Manet Velazquez (Musee d'Orsay, till 5 January)
Confusing collection
Nicholas Powell
When this show opened recently at the Musee d'Orsay it had them queuing round the block. Very quickly, however, word got round that the catchy title with its blockbuster names was no more than misleading advertising, and the queues shrank. There are indeed a lot of Manets in the exhibition, but only four not particularly stunning Velazquez as well as works by a great many more artists, besides.
Organised jointly by the Musee d'Orsay and the Metropolitan in New York, Manet Velazquez is based on a brilliant idea, the huge influence that the discovery of Spanish art had on French art during the 19th century. The had news is that, for all the great works on show, the layout and thus the illustration of that strong, central argument is, to say the least, confused.
The British had discovered Spanish art some years before the French. In 1820, J.B.S. Morritt hung Velazquez's rear-view nude, 'Venus and Cupid', in Rokeby Hall — high enough, he recorded, not to shock the ladies, yet low enough for the gentlemen to enjoy it properly. With the exceptions of Thomas Gainsborough and David Wilkie, however, Spanish art had little influence on the subject matter, or the manner in which artists were painting in Britain. In France they went overboard, beginning with King Louis Philippe. His subjects had just ten years during which to admire the 400-odd paintings of the monarch's Galerie Espagnole in the Louvre, which were packed off to his descendants in London in the wake of the 1848 revolution and sold at Christie's in 1853. Charles Baudelaire marvelled, while his fellow poet and critic Theophile Gautier worried in verse about the masochistic piety of Zurbardn's monks — `Quel crime expiezvous par de si grands remords?' French painters, meanwhile, found themselves confronted with a manner quite unlike that of the ever influential Raphael, techniques quite alien to the glacial perfection of French neoclassicism. They loved it. It got them interested in religion, in a new approach to human figures and in the colour black.
Illustrating all that could have been both simple and spectacular, yet the visitor to Orsay needs to shift continually from one room to another in order to compare a Spanish model and its French derivative. The first hall, for example, is devoted entirely to 17th-century Spanish paintings, including Murillo's fluffy, lighter-than-air and cherub-infested 'Immaculate Conception', circa 1678. Such art — and Murillo was considered by far the greatest Spanish artist during the 19th century — influenced 'Sainte Barbe enlevee au Ciel' of 1841 by Jean-Francois Millet, who was better at painting peasants, and in which, unusually, one cherub is kicking another in the groin. It is hung an inconvenient distance from the Murillo.
The Velazquez at Orsay are portraits of the jesters Pablo of Valladolid and Juan of Austria and the philosophers Democritus and Menippos. How interesting it would have been to see these works near to the two full-length portraits of philosophers by Edouard Manet, the greatest Spanish enthusiast of all, which are housed several rooms further on.
Manet, who visited the Prado, fell in love with bullfighting and caught a stomach bug which radically curtailed his stay in Spain, went for the strongly built figures and the dark palette of Spanish art, as well as its folklore: witness, among many splendid Manets on show at Orsay, 'Mlle V. en costume d'espada', 1862, a fanciful portrait of the artist's model and mistress Victorine in a bullfight arena, holding a sword aloft as daintily as she would a cocktail stick. 'The Dead Soldier', now thought to be 17th-century Italian and anonymous but then considered a Velazquez, was the evident and direct inspiration for Manet's masterpiece of a dead toreador, 'Le torero mort' of 1864. Orsay also has a fair number of great paintings and engravings by Goya, who was thinly represented in Louis Philippe's Galerie Espagnole and despised by Gautier, but who greatly influenced Eugene Delacroix. While Manet adopted and adapted Spanish art (as, indeed, did the little-known and under-estimated Theodule Ribot, whose masterly renditions of texturc in both still lifes and human figures are a revelation of this exhibition), many of his contemporaries were ill at ease with the intense, fleshy brand of Spanish Catholicism which so intrigued Gautier. With his shadowy face, half-open mouth and upward rolling eyeballs. Zurbardn's kneeling 'Saint Francis' is male orgasm in a hair shirt: Camille Corot's answer to that was a polite, pofaced Saint who appears to be whistling. Where the Spaniards gloried in and transcended the flesh, the French, with the exception of Ribot, either prettified it or were crudely over-realistic: Leon Bonnat's hideous Job', showing the prophet old and naked, is a study in geriatric skin disorders. The last canvas on show, at least it gets you out of there fast.
Musee d'Orsay: WNW. musee-orsay.fr
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