October 23, 2023 Issue

Jackson Arn, in his “The French Connection,” in this week’s issue, says of Édouard Manet’s Olympia (1863-65), “You can’t really appreciate Olympia unless you feel the rude slap of its shortcomings.” I suppose that’s one way of looking at it. Peter Schjeldahl had a more memorable response:

Here's a pop quiz: in Olympia, how many things is the model, Victorine Meurent, wearing? Time’s up. Six: a high-heeled slipper (its mate has come off), a ribbon choker with a pearl attached, a pair of earrings, a bracelet with another dangling jewel, and a flower, perhaps a hibiscus, in her hair. Every item renders her more naked, of course, as do the fully clothed black maid proffering a gorgeous bouquet, the bristling black cat, and the sumptuous topography of fringed coverlet, yielding pillows, and wrinkled sheets. Without all those objects, the painting would be a nude. With them, it’s a general-alarm fire.

I love that passage. It’s from Schjeldahl’s great “The Urbane Innocent” (The New Yorker, November 20, 2000). 

Édouard Manet, Olympia (1863-65)

Top Ten Exhibition Reviews: #2 Peter Schjeldahl's “Édouard Manet”

Édouard Manet, Asparagus (1880) 

Peter Schjeldahl is my hero. Anyone who follows this blog knows that. Why do I like him so much? I think the answer is that he’s developed a style – an unmistakable, original, brilliant, personal style. The challenge is to pick a piece that fully expresses that style. For me, the quintessential Schjeldahl piece is “Édouard Manet,” which originally appeared in the November 20, 2000, New Yorker under the title “The Urbane Innocent,” and is included in his wonderful 2008 collection Let’s See. It’s a review of the Musée d’Orsay’s 2000 exhibition Manet: The Still Life Paintings. Here’s a sample:

Many people regard Manet as ironic. I don’t. I think he is witty and profound, often simultaneously. Consider two paintings of asparagus, both from 1880. The first one shows a bundle of pale, tender stalks on a bed of greens on a marble table. It was bought by a collector who insisted on paying a thousand francs instead of the eight hundred that Manet had asked. The second painting, of a single stalk perched on the table’s edge, arrived at the collector’s door with a note: “There was one missing from your bunch.” This little work, the payoff of a wispy jest, happens to be one of the most magical paintings in existence. It concentrates sensual arousal in a manner that verges on the sexual but remains in the realm of food and furniture. Its fullness of life suggests a thought: Manet ate the asparagus after he painted it. Painting and eating, art and sociability, loving and liking all flow together – even in a glance at a stray vegetable. Only Manet could have made such a picture.

Concentration of “sensual arousal” is a hallmark of Schjeldahl’s style, too. Consider his description of Manet’s floral paintings:

But his bouquets are substantial presences in penetrable space. “I would like to paint them all,” Manet said of flowers. So he did. Every blossom feels at once unique and suffused with the memories of a million kin. When a bright-yellow petal curls down around a salmon-colored shadow, it’s as if a bard of roses were singing a secret of the tribe. The glass vases abolish mystery. We observe the sustenance of cut stems, crazed by refractions through the wettest water you’ve ever seen. Each of Manet’s paintings raises its subject into a present time that forgets the past and ignores the future. Each is a lesson about dying: don’t. Only be alive.

That “When a bright-yellow petal curls down around a salmon-colored shadow, it’s as if a bard of roses were singing a secret of the tribe” is exquisite! The whole piece is exquisite. And the ardency of its message is unforgettable: Only be alive.