Early Chapters Discussion: Boycotting the Salon

[Jessica]

Meissonier boycotted the 1863 Salon because of the new regulations introduced by the Comte de Nieuwerkerke. What do you think the true nature of his objection was? Was he being altruistic of merely looking out for his own interests?

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[Mariposa]

Meissonier boycotted the Salon because the rules had changed and under the new rules he would only be allowed to show three paintings every two years. In previous years he had shown as many as nine paintings. Although his boycott was motivated by self-interest, I admired him. Manet signed and delivered the letter of protest, but when it was declined, he continued to work to see his art accepted. He did not boycott the Salon. Both Manet and Meissonier were motivated by self-interest in their protest against the rules change, but only Meissonier remained true to his position. Of course, it was easier for Meissonier to boycott the Salon since he was doing so well financially. Manet, on the other hand, needed to exhibit there.

Another point, off topic a bit. I was fascinated by the discussion of how the artists made their paint. How, for example, the change from using linseed oil to poppy oil made it more difficult to disguise brushstrokes. I could go on and repeat the entire section to elaborate on other changes Manet made--all so interesting...

Now we go into art stores and buy ready made tubes of oil. That ceases to differentiate artists on the basis of the chemistry of the paint. I remember seeing an exhibit in Washington DC recently where they did some analyses of the composition of the paint and in one case, bits of glass was ground into the paint. I wish I could remember why or who the artist was...but it was so interesting.

Do any artists today make their paint?

In Tracy Chevalier's The Girl with the Pearl Earring, there is a section where the girl learns how to make paint for Vermeer. How has this loss of the art of making paint affected the works produced today? Or again, is the art lost?

Lizabeth

[ross_king]

The paint with glass in it was known (in Italy at least) as smaltino. Its manufacture was quite a technical process, which in the Italian Renaissance was usually performed by monks. Cobalt ore would be roasted in a furnace and then added to molten glass to color it blue. When the glass crystallized, it would be crushed into a powder. The result was a nice blue pigment. Under magnification, you can see (as Lizbeth notes) air bubbles and also splinters of glass. Michelangelo used smaltino in his fresco in the Sistine Chapel.

There's a really interesting relationship between materials and the art produced ...

Tubes of ready-made paint only appeared in the 1820s. There was an argument in the 19th century that this invention made it so that “anyone” could become a painter, the craftsmanship went out of art, and therefore standards declined. However, Michelangelo - to go back to him - didn’t really know how to prepare pigments when he began work in the Sistine Chapel. He would have bought smaltino from the monks and had his assistants grind it to the right consistency. And it’s hard to argue with his results.

An even more interesting development in the 19th century was the advance in chemical engineering that produced many new (and bright) pigments. By the middle of the 19th century, painters had a far bigger repertoire of pigments than those a century before - but few of them chose to use them. Color was simply not considered important to a painting. In the book I quote the collector who said to John Constable, the English painter: “A good picture, like a good fiddle, should be brown.” A “good painting” was meant to blend in modestly with the antiques in your house, I suppose.

Interestingly, Claude Monet was one of the first people to really use the new pigments, such as chromium oxide green and cobalt violet. So Impressionism, with its bright colors, is in some ways a result of industrial technology.

[Jessica]

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dianearbus wrote: Meissonier boycotted the Salon because the rules had changed and under the new rules he would only be allowed to show three paintings every two years. In previous years he had shown as many as nine paintings. Although his boycott was motivated by self-interest, I admired him. Manet signed and delivered the letter of protest, but when it was declined, he continued to work to see his art accepted. He did not boycott the Salon. Both Manet and Meissonier were motivated by self-interest in their protest against the rules change, but only Meissonier remained true to his position. Of course, it was easier for Meissonier to boycott the Salon since he was doing so well financially. Manet, on the other hand, needed to exhibit there.

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I agree with all of this. And I wonder -- since Meissonier was so popular, maybe he felt he didn't need the Salon -- the establishment's approval -- to maintain his status? That his genius exceeded even them.

Which kind of leads me to my next thought. In Chapter 7, there's a passage about the mannered way paintings rejected by the Salon were handled. They "...were carried away ("like corpses after a battle," as a commentator put it) by white-coated attendants and then -- most humiliatingly -- stamped on the back with a red R that stood for refuse: "rejected." This symbol was the kiss of death to a work, not only ruling it out of the Salon, but also hampering any chance of it selling to a private buyer."

I imagine that today, a Manet, Money, Cezanne, or Renoir would fetch an even higher price at an auction if they had one of the tell-tale red stamps... Ross, do you know if this has ever been the case?

Jessica
Book Club Editor

[ross_king]

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Jessica wrote:

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I imagine that today, a Manet, Money, Cezanne, or Renoir would fetch an even higher price at an auction if they had one of the tell-tale red stamps... Ross, do you know if this has ever been the case?

Jessica
Book Club Editor

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I’ve never come across a case of a painting being sold with the red R - the “scarlet letter” - stamped on the back; but I’m sure Jessica’s right that today a Monet, Manet or Cézanne would sell for even more if it had that little detail. Why such paintings are extremely scarce is that if your work was rejected from the Salon and stamped with an R, you would generally re-line the canvas in order to conceal this "mark of shame": it would be unsellable otherwise. In the 1860s, no one wanted to buy a “rejected” painting.

Most rejected paintings simply didn’t survive. Artists usually repainted the canvas with a coat of white, then started another work on top. Sometimes they even cut up the canvas, which is what Manet did with one of his works in 1864 even though it had been accepted at the Salon: as I describe in Chapter 13, the bad reviews of the painting (Incident in a Bull Ring) made him take his scissors to it. Luckily for us, he restrained himself a year earlier with Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe and a year later with Olympia.

[Jessica]

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ross_king wrote: Most rejected paintings simply didn’t survive. Artists usually repainted the canvas with a coat of white, then started another work on top. Sometimes they even cut up the canvas, which is what Manet did with one of his works in 1864 even though it had been accepted at the Salon: as I describe in Chapter 13, the bad reviews of the painting (Incident in a Bull Ring) made him take his scissors to it. Luckily for us, he restrained himself a year earlier with Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe and a year later with Olympia.

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Lucky for us, indeed! Knowing this, I cringe at how many paintings -- ones that we might now consider masterpieces -- may have been destroyed.

And as I was reading all about the 'Incident in a Bull Ring' controversy, I tried desparately to find it online ... and then the next day got to the part in the book where Manet ripped it to shreds. ("Well thanks a lot, Manet!" I thought...)

Don't we wish we could go back in time and tell guys like Monet and Cezanne how valuable their works are today? I bet they'd be pleased to know that the underdogs won in the long run (or would they only be more frustrated?)...

Jessica
Book Club Editor

[Mariposa]

Miscellaneous late night disconnected comments:

I couldn't find "Return from the Conference" by Courbet anywhere on online.
Anyone find it, please send me the link. I want to see if it still seems shocking today.

Courbet's "Woman with a Parrot" is one of my favorite artworks. .I love love love her hair...

I swear I saw Whistler's "The White Girl" at an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art recently. Interestingly, I did not notice the bear rug. When I found it online (I needed to see it in color), I was amused by the rug. Something about this woman all in white standing on a rug with the face of a dead bear staring out at the viewer. Any significance there?

Lead in paint...Vincent van Gogh poisoned by lead paint? I am not sure I read that before. Could that have contributed to his erratic behavior?

I read about the three vertabrae too many in "Grande Odalisque" (actually I think the author said two more) in Blue Arabesque by Patricia Hampl. The painting is on the cover of the hardcover edition. I guess you do what you have to do to get a certain effect.

In Le Bain, it was interesting to discover that the public was more shocked by the clothing the men were wearing than the nudity of the woman. Posing one naked woman with two clothed males even today is a juxtaposition that could create questions about what was going on. Also it takes the viewer aback because the woman is staring right out of the painting.

On Cabanel's The Birth of Venus---please... she is totally sensual...Just look at that pose...It is no wonder that Louis-Napoleon bought the painting. I like that phrase "Cabanel's aphrodisiac style..."

Lizabeth

[ross_king]

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dianearbus wrote:
I couldn't find "Return from the Conference" by Courbet anywhere on online.
Anyone find it, please send me the link. I want to see if it still seems shocking today.

Lizabeth

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Return from the Conference is no more, which is why it’s not available on-line. There is, however, a black-and-white image of it in James H. Rubin’s excellent book on Courbet (published by Phaidon). Rubin reports that “long after Courbet’s death, the painting was purchased by devout Catholics who destroyed it” (p. 193). Rubin’s reproduction is credited as coming from the Musée Courbet in Ornans, but I’ve been unable to find a copy of it on their website: http://www.musee-courbet.com

The reproduction shows seven tipsy priests staggering along a country road, watched by a couple of laughing peasants. There’s no doubt Courbet was being deliberately provocative: he took pride (like Baudelaire) in his notoriety. Manet, however, didn’t go out to shock and offend, and he seems to have been genuinely puzzled and dismayed when he drew mockery from the public and attacks from the critics.

I found Courbet a fascinating figure. I didn’t know too much about him before I started work on the book, but I read all of his letters (a number of which I quote), which allowed me to get to know him a lot better. (He was a very witty letter-writer, so reading his letters was a real pleasure.) Despite all of his artistic and political bragging and posturing, at bottom he was just a big softie who wanted his father to think his boy Gustave had done well.

[ross_king]

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dianearbus wrote:
I read about the three vertabrae too many in "Grande Odalisque" (actually I think the author said two more) in Blue Arabesque by Patricia Hampl. The painting is on the cover of the hardcover edition. I guess you do what you have to do to get a certain effect.



Lizabeth

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I’ve read contradictory reports of whether it’s two or three surplus vertebrae. Kenneth Clark writes in The Nude (p. 145) that the critics complained she had two vertebrae too many, but in The Romantic Rebellion (p. 119) he says three. The interesting thing about the criticism is that a) the art critics in those days counted the vertebrae, and b) they knew exactly how many vertebrae a woman should have! I wonder how many art critics today are so familiar with skeletal anatomy? Anyway, it shows how seriously art was taken in the 19th century. An image of the Grande Odalisque (in case anyone wants to count vertebrae) can be found at:

http://www.artchive.com/artchive/I/ingres/ingres_grand_odalisque.jpg.html

Note how different Ingres' elegant courtesan is from Manet's Olympia.

[ross_king]

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dianearbus wrote:
Vincent van Gogh poisoned by lead paint? I am not sure I read that before. Could that have contributed to his erratic behavior?
Lizabeth

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Apparently lead poisoning can cause irritability and aggressive behavior, so maybe at least some of Vincent's problems were related to his pigments. I’ve always been fascinated by the yellows that he uses: he was clearly color-blind in some way that made him see white as yellow. For example, any of his paintings with the French flag depict it as red, yellow and blue. I’m not sure what medical condition would cause that, but it obviously gave him a distinctive way of seeing the world. The answer to the question might lie in a book that’s been on my reading list for the past few months, Martin Gayford’s The Yellow House, which is about Gauguin and Van Gogh’s nine weeks together in Arles.

The other substance that wreaked havoc with the mental health of painters and poets in 19th-century France was, of course, absinthe. Reading newspaper reports from the period I was surprised to see how many crimes and suicides were attributed by the authorities (rightly or wrongly) to absinthe-induced insanity.