A Talent for Outrage

John Haber
in New York City

Edouard Manet in the Norton Simon Museum

John Singer Sargent in Charcoal

Be suspicious when people get outraged at a work of art. Maybe that subject does not belong in a gallery—that nude, that politics, that Jesus, or that drip. Or maybe they know that they are the ones who do not belong.

Edouard Manet surely put them on the spot, with his paintings at the Frick. On loan from the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, they look innocent enough—until you realize that you have stumbled onto something where, you flatter yourself, you do not belong. You find yourself on intimate terms with someone else's wife, a homeless man, and seafood not in the least ready for dinner. Just try to look away. As a postscript, why did John Singer Sargent turn from flashy oils to charcoal for his portrait commissions at the Morgan Library? He was so bored.

Riffing or unfinished?

Edouard Manet had a talent for outrage. No sooner had the jury at the French salon rejected his Déjeuner sur l'Herbe (or Luncheon on the Grass) in 1863, but the emperor commanded a Salon des Refusês. More than a thousand came each day to see his and other rejected works, fairly pushing their way in. Not the least of its attractions was Manet's nude, seated among two smartly dressed young men—with another woman preparing to bathe in the distance. If the lunch before them has the freshness of a still life, and the landscape has the freshness of Impressionism still to come, that just made things worse. And he was already working on a bigger scandal.

Manet was riffing on Titian, and the distant woman fills out the peak in a proper Renaissance triangle, but so much for propriety. That nude is plainly out to lunch, but her knowing glance aims directly at you. Was she right out of art history, a modern bohemia, or a brothel? With Olympia, painted the same year and exhibited at the official salon in 1865, she has become once and for all a prostitute. Maybe you do not belong there, along with a fierce black cat and a wide-eyed black servant, but the flowers in the servant's arms belong to you. And again you cannot look away.

Manet's three paintings riff on traditional genres, too—portraiture, a standing figure, and still life. He distanced himself from such contemporary labels as the origins of Impressionism, and he had a flair for the past. The still life looks at home at Frick with Jean-Siméon Chardin, and the museum has no shortage of female portraits as well. The rag picker could belong in a moral fable from William Hogarth or the golden age of Dutch painting. His firm stance in an indefinite space recalls paintings by Diego Velázquez. Manet thrilled to them at the Prado on a visit to Madrid, and he pictured his figure as a beggar-philosopher like the Spaniard's Aesop.

How, then, can an artist with such care for tradition sustain such outrage? Charles Baudelaire, the poet and his friend, had an answer in linking him to "the painting of modern life," and the public found itself caught between past and present. It was not, for them, an easy place to me. They would have felt more comfortable without either one. That portrait, say, was of Manet's wife, and they could never know for sure that he had altogether shared it with them. Painted around 1876, it looks neither flattering nor finished.

What in the world is at the center of the woman's portrait, and what accounts for a couple of darting strokes akin to doodles at right? Is there even a background apart from the picture plane? A mix of black and yellow, applied wet on wet, creates the stunning illusion of auburn hair, and her lipstick is bright red, but an also an awkward smudge. Has she applied it too hastily, or has he? Her lips that barely part it cannot manage a smile. She had patience enough, though, to sit for her husband at least thirteen paintings.

Is this one, then, truly unfinished? Manet has signed it. Does it suffice, then, as a private token between long lovers? (He knew her as the family music teacher more than a decade before they married.) Maybe, but Baudelaire also called her a beauty, and one would never know it from her features here. It combines, then, unsparing intimacy with an equally unsparing honesty—and, you have to ask, does either have room for you?

A reason to look away

Within limits, Manet just ups the ante on what you think you know. The loose brushwork for the woman's clothing has a parallel in a white explosion at the center of a portrait by Franz Hals a room away. And then he brings it into a present moment in Paris that art barely knew. No wonder viewers did not know whether to be attracted, repelled, or fascinated. Each of the other two paintings works the same way, although with more obvious finish and talent. It makes their embarrassment all the clearer, along with their attachments to tradition, to documentary realism, and to paint.

In the still life, from 1864, a needlefish wraps around a salmon on a bed of greens, still moist and alive. It took what the Frick calls a "frenzy of paint" to achieve that—or the dazzling light on the salmon's scales. The shrimp could still be crawling their way across the counter. They exist between life and death on their way to dinner, much as traditional still life bears the theme of vanitas, or the futility of passing pleasures. Be careful what you eat. And yet you can all but measure the narrow distance from the picture plane to the front of the table, with its knob on the closed drawer.

The rag picker has a still life at his feet, too, and an even greater sense of life. He carries his staff as a tool for spearing rags, but it bears his weight. The handle of the staff reflects the light. He, in turn, bears a hefty sack over the opposite shoulder, while leaning slightly forward and bending his knees. His blue pants torn at the knee could almost match fashionably torn jeans today. You know just where he stands, except that you do not.

Whatever happened to the division between foreground and background? Even Velázquez portraits generally spare a line to demarcate the rear wall and floor. What is at the man's feet anyway—perhaps a broken beer stein, a half-peeled fruit, and a rag? I hesitate to say. Are those stains on his loose white top shadows or the dirt of the street? And all this again invites you into intimate contact from which you dare not look away.

His viewers would have had every reason to turn away, on behalf of their reputation and their future. Paris had suppressed its political upheavals, while undertaking a physical remaking. The grand boulevards one knows today, as a response to crime and poor sanitation. It cast others, like the rag picker, onto the street, where some might want ever so much to ignore them, like the homeless today. Georges-Eugène Haussmann, or the Baron Haussmann, initiated the plan in 1859, although it remained incomplete at his loss of office in 1870. Manet began the painting in 1867 and completed it in 1871. He may have returned to it later as well.

Paintings like this do not reduce to social commentary, not when they speak of Aesop. They live in too many interesting times. So does the Norton Simon Museum, which has had exchanges with the Frick since 2009. (New York has had, I fear, no shortage of loan shows of Manet, but this will do fine.) They also have too much awareness of paint, from the brushwork on the fish to the drawer bringing out the picture plane—or from the portrait's free handling to the beggar's feet, toes turned up, standing his ground. If Manet played his cards right, he still commands both past and present.

So bored

He was bored of self-portraits, John Singer Sargent said—right around the time that he committed not one but two of them to a single sheet of paper. Bored even more of churning out glittering and flattering oil portraits for the rich, the kind that has made him a museum staple ever since. Not that he could deign to abandon proper design principles in favor of a budding Modernism, but still. And so in 1907, at age fifty-two and at the height of his career, he all but quit. So what happened? Demand only grew, and more than seven hundred and fifty charcoal portraits from his hand survive (with another of his works on paper in the Eveillard gift to the Frick, a fine complement to the Eveillard gift of drawings to the Morgan).

Now roughly fifty come to the Morgan, and you can see right away the source of his appeal. Sargent captures not just a likeness, but a character and a style—and he made little distinction between the two. After all, he gave up self-portraits because they bear the burden of a revelation. His pair at the Morgan Library studiously avoids self-expression, and he does not look in the least bored. With others, he could leave part of a sheet polished, part unfinished, and only the haziest and most irregular borders between the parts. They convey instantly the values of surface, spontaneity, and a well-rehearsed role.

You can see, too, why he chose charcoal. Even his most finely executed oils can seem as instantaneous as the fall of light on pale skin and plush clothing. They account for his having had at least five East Coast museum exhibitions in just the millennium—of family and friends, a family portrait, children, watercolors, and landscapes. Charcoal allows him to cover a sheet more quickly than graphite and pen, but also more precisely than washes. He could sharpen it for fine line or use a coarse end for a portrait's slashing, often brittle beginnings. In an early example, from 1897, the prime minister's wife looks just to the left while a thick line or two darts up and to the right.

She belongs to a group that styled itself "the Souls"—political conservatives out to distinguish themselves from a lazy and effete aristocracy. Sargent's own circle ran more to the theater and music that they cultivated and the liberalism that they despised. He sketched writers, thinkers, and social reformers, including (yes) the author of a treatise on good design, the first woman member of Parliament, and a (white) founder of the NAACP. All show their flair. Henry James looks half his age (far younger, in fact, than in the oil, seen here, that it soon became), while actors look as artfully composed as in professional photo shoots today. The rest of life takes place only off-stage, even World War I, which returned Sargent to the United States.

He returned, too, as old-world wealth was giving way to new money back home. His conflicted allegiances sound all too familiar now, as museums struggle with their dependencies on patrons and donors—the kind that drove half a dozen artists to threaten to quit the 2019 Whitney Biennial. For Sargent, though, the conflicts and contradictions cut all the closer to his identity and his art. Even his boredom sounds like an aristocratic pose. "He was a very quick worker," said one sitter. And a quick and forgiving judge as well.

He runs to parallel strokes, often crossed by further parallels, with the lightest of traces at the end. These may create dark clothing or a backdrop curtain, so that a head seems to rise up as if of itself. Lips and facial hair take on a life of their own, while older and wiser eyes look away. Yet Sargent paid a price for the limited freedom of portraits in charcoal. You may remember their skill, but you may not remember individual portraits. You may not remember in contrast the real name of Madame X, but you will never forget her portrait in oil, and you will never be bored.

jhaber@haberarts.com

Edouard Manet in the Norton Simon Museum ran at The Frick Collection through January 5, 2020, John Singer Sargent at The Morgan Library through January 12.