In front of Manet’s impudent Nana, Bertall was offended by the aplomb of a
such provocation: What does this horrible woman who,
towards the public, pulls its blue stockings above which are draped
sordid linens and that overcomes a corset holding with difficulty a throat
ugly, whose crooked and disgusting folds shamelessly overflow from
spectator side?” I don’t know if the story is unfair, but of Bertall,
He was less inventive than Gavarni and Daumier.
From Manet, we will always have this “provoc blue” in
Compositions all the more disturbing as restraint is required.
After Courbet, Edouard Manet provoked aesthetic quarrels in
breaking the agreed boundaries of representation. Manet accused
of indecency draws upon him all anathemas; painting is under his
a place of rupture and rebirth, and its modernity the crucible of
scandal. Scandal assumed however, since the Emperor authorized in
1863 the Salon des Refusés, following a paradox that characterizes the period
marked by the speed of change and the desire to preserve
appearances. And Manet, on the other hand, collected the refusals
famous.
Exposing Manet is repeating the gesture of modernity. A forgotten gesture, both
it will have been revolutionary, so much it will have struck the world of
images. I think of Diderot’s pages in Le Neveu de Rameau, on the
how Italian musical modernity had to prevail over
the impaled mythologies of French lyric art: The foreign god
place humbly on the altar next to the idol of the land; little by little there is
strengthened; one fine day he pushes his comrade from the elbow, and patatras! there you are
the idol below." Other times, other stakes: but there is some
thing of this in the way that the painting of the Manet Refused
to easily explode, for posterity, what remained of the academic idol.
Represent the real without the mediation of myth or history, discard
formulas from the past: the case is not simple when you have
Master Thomas Couture, to whom the young Manet stands up to by
its codes, as it will divert the Champêtre Concert of Titian with its
Lunch on the grass. Farewell to the Arcadian landscapes, petri academicism
of ancient fascination, the erotic hypocrisy of the Second Empire, the
gladiator fights in Gérôme and the outdated pump. Far from the Salon
Official, Manet cares about the poor, the beautiful gypsies at the
cigarettes, prostitutes, waitresses who wipe the glasses of the
Absinthe drinker at the bottom of the café, in a bar at Folies-Bergères.
Berthe Morisot, Victorine Meurend, model of Olympia, painting of which we
recognizes the dual inspiration of La Maja desnuda de Goya and La
Venus of Urbino of Titian, animate a work where the feminine transgresses
standards of the well-thinking society. Goya again, whose painter
is also inspired to depict the tragic end of the adventures
in Maximilian’s execution.
Like all great aesthetic gestures, that of Manet has imposed itself
as such evidence in the history of our perceptions that we in
have lost the trace. We still have the demonized foam of the work
art at the time of its mechanical reproduction: posters and maps
postal – to the delight of the recipes of the
Musée d'Orsay -, covers of classical literature in
pocket collections – which has not associated, in its readings
from a novel by Zola to a painting by Manet?
Behind the banalized iconography of reproductions, symptoms
paradoxical of supreme notoriety, there is also a world of gaiters
white and bright colors, exuberant costumes, memory
visual of a time when Paris dictated its law on the canons of fashion,
to the United States. I take this opportunity to salute the Bank of America-
Merrill Lynch who contributed greatly, through the generosity of his
to make this exhibition possible, where we find many
works exhibited in the permanent collections of the most prestigious
American museums: these Franco-American partnerships were
particularly dear to Françoise Cachin, who had invested a lot of
his time.
But I come back, after this page of advertising, to the visual memories
of this imperial France, in which Manet thus occupies a place
choice, in striking contrast, for example, with black & white
photos of Nadar. This in-between makes of technical modernity, of a
Racing Story, Color and Black & White, has aired in all
our popular culture: it is a bit the gap that can be found between
the extravagant outfits of James West and Artemus Gordon who
cross the Mysteries of the West in their very second armored car
Empire, where there are bright colours, purple vests and green
malachite, and Tardi’s pencil in The Cry of the People, which revives
black and white, in the disoriented Paris of the Commune, the extravagance of
The scoundrel in the infamous cabarets.
All this is well known, and this exhibition offers us the rare pleasure,
voluptuous and disturbing, of a magnificent déjà vu. But the merit of
this exhibition is also to highlight a period less
known to Manet, his late work, far from the scoundrel and closer to
Mallarmé, who hailed in the 1870s Manet a simplified art made
ointments and colours”, but “whose word is still obscure”. A
painter whose Françoise Cachin very correctly identified the fact that he
was neither the apostle of a pure painting to which the greatest writers
wanted to identify him, nor the only carrier of a social painting.
This second monograph Edouard Manet, under the commission
Stéphane Guégan, is orphaned by a very large figure of the
museums of France and the history of art - I mean, you will have it
from the late Françoise Cachin, who was entrusted with the reins
exhibition. Echoing the first retrospective
that she dedicated to Manet in 1983,
inauguration, and in this place she directed, to pay tribute to the memory
a committed Conservative, who has consistently
knowledge of French artists of the 19th century, including
(Manet, Seurat, Gauguin) are still references today
obligated.
With an exemplary career, director of museums in France in 1994
In 2001, Françoise Cachin deeply reshaped the landscape
Parisian and national museums, by endowing the high places of the
French heritage of international stature by ambitious
and its unparalleled policy action
museum. We also owe it to him to be at the origin of the coming to Paris
one of the most beautiful collections of impressionist, post-impressionist art
and modern of the early twentieth century, the very famous, but
very secret Barnes collection.
It is to her too that we owe the relaunch of research and
the opening of public debate on the tables resulting from the dispossession of the
war, but also to have obtained the gift of the collection
Bonnard, Cézanne and Vuillard by Philippe Meyer, since
exhibited at the Musée d'Orsay.
I also pay tribute to his commitment to the service of
development of regional museums and their links with museums
Paris. Indeed, it has contributed greatly to the implementation of the
a national museum vision, including participation in
the drafting of the law on museums in France.
Françoise Cachin, in expressing her convictions, has not always
received the understanding and recognition it deserved.
Open today this magnificent exhibition, in this place that it will have
designed and created, this superb station whose painter Edouard Detaille wrote
in 1900 in a very prophetic way that it looked like a palace of
Beaux-Arts», is a unique opportunity to pay tribute to the director
of the museums of France which will have so marked with its imprint the world
of our memories – the one with the beautiful heritage name.
Thank you.
Discours
Address given by Frédéric Mitterrand on the occasion of the inauguration of the exhibition «Edouard MANET, Inventor of the Modern»
Mr President of the Musée d'Orsay, dear Guy Cogeval,Mr Director General of Heritage, dear Philippe Bélaval,Dear Georges Liébert,Ladies and Gentlemen,Dear Friends,
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