Art:Salon des Refusés

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The Luncheon on the Grass
French: Le déjeuner sur l'herbe
ArtistÉdouard Manet
Year1862–1863
MediumOil on canvas
Dimensions208 cm × 265.5 cm (81.9 in × 104.5 in)
LocationMusée d'Orsay, Paris

Rejected by the Salon jury of 1863, Manet seized the opportunity to exhibit Déjeuner sur l'herbe and two other paintings in the 1863 Salon des Refusés.[1] Déjeuner sur l'herbe depicts the juxtaposition of a female nude and a scantily dressed female bather in the background, on a picnic with two fully dressed men in a rural setting. The painting sparked public notoriety and stirred up controversy and has remained controversial, even to this day. There is a discussion of it, from this point of view, in Proust's Remembrance of Things Past.

One interpretation of the work is that it depicts the rampant prostitution in the Bois de Boulogne, a large park at the western outskirts of Paris, at the time. This prostitution was common knowledge in Paris, but was considered a taboo subject unsuitable for a painting.[2]

Émile Zola comments about Déjeuner sur l'herbe:

The Luncheon on the Grass is the greatest work of Édouard Manet, one in which he realizes the dream of all painters: to place figures of natural grandeur in a landscape. We know the power with which he vanquished this difficulty. There are some leaves, some tree trunks, and, in the background, a river in which a chemise-wearing woman bathes; in the foreground, two young men are seated across from a second woman who has just exited the water and who dries her naked skin in the open air. This nude woman has scandalized the public, who see only her in the canvas. My God! What indecency: a woman without the slightest covering between two clothed men! That has never been seen. And this belief is a gross error, for in the Louvre there are more than fifty paintings in which are found mixes of persons clothed and nude. But no one goes to the Louvre to be scandalized. The crowd has kept itself moreover from judging The Luncheon on the Grass like a veritable work of art should be judged; they see in it only some people who are having a picnic, finishing bathing, and they believed that the artist had placed an obscene intent in the disposition of the subject, while the artist had simply sought to obtain vibrant oppositions and a straightforward audience. Painters, especially Édouard Manet, who is an analytic painter, do not have this preoccupation with the subject which torments the crowd above all; the subject, for them, is merely a pretext to paint, while for the crowd, the subject alone exists. Thus, assuredly, the nude woman of The Luncheon on the Grass is only there to furnish the artist the occasion to paint a bit of flesh. That which must be seen in the painting is not a luncheon on the grass; it is the entire landscape, with its vigors and its finesses, with its foregrounds so large, so solid, and its backgrounds of a light delicateness; it is this firm modeled flesh under great spots of light, these tissues supple and strong, and particularly this delicious silhouette of a woman wearing a chemise who makes, in the background, an adorable dapple of white in the milieu of green leaves. It is, in short, this vast ensemble, full of atmosphere, this corner of nature rendered with a simplicity so just, all of this admirable page in which an artist has placed all the particular and rare elements which are in him.[3]

Émile Zola incorporated a fictionalized account of the 1863 scandal in his novel L'Œuvre (The Masterpiece) (1886).

Symphony in White no 1

Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl
ArtistJames McNeill Whistler
Year1861–62
MediumOil on canvas
Dimensions215 cm × 108 cm (84.5 in × 42.5 in)
LocationNational Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

In 1861, after returning to Paris for a time, James Abbott McNeill Whistler painted his first famous work, Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl. This portrait of his mistress and business manager Joanna Hiffernan was created as a simple study in white; however, others saw it differently. The critic Jules-Antoine Castagnary thought the painting an allegory of a new bride's lost innocence. Others linked it to Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White, a popular novel of the time, or various other literary sources. In England, some considered it a painting in the Pre-Raphaelite manner.[4] In the painting, Hiffernan holds a lily in her left hand and stands upon a wolf skin rug (interpreted by some to represent masculinity and lust) with the wolf's head staring menacingly at the viewer.

Countering criticism by traditionalists, Whistler's supporters insisted that the painting was "an apparition with a spiritual content" and that it epitomized his theory that art should be concerned essentially with the arrangement of colors in harmony, not with a literal portrayal of the natural world.[5]

Whistler started working on The White Girl shortly after December 3, 1861, with the intention of submitting it to the prestigious annual exhibition of the Royal Academy. In spite of bouts of illness, he finished the painting by April.[6] The white paint Whistler used contained lead, and his work on the seven-foot-high canvas had given the artist a dose of lead poisoning.[7] The portrait was refused for exhibition at the conservative Royal Academy in London. Whistler then submitted the painting to the Paris Salon of 1863, where it was also rejected. The public was able to see the painting exhibited with other rejected works, in the Salon des Refusés. The Salon des Refusés was an event sanctioned by Emperor Napoleon III, to appease the large number of artists who joined forces to protest the harsh jury decisions in 1863.[7] Of the over 5,000 paintings submitted in 1863, 2,217 were rejected.

In a letter to George du Maurier in early 1862 Whistler wrote of the painting:

... a woman in a beautiful white cambric dress, standing against a window which filters the light through a transparent white muslin curtain – but the figure receives a strong light from the right and therefore the picture, barring the red hair, is one gorgeous mass of brilliant white.[8]

Whistler submitted the painting to the Academy, but according to Joanna Hiffernan, he expected it to be rejected.[6] The previous year, in 1861, another painting had caused a minor scandal. Edwin Henry Landseer's The Shrew Tamed showed a horse with a woman resting on the ground nearby. The model was named as Ann Gilbert,[9] a noted equestrienne of the period,[10] however it was soon rumored that it was actually Catherine Walters, the notorious London courtesan.[11] Whistler's painting was reminiscent enough of Landseer's that the judges were wary of admitting it.[12] White Girl was submitted to the Academy along with three etchings, all three of which were accepted, while the painting was not.[13] Whistler exhibited it at the small Berners Street Gallery in London instead.[8] The next year, Whistler tried to have the painting exhibited at the Salon in Paris – the official art exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts – but it was rejected there as well.[14] Instead, it was accepted at the alternative Salon des Refusés – the "exhibition of rejects" that opened on May 15, two weeks after the official Salon.[15]

Although Whistler's painting was widely noticed, he was upstaged by Manet's more shocking painting Le déjeuner sur l'herbe.[14] The controversy surrounding the paintings was described in Émile Zola's novel L'Œuvre (1886).[6] The reception Whistler's painting received was mostly favourable, however, and largely vindicated him after the rejection he had experienced both in London and in Paris.[16] The painting was greatly admired by his colleagues and friends Manet, the painter Gustave Courbet and the poet Charles Baudelaire. The art critic Théophile Thoré-Bürger saw it in the tradition of Goya and Velázquez. There were, however, those who were less favourable; certain French critics saw the English Pre-Raphaelite trend as somewhat eccentric.[17]

Legacy

Art historian Albert Boime wrote: "The Salon des Refusés introduced the democratic concept of a multi-style system (much like a multi-party system) subject to the review of the general jury of the public."[18]

See also

  • Salon
  • French art salons and academies
  • Société des Artistes Indépendants
  • Unjuried

References

  1. ↑ Boime, Albert (2007). Art in an Age of Civil Struggle. Los Angeles: The University of Chicago Press. pp. 676. ISBN 978-0-226-06328-7. https://archive.org/details/artinageofcivils0000boim. 
  2. ↑ Peter J. Gartner, Art and Architecture: Musee D'Orsay, 2001, p. 180. ISBN 0-7607-2889-5.
  3. ↑ Émile Zola, Édouard Manet, 1867, et lps 91
  4. ↑ Anderson and Koval, pgs. 106, 119
  5. ↑ Peters, pg. 17
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 Spencer (1998), p. 300.
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 King, Ross (2006). The Judgement of Paris. New York: Walker Publishing Inc.. pp. 61. 
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 Taylor (1978), p. 27.
  9. ↑ The Times, Saturday, May 04, 1861; pg. 12; Issue 23924; col A
  10. ↑ She offered her professional services to render ladies' horses "quiet, safe and pleasant to ride":The Times, Friday, Jun 20, 1856; pg. 2; Issue 22399; col A
  11. ↑ Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine Vol. 90 (550) Aug 1861 Page 211:'"The Shrew Tamed" - a high-bred horse of soft silken coat, dappled with play of light and shade as on velvet, subdued by a "pretty horsebreaker", is certainly unfortunate as a subject. This picture has been made the more notorious by "The Belgravian Lament", which took the well-known rider as a text whereon to point a moral. We hope it will now be felt by Sir Edwin Landseer and his friends that the intrusion of "pretty horsebreakers" on the walls of the Academy is not less to be regretted than their presence in Rotten Row.'
  12. ↑ Spencer (1998), p. 310.
  13. ↑ Anderson & Koval (1994), pp. 129–30.
  14. ↑ 14.0 14.1 Craven (2003), pp. 342–3.
  15. ↑ Weintraub (1974), p. 84.
  16. ↑ Newton & MacDonald (1978), p. 151.
  17. ↑ Spencer (1998), p. 308.
  18. ↑ Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; no text was provided for refs named Boime

Sources

  • Brombert, Beth Archer (1996). Édouard Manet: Rebel in a Frock Coat. Boston: Little, Brown.
  • Hauptman, William (March 1985). "Juries, Protests, and Counter-Exhibitions Before 1850." The Art Bulletin 67 (1): 97-107.
  • Mainardi, Patricia (1987). Art and Politics of the Second Empire: The Universal Expositions of 1855 and 1867. New Haven: Yale U Pr.
  • Albert Boime, "The Salon des Refuses and the Evolution of Modern Art," Art Quarterly 32 (Winter 1969): 411-26
  • Fae Brauer, Rivals and Conspirators: The Paris Salons and the Modern Art Centre, Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars, 2013.



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