"The Potency of Pure Painting: Manet’s Still Lifes" by Karen Wilkin, in The New Criterion (Mar. 2001), 850 Seventh Ave., New York, N.Y. 10019; "The Urbane Innocent" by Peter Schjeldahl, in The New Yorker (Nov. 20, 2000), 4 Times Sq., New York, N.Y. 10036.
Édouard Manet (1832–83) is so much associated with large painted images of the human figure, in Olympia (1863), Le Bar aux Folies-Bergère (1881–82), and other masterworks, that even art critics Schjeldahl and Wilkin were surprised to learn how much of a still-life painter he was. The 80 or so still lifes he did during his brief career constitute a fifth of his oeuvre. "I was even more surprised," writes Schjeldahl, "by a dawning conviction that stilllife wasn’t a sideline of his art but fundamental to it. What are his celebrated figure paintings but still-lifes in which people are objects of a particular variety?" Until Manet: The Still-Life Paintings opened at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris last fall, and then at the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore this past winter, no major exhibition focusing on Manet’s still lifes had ever been organized. Though the exhibition was "short on masterpieces," that "turns out to be a virtue," Schjeldahl says. "A viewer is admitted to the workshop of the artist’s technique and rhetoric, which are indistinguishable from his soul." Oysters (1862), which is considered Manet’s first still life, and other works from the 1860s use motifs of earlier painters and "are self-consciously showy, exuding decorative panache," observes Schjeldahl. The other main group consists of still lifes done toward the end of Manet’s life, when he was ill (probably with syphilis) and racked with pain. Most of these paintings, Schjeldahl says, "memorialize bouquets that were brought to him by friends: roses, peonies, lilacs, tulips, carnations, and pansies in glass or crystal vases against dark grounds. They are desperately moving." The best of these later paintings, writes Wilkin, "are energetic and dazzling, with their rapidly evoked particularities of petals and the complexities of stems and leaves seen through water and crystal." Manet’s greatest talent, it seems, may have been bringing inanimate objects to life. Despite his most celebrated figure paintings, Manet was, in Schjeldahl’s view, "a terrible portraitist—too respectfully well mannered and too shy, I think, to express anybody else’s personality. He was also too honest, perhaps. (What mood, besides glum torpor, can a person who must hold still for hours and days convey?) Only when Manet’s affection for a sitter is intense does a portrait sparkle." "A painter can say all he wants to with fruit or flowers or even clouds," Manet once told an artist friend. But he did not confine himself to still lifes. The naked women in Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863) and Olympia caused public scandals, which much vexed him. "Some critics who initially found Le Déjeuner or Olympia vulgar in subject and wanting in execution," notes Wilkin, "were receptive to Manet’s treatment of inanimate objects." But while he wanted to please, he kept going his own way. "What is Manet’s essential quality?" asks Schjeldahl. "I think it’s innocence."