30July 2021
Manet’s late flowers, an intimacy with paint, #2
So I had a dream the other night wherein I was walking through the forest behind the Chateaunoir but as an adult, and remembering my way around like it was fifty years earlier. I think it came because for the past few days I’ve been looking through a small book I’ve had of the last flower portraits by Edouard Manet. Like I’ve intimated, though I admired him I was never a huge fan of his despite his giant and well-earned reputation, but that said, I really love these small intimate pictures I discovered so much later. Of course, I had seen his large things as a child and was amazed by the verisimilitude of his craft of which he was certainly a master. When I became a painter myself though he kind of slipped away from my circle of heroes.
In my early years I was beginning to learn about how a picture is organically formed from its very inception instead of just being pieced together one element after the next, then added to create a kind of collage of form. The French say ‘Bricolage’ for such things that are randomly assembled (any which way) when put together one piece at a time. Some of it can be wonderful and there is a grand history of this kind of Painting to be sure. But at this time, Léo was already teaching me about something else, about how a picture could also spring to life from a vision as a unified whole. Consequently, this changed forever the way I would not only look at Painting, but all art. I decidely had an unusual art education unlike anything in America or even Europe as far as I knew. This was the reason I stayed in France throughout the 1970’s, and then later too.
So if I wasn’t crazy about Manet, why do I love these late flowers done right before his death? Though he is known for his early and famously large pictures made for the Salon like Déjeuner sur l’Herbe, it was the intimacy of these small flower portraits which snared me. He had been chasing fame most of his career with large pictures, and though well painted, his work was shocking to a conventional public with no appetite for irony. Though much celebrated at the very end of his life, an illness slowed him down to working alone in his studio in front of small vases of flowers. It was a simple motif and lacking any presumption. They certainly fall into a genre of work that goes back centuries in Europe, but the manner in which he created them was Modernist I think. He asked us to look at Springtime through its children, its lilacs and roses, poppies and peonies, irises and wisteria. They appear so modest and lacking any pretention that one could almost walk right by them. There is none of the artifice I’ve seen in his large celebrated things. They possess for me that straight-forward ‘no-nonsense’ style that one can sometimes feel in the presence of such subdued elegance.
They are smallish works, certainly no bigger than perhaps 40 X 30 cm. They were executed without a lot of correction or fiddling about, and apparently executed in few brief sessions at most. It was under the guidance of his two young admirers, Monet and Renoir, who both pushed Manet to work directly in front of Nature, ignoring his predilection for a clean finish and to abandon himself to the pleasures of spontaneity and an undisciplined approach to a painting session. At the end of his life, these last pictures seem to say: Forget about the public, just enjoy the pleasures of a few small flowers in a vase and just the paint itself. Unfortunately, his health was declining and he was sequestered at home with a nurse. These small studies are fitting farewells to a creative life during a most remarkable era in French Painting.
I first saw them in Paris where many of them all lived together in the comfort of the cluttered Jeu de Palme Museum. Now I think they live in the Musee d’Orsay, but wherever, they feel just right, expressing enough, but no more. These are creatures that hide their creator and they seem to live on beyond his death in their own oxygen tent.
I think they are beautifully painted though today, many young people may find them ‘too 19th century’, but I still like them very much. They appear modern to me, timeless even. I use the word ‘beautifully’ in defiance of the large dark shadow of Post-Modernist orthodoxy, a shade under which we are all now subjected to live, but hey!
When one looks at the lives of great giants in every creative domain, the instinct for the student/admirer is to follow their paths. One does it for a while yet at a certain point sometimes it’s best to jump ship and go find your own even if you fall down for a while. We’ve all been there, failing is the greatest part of a painter’s training.
Finding one’s own vocation in the arts is but the first step. Failure is the second, and it can hit one like sledge hammer, but it can also teach a young student more than when they do eventually succeed. If one is committed, their success will usually arrive in drips and drabs but may not be recognised by the lucky recipient until much later in their lives. I’m not referring to a bright worldly commercial success but an artistic one, more like Manet at the end of his brilliant and successful career, when he settled into a simple routine in front of a vase of lilies.
This second painting from the same night really reveals what the winter sky down here is capable of doing. The sky went crimson red then dropped into the sea which it will often do with skies like this. It always translates into various shapes of deep warm violets that take over the water. It doesn’t last long but I’ve learned to wait for it then pounce at the right instant.
Like a true narcissist, it exhibits just the right amount of emotional melodrama to seduce a needy painter.
