March 11-17, 2004
art
Old Manet and the Sea
 Edouard Manet, The Steamboat, Seascape with Porpoises (c. 1864), 31 7/8 inches by 39 3/8 inches, oil on canvas.  |
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A major exhibit places Manet's marine paintings -- turbulent, dramatic studies in color and light -- in the context of his peers and proteges.
This exhibition highlights the work of one artist (Manet) concerning one theme (the sea) over a 17-year period. The show also offers a context for this work by providing examples of paintings that may have inspired Manet, related work by his peers and work by younger artists whom he might have inspired. Manet's work is installed on dark-gray panels down the center of the group of galleries, while the contextual works are hung to the side on pearl-gray panels. Wonderful little groups of paintings by Whistler, Morisot, Monet and many others line the edges of the rooms, like branches of the family tree that lead off in different directions. It's a really great way to look at art.
It's fascinating that Edouard Manet (1832-1883), the accomplished and highly regarded proto-Modernist painter of sophisticated nudes and genteel scenes of urban life, turned his attention to painting marine scenes that were provincial and, by the 1860s, old-fashioned. Perhaps his regular trips to the Louvre to examine favorite marine paintings encouraged him to try his hand at them himself. A 17th-century painting included in the show, Two Dutch Vessels Close-Hauled in a Strong Breeze, by Willem van de Velde the Younger, is similar to the works that may have inspired him to paint his first real marine painting, Battle of the "Kearsarge" and the "Alabama" in 1864. It documents an American Civil War battle off the coast of France and is a masterful work in blue-green, gray and black, showing a large expanse of undulating water, battling ships shrouded in smoke and a boat filled with French sightseers. Manet jumped in with both feet and by the end of his life completed more than 40 marine paintings, plus drawings and watercolor studies.
Another reason Manet took up marine painting might have been his family vacations every year at the seashore. Like many artists, Manet was always on duty as an artist, even while vacationing. The show contains a number of studies and sketches made over the years at the beach, including a newly discovered sketchbook made in 1898. Manet had been interested in observing social conventions and customs in Paris, and in these paintings he turned his attention to the social life of vacationing beachgoers, sailors and fishermen -- shown against the backdrop of something bigger. Many paintings, such as Out On the Beach -- Suzanne and Eugene Manet at Berck (1873), show the artist's family relaxing with the sea in the background. There's a glowing yellow expanse of sand framing these fully and fashionably dressed Parisians. Manet's vision of the sea combines the distanced outlook of an outsider with relaxed pleasures of a vacationer, and he always manages to find an innate theatricality in the arrangement of figures on a beach or boats in a harbor.
Manet was also strongly attracted to the unique pictorial opportunities offered by marine themes: the continuous plane of the sea, the depth, reflections, textures, color and light. His paintings always have the perfect balance of a carefully constructed compositional framework and a surface of animated, juicy brushstrokes. Moonlight, Bologne (1868), for example, is a wonderfully harmonic study in gray, blue and black. Bright bits of searing-white light reflected on the water appear between dark silhouettes of figures and boats. The negative space eats into the figures and objects just a little, creating bright, gemlike shapes. As he developed the marine theme over the 17 years that he worked with it, his painting technique found increasing freedom. In Boats at Low Tide on the Bay at Arcachon (1871), Manet subtly merges together the hazy, pale-yellow sky, ground and water into one solidly cast form, pierced with dark angular boats.
Throughout his life, Manet became more interested in exploring the symbolism of the sea. He studied the Romantic vision of the sea, expressed in the work of Gericault, Delacroix, Hugo and Baudelaire, as an interior landscape filled with turmoil, action, tranquility. In one of his last major works, The Escape of Rochefort (1880-81), he drew on the Romantic spirit, but explored this current event with a Modernist approach. It was painted 10 years after the controversial journalist Henri Rochefort escaped from prison, when he returned exonerated to France. Rochefort looks out of his boat -- with an expression of fear, longing and fortitude -- enclosed in an immense wall of water made of stabbing and looping brushstrokes of rich, blue-green hues, while a brushy ribbon of pink froth connects the protagonist to the viewer. Manet finds a deeper symbolism of death and escape in this topical subject, and then disengages from the subject entirely as he revels with painterly exuberance in the visual and metaphoric splendor of the sea.
This exhibition presents a new dimension of Edouard Manet to consider in depth and, if you didn't know before you went in, you'll soon see why he was one of the most accomplished painters of all time. This trip to the sea with Manet and friends is pure pleasure.
Manet and the Sea
Through May 31, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 26th St. and The Parkway, 215-763-8100
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