed the latter with utmost clarity. Greatness can be either conservative or radical: in Manet's case it was the latter. On that point, minds as far apart as the esoteric poet Stéphane Mallarmé and the popular novelist Emile Zola, both Manet's contemporaries, agreed. The former described Manet as "the only man who tried to open up a new path for himself and for all painting"; the latter called him a "regenerator." Artists are seldom kind to colleagues, and Paul Cézanne was anything but attracted to Manet's personality, yet he declared that with him began "a new state of painting." As for Paul Gauguin, he said flatly, "Painting begins with Manet." Not since Giotto had an artist so truly deserved the epithet revolutionary. Indeed, it was the state of painting instigated by Giotto in the 14th Century, often modified but never basically questioned, that Manet overthrew, creating a new one: modern painting. What was the revolution about? A picture by Manet, Before the Mirror (pages 9-11) says it better than words. A woman, half-dressed, probably young and possibly of easy virtue, her back to the viewer, is inspecting herself in a large mirror. The attitude is almost as familiar to painters as it is to women. Because art itself is a mirror held up to the world, the mirrors depicted by artists in their works are in a sense symbols of their profession. They reflect not only the model represented, but also the art of painting. Consider, for example. Las Meninas, by Manet's favorite artist, Velázquez. In this muhiple portrait of the Spanish Royal Family almost everybody is looking at the two chief members of the household, the King and Queen. They, however, are only indirectly visible—in the mirror. It is as if the artist is telling us that painting is so faithful a reflection that the borderline between reality and art has been erased. For centuries artists basically shared the view that the function of a painting was to mirror a model. The picture's meaning was the subject's