The coupling of the
legendary artistic genius and his brazen muse became a stereotype
long before art became a commodity among the bourgeoisie. Most
Renaissance artists were driven inventors and rarely had time for
conventional propriety. And in those days, there was no Media to tattle on a celebrity...
Art in “Western”
culture has always been a pissing match, with each artist having to
outdo the other. The egos involved, the controversies, the gossip and
mischief of the competing collectors and institutions made an
intoxicating and sometimes toxic brew which somehow inspired
creativity and patronage, for whatever reasons. Whispers and public
assumptions and outright lies about artists and their private lives
fueled the fires of art commerce, and without them artists would have
starved even worse. Art is just an expression of the Philosophy of the Age... or so I was taught in Art School. And so every artist's muse is just the embodiment of his philosophy...
There is no way to gauge the importance of the
artist's muse, but we can assume from the paintings and the histories
cherished in art schools that they became the soul of most galleries
and every art museum.
Every artist has to have a
passion for something which drives him... to create, to perfect his
craft, to endure the financial chuck holes in the art market, and for
many artists that essential quest was... women. Mary the Mother of
Jesus may have been the first muse, quickly followed by the Greek
goddesses. It went rogue from there, until prostitutes and courtesans
dominated the excitement in European studios. And that is where we
will start this snipit of art trivia.
Rembrandt was perhaps the
most ribald of the Dutch painters, who took his cue from the
non-conformists like Rubens and the risque Dutch school. Rubens
painted the most fleshly of females in wild sexually-charged
situations. If Rembrandt was to compete, he had to eventually use
female models and paint them without shame. His wealthy blond muse
Saskia, introduced through his art dealer, modeled regularly for him
and then became his wife. This somewhat legitimized his untold hours
devoted to studying and illustrating her form. He painted her as a
man infatuated, if not madly in love with her countenance. Through
his paintings she became an infamous woman in Holland... for a time.
But Saskia became fatally ill after their fourth child was born, and
Rembrandt began to take unusual risks during her illness by painting
Geertje Dircx, his child's wet nurse, in the nude. After Saskia
passed away, and he refused to marry Geertje after an extended love
affair, she sued him for breach of promise- and won. The
court-mandated alimony he owed her was negated however when he proved
that she had stolen and hocked some of Saskia's jewelry. She was
committed to an asylum, for twelve years, ending his first scandalous
affair, and beginning the much celebrated ill-fated artist's muse
stereotype.
Not discouraged, Rembrandt
took another concubine, Hendrickje, who was a true “bohemian,”
satisfied to cohabitate with him without the benefits of marriage.
She became pregnant, and after she was interrogated by church
authorities in 1654, Rembrandt was banned from the sacraments of the
church for living in sin.
Later poor maligned
Geertje was released from the asylum and still determined, sued
Rembrandt for false imprisonment. It became obvious after Rembrandt
took in Hendrickje, that it was nothing personal, but he would not,
could not marry anyone under any circumstances. His first wife, now
deceased, had left him as trustee of her wealth, and well fixed, he was
able to support himself and his son nicely, but his financial support
was only made available to him as long as he remained single. To
avoid losing Saskia's inheritance, he could not marry again, but
after his son came of age, he still eventually went bankrupt.
To protect Rembrandt from
his debtors, Hendrickje opened a gallery and managed his art career,
making him a sequestered laborer and his concubine his veritable
overseer... until she was killed by the plague in 1663. Scandalized,
sued and banished by society, Rembrandt spent his last days
impoverished and humiliated.
This mess was a warning
for all artists of the future, and it was absolutely ignored. The
demand for nudes in art made models a necessity, and the temptations
and improprieties which came with them became an accepted part of the
business. By the time these next models came on the art scene, hardly
an eyebrow was raised...
The star of the blockbuster play Mazeppa, Adah Menken, the
Victorian version of Madonna, had
joined an elite bohemian family of emerging artists and intellectuals
who networked between New York and London and Paris and became the
European's favorite American pet. In England she was escorted in the
markets by Dante Rossetti, James McNeill
Whistler and others who were soon to become
famous in their own right. Rossetti, a writer and painter, respected
her poetry, and along with his brother was somewhat responsible for
establishing its status and publishing her abroad.
Rossetti
also endorsed and promoted the writings of her mentor, Walt Whitman.
No doubt the fellow
American, James Whistler welcomed Adah as a ready associate, and it
would not have been absurd for him to have asked her to model for him
during that time. After all, she had no modesty... and she was
considered to be very attractive.
My tintype of Adah Menken
Charles Howell,
a friend of the artists and a natural-born huckster, connected Adah
with the rising star in British Literature, Algernon Swinburne. Soon
Adah saw in Swinburne the talent necessary to polish her poetry and
to complete her autobiography, something even Mark Twain had declined to do. What evolved was an amazing flow of
synergy, where each person freely and shamelessly used the other. The
greatest need for all of these creative types was inspiration. Each
gave what she or he had to enable the other. For artists, nothing
could be more inspiring than a beautiful model. A muse. Since many models
ended up being the artist's lovers... well you can imagine. And no
one gave more inspiration than Adah.
For comparison... Mine (center) must have been made
fairly early, when she was in Texas or Ohio
Beautiful Rosa
Corder, a fledgling artist and Charles
Howell's girl friend, (and a prolific forger of Rossettis!) did a
little modeling as well. Later she would move back to the U.S. and
model for James Whistler after Howell was found murdered in a New
York gutter. This was a fast crowd... as in "two kinds... the quick and the dead."
It
has never been suggested before... but I believe
Adah Menken not only ran with a the fast crowd, and thrilled the masses and stimulated British writers, but may well have
modeled for artists while in Europe. All while acting as
a Confederate agent. She had stormed European shores in 1864,
fleeing the devastating results of the South's War of Secession, and
any appearance of complicity she may have had in the Confederate
cause. She needed money and friends, and found a ready home with the
Pre-Rafaelites and other British liberals. There was a yet undefined
affinity between the Southern “Cause” and some British subjects.
Certainly Confederate ships were being built in British shipyards
when Adah arrived, and she would have known about them, through her Confederate spy network.
A mischievous provocateur, Menken used her trade
as a cover for her rebellious Southern leanings.
Dr. William Whistler.
In fact, James Whistler's brother was a trusted Confederate
officer, soon to be sent to England with cash to arrange financing for the ships
under construction. Adah's plan may well have been to supplement the
“Cause” with funds she raised in Europe, just like she had done with
her tour through California and the west. Meanwhile she had a wild
time. In fact it would be a surprise if she had not posed for some of
these lusty, counter-cultural creatives. It makes perfect sense, and I
believe my artist's eye has found perfect proof.
It is known that between
her flamboyant affairs with British men of literature, Adah frolicked
off to France with Gustave Courbet at one point. Perhaps one of the
British artists had been doing too much bragging about their secret mother lode of inspiration, the American sensation who appeared to ride a horse on
stage buck-naked... and Courbet in typical style seized that which
he- and Art- and all bohemian/socialist/humanist culture must have.
Whatever the case, there are several paintings done by Courbet which
suggest that Adah Menken left a silent yet groundbreaking visual
legacy in French art.
Gustave Courbet was a sort
of eccentric uncle to the Impressionists. He was undoubtedly the most
adventuresome of the French artists, unafraid of breaking conventions
or offending the masses, and even eager to do so. And who else to
recruit to pose in his daring compositions, than the most daring
entertainer of his time? Here is uncanny visual evidence that Menken
left a lasting legacy beyond her tacky skits in Europe. As many as FIVE paintings, all by Gustave Courbet, and one perhaps his most famous,
suggest that Adah Menken was front and center for at least a short
time in his Paris studio... a place fitting her reputation, where art featuring the most
unconventional and risque subjects was being created: The equivalent to, or even superseding her sensational displays on stage, in oils on
canvas... and even beyond, on the Internet today!
Gustave
Courbet: Woman With A Parrot- 1866. Through the help of American artist Mary Cassatt, this painting ended up in Louisine Havemeyer's famous art collection, now housed at the MET.
Please forgive the intrusions on
Courbet's works... but this was the best way to show Adah Menken's
facial characteristics juxtaposed against Courbet's female figures. It has
always been suggested that these works were inspired by the model
Joanna Hiffernan. It had to be somebody, to feed the European rumor
mills...
Joanna Hiffernan as Whistler saw her, on the left.
As Courbet supposedly saw her, bottom center.
Photos of Menken above and right.
Sorry,
but auburn-haired Joanna Hiffernan was slender and long faced, with a neck like a gazelle, and too petite and pretty to be the nude above: the
supposed portrait of her at the bottom (in pic above) by Courbet suggests that she had a shorter neck,
a small forehead, and sunken, down-slanted eyes. All physical contradictions to Whistler's Jo. Courbet's Jo has somewhat thin misfitting
lips, Whistler's has extremely full lips. All of these inconsistencies lead to my doubts, and then the face of Menken compared to several of Courbet's subjects truly rings a bell.
I suggest
that Courbet's redhead above was at best an amalgamation... not completely a painting of Hiffernan,
who was a sort of scapegoat for Courbet's mixed bag of muses, and the painting was actually just a bad portrait
of... Adah Menken. Compare the same likeness below, with several Courbet studies.
It seems what Jo Hiffernan contributed most to Courbet's female subjects was her hair! Being Whistler's former flame and model, she might well have known Adah, and no doubt did model for Courbet, perhaps in "Origin of the
World," where he cut off her head, showing only her torso... in the most "unlady-like" portrait done in French history. You will have to search that one on the Internet yourself... And she may have been
featured in “Sleep” (1866), a highly suggestive work that may
have been the first nude lesbian love scene, which featured her and
someone else...
Menken assumes a familiar pose.
A
black haired, shameless fleshpot, famous for posing in dreamy,
horizontal ecstasy...
Adah
may have starred in Courbet's "Sleep" as well. Most researchers believe Adah was
at least bi-sexual, from the content of her private correspondence.
If Courbet was painting such subjects, were homosexuality and
bisexuality not becoming a hot topic among these European elites?
Is it possible that Adah Menken, the seemingly amoral entertainer,
was also at the vanguard of bohemian culture and its various
expressions?
This could inspire a new, totally different interpretation of "Sleep," Courbet's historic flirtation with pornography. This will get deep, but it may be that this suggestive figural had less to do with lesbianism, and was more an edgy artistic exploration into the sub-conscious. My study of Menken and this painting have come together into one theory, that Adah Menken, artist, singer, equestrian, actress and poet, was on a bizarre crusade to define modern womanhood, and hopefully herself in the process. Only a few people close to her knew that she was not only bi-religious (Christian and Jewish) and bi-sexual, but bi-racial. A dark-eyed New Orleans "Quadroon," Adah had used toxic lead-based pigments to lighten her skin for years. Like the painting, there was a light Adah and a dark Adah... She always wore wigs to appear as a blond or brunette, but her hair was naturally almost black, and extremely curly. She had spread so many lies about her origins and her life story that nobody really knew her very well. She was, as I think this painting by Courbet so tenderly illustrated, living the lives of two distinct people.
Menken was the premier star of her day, and Courbet considered himself her equal in art. As they grew close, and talked, I have no doubt that at some point Courbet envisioned the impossible: A portrait of Menken's inner dilemma and the simple complexity of it; a woman playing many roles, who stepped off of the stage to be the International star, which was just a front for a woman of color, passing for white, whose mother had been a slave. It was only at night, IN HER SLEEP, that Adah Isaacs Menken met up with little Berthe Theodore, and they became one.
It was the only time, in her sleep, that Adah felt complete, safe, and truly herself. The more famous she became, the more precious those hours became to her... until she finally succeeded in her desire to finally become one again, by committing suicide. She was never returned to the States, buried temporarily in a pauper's grave, but her split existence was beautifully captured forever in Courbet's masterpiece.
That is what I think "Sleep" is about. Courbet loved her, and loved the attention the painting got for him, and I think he loved the fact that nobody knew what it was all about! And they could never... In the free-thinking world, Adah's body was mere temporal flesh, something to be celebrated, but Adah's public personna, something she had shaped like a sculpture, was to be honored and protected. In a strange way, Coubet held to his own concept of ethics and morality, and it was not without a kind of integrity, albeit salvaged from pre-christian times.
For the immediate years after her death, Courbet appears to have been obsessed with this great creative genius, and he devoted himself to several tributes to her... If I am right!
Gustave
Courbet: La Femme A La Vague,
aka "A Woman in the Waves," or
"The Bather"- painted in 1868-
Featuring the profile of Adah Menken.
The breasts were someone else's!
Once
again, the near exact face AND body type of Adah Menken in A Woman In The Waves. Once again, Hiffernan
may have modeled her hair. But the face could certainly have passed among her admirers as a final tribute to Adah Isaacs Menken. In the beginning, perhaps the
artist was infatuated, INSPIRED, and unafraid to paint her as she
was... after all, she planned to eventually go back to the States...
thus there was no local or regional reputation to protect. In fact
Menken, a Victorian “candle in the wind,” was already dead when
The Bather was debuted.
If
you read the story of Menken, you understand how integrated she was
with the creative forces in England and France. It seems she was
striving for a sort of artistic triple crown, doing her necessary
melodramas to finance her writing, and desperate Confederate naval
plans which nnever materialized. While loving up Swinburne and Dumas and others to glean
whatever she could to establish her literary foundation, she may have been secretly
posing nude for the most prominent and scandalous artists of the day.
This
was where France was 140 years ago... and to some degree it was aided and
inspired by an American. And it was where America was eventually, if
not belatedly headed, almost one hundred years later.
Perhaps
the most famous of all the famous muses was Jane
Burden Morris. Born poor and denied much
education, she was discovered at age 18 by Dante Gabrielle Rossetti
and the “Pre-Raphaelites” in England, and became a popular model
among them.
Like most popular models,
youth was kind to Jane and essential to her exotic beauty. When
Rossetti first saw her, she looked like this. Unfortunately for her,
and art, he did not start painting her regularly for another fourteen
years.
Jane Burden was a quick
study, reinvented herself, and soon carried herself like royalty, as
she acquired ability in music and learned several languages. William
Morris, a major influence in the Arts and Crafts movement, took her
as his wife and she contributed greatly to the success of his
company, especially in textile design. They had two daughters, and
rented a summer home along with the Rossettis for their
entertainment. But when Rossetti's wife and muse passed away, from a
laudanum addiction, and Morris naively traveled to Iceland, Jane and
Gabrielle discovered that they could not resist one another, and a
scandalous affair ensued. Some historians contend that they had been
in love from the very beginning, but Rossetti's marriage prevented
any public attachment.
When Rossetti had buried
his wife he also buried his sexy love poems, written to her, or
someone, which were quite sexually indiscreet. Now he was to turn
exclusively to painting the majestic ideal Arthurian woman with a
vengeance. And Jane became one of his favorite models. He supposedly
painted a woman named Fanny Cornforth as well, but a careful
comparison of her and Jane suggests that most of the paintings, even
ones supposedly of Cornforth, were Jane. Fanny was more of a decoy
for an artsy-craftsy scandal that was just beginning. Jane was the
living, breathing, dark-haired, expressionless siren made famous by
his mysterious canvases.
Back from frozen Iceland,
William Morris, now a partner with Rossetti, and whom he admired as a
sort of mentor, found a sensible and creative solution to Jane's new
obsession. They would all live in one house together. Nobody would
know whose bed Jane was sleeping in. This arrangement did not last as
long as the scandal it inspired. Then after a few years, the
Pre-Raphaelite gang convinced Rossetti that he had buried his poetry
too hastily. His growing fame would make the love sonnets he composed
for his beloved lover a national hit. Everyone could wonder for
generations which woman he was talking about. So she and they were
exhumed. For this crowd, no impulse was denied.
Her beauty somewhat fading, eventually Jane settled
down, charismatic Rossetti succumbed to alcohol and chloral hydrate
(used to treat insomnia!) ... and with Jane's talent and quiet help
William Morris fathered a movement in decorating and architecture
which still commands enthusiasts today...
The captivating features
Not to be outdone... the
other Pre-Raphaelites had their own muses. Simeon Solomon was the
first to recognize the noble visage of Fanny Eaton, a
statuesque Jamaican immigrant and the wife of a London carriage
driver. Fanny's mother was probably born a slave, and yet her skin
color seems to have been considered part of her charm. She may have
been the first art subject to break the color barrier in
predominantly anglo Europe, being depicted with a certain objective
respect and even admiration for her appearance, regardless of race or
class. Fanny is not believed to have been romantically involved with
any of her admirers, which included Millais and Rossetti, but for a
season she was an exotic distraction from Jane Morris.
As women in France became
“liberated” in the 1870's and were allowed to get educations and
pursue careers, things got really complicated... at least
professional/sexual relationships. Suddenly women were invading a
man's world, stirring indignation and controversy, as former formalities were obsolete,
and minds and a few art careers were blown. Male artists were not
only painting women, nude and otherwise, they were painting alongside
them; Teaching them, organizing exhibits, and competing with them.
Natural elements and human chemistry had to collide as men moved over
and made room. And some like Manet and Renoir moved in...
This of course did not in any way
interfere with the artist-model-muse-lover-wife-mistress complex.
French art had become a censor-free zone of Victorian public nudity,
and artists of all genres rose to the occasion. Gerome painted and
sculpted heroic woman, too strong and magnificent to be clothed,
Chaplin created angelic virgins, uncovered and innocent so as to be
immodest. Degas painted preoccupied ballerinas. Manet edified the
working girl. And his success meant he could afford excellent models;
Victorine Meurent, Meri Laurent, Suzanne Valadon. Monet
painted his wife Camille, prim but faceless. Renoir painted
his pretty young wife Aline Charigot, his children's pretty
young nanny Gabrielle Renard, and his friend's pretty young
daughters, in an avalanche of portly naked womanhood. And all that
restrained testosterone had to go somewhere...
While Cezanne painted
fruit and some really bad nudes, and Pissarro painted trees, most of
the Impressionists and their entourage were interested in painting
people... people living their everyday lives. Courbet had started
the thing... painting outrageously erotic nudes, genre scenes, men
busting rocks on the side of the road, and the idea of real humans in
real-life situations. Suddenly the unemployed and untrained female
had a natural talent for a low-stress, relatively easy job. And as
art became more and more an attraction in French tourism, posing for
an artist was becoming almost the patriotic thing for a woman to do.
Back in the day, poor
young French women had few alternatives. The constant wars and
depressions in France had left the country bankrupt in several ways.
Without educations or status, they had to be open-minded about
marriage prospects. And until they had a husband, they had to be
open-minded about paying gigs... such as modeling for a poor,
not-so-promising artist, just for food. Aline Charigot Renoir
was able to use her beauty to end up on Renoir's canvases, and
eventually in his bed... and to wear his name. It was messy and
tawdry and not to be recommended to anyone. The only problem was that
once she was pregnant and overweight, Renoir would find a new muse...
over and over again, as she gave him three sons. Still, Aline in her
prime was the probably one of the prettiest of the French models of
that day.
Young actress, Henriette Henriot, who
posed for Renoir numerous times, and
may have been his favorite "muse."
Aline was pretty, but
another class of models had arrived on the art scene, that would make
her pale in comparison. It was the wealthy French girl-artist
wanna-be. France was lousy with the type. In fact it attracted them
from all over the world. Wealthy girls had great clothes, and
handsome parents, nice teeth, and well, good genes. They had
educations. Many had art instruction. And as they slyly wormed and
levered their way into the art market, they immediately offered a new
and desirable subject for painting.
Fetching Berthe and
Edma Morisot led the way of this fresh echalon. Edma, an outstanding artist, married Manet's
best friend, and was soon out of the picture, but Berthe held on to
her dream of being a professional artist. She and Edma had studied
under several prominent French artists, such as Puvis Chavannes, and showed considerable
promise when they began to turn heads in Paris. “Too bad they are
women,” Manet had lamented. Being a woman was considered an
insurmountable handicap for even the most talented artist.
Believed by this blogger to be young Berthe Morisot
with her fiance. and sporting an engagement band.
One of
Berthe's first instructors was the sculptor Aime Millet. Soon the
mentor wanted to be the suitor, and they were even engaged. The young
female painter was about to become Millet's studio keeper when she
came to her senses.
When Berthe was wisely
invited into the group of loosely organized “impressionists,”
nobody was sure whether it was because of her talent, or, you know,
the fact that she was drop-dead gorgeous. Ever the opportunist, Manet, who never actually
bonded with the “Impressionists,” did not care, and got her to
model for him often. In fact, no other artist was ever painted so
many times by a fellow artist. And probably no other artist was ever studied and depicted by fellow artists as much as Morisot. Besides Manet and her sister, and herself, and probably her instructors like Millet and Chavannes, she modeled for Desboutin, Bremen and Marcello.
Manet was able to engage her nearly exclusively, within his sphere of influence, but he could not have her. But he could
enjoy her company and paint her and have that distinction... although
he never did her justice. Meanwhile Berthe went about smoothing over
squabbles and keeping the peace among the art beasts of France. Only
a classic beauty with brains could have kept them together and
actually established a true art movement out of such undisciplined
renegades. Like insecure little boys in a tree house, they
intentionally met at a bar where she could not go because of French
propriety, where they bitched and moaned about her constant interference and
ultimatums. But Morisot was one messenger they would not shoot, and she got them to do work together and to establish themselves, for posterity as it turned out. Meanwhile Berthe made brochures and posters, and used her social
connections to make headway in spite of them, a reactionary Salon and a hostile French culture.
Then she got married- to
Manet's brother Eugene, and the Impressionists lost their most
effective public relations agent. She would still paint, but becoming
a mother became a new creative challenge, and one she relished in.
Over the years, Berthe painted her sister, her mother, her nieces and
most often, her daughter Julie, as did insatiable Renoir.
Men paint the objects of
their fascination and fulfillment- and so do women. For men that is
women. For women that is... or used to be, family, and especially children.
Julie
After Berthe Morisot's
death, Renoir was Julie's surrogate father and she his muse. Julie
moved in with Berthe's closest friends, the home of France's popular
poet Stephane Mallarme. His daughters were like sisters to her.
Between the attentions of Morisot and Renoir, the daughter of one and
the muse of the other, Julie Manet replaced her mother as one of the most painted
persons of the French art scene.
Julie Manet (center) poses with two American artists,
Edward Darley Boit and Childe Hassam,
and her close friend, Genevieve Mallarme.
How much Julie posed is a topic for
inquiry. Many of Renoir's nudes sport the round pixie face of Julie
Manet, often attributed to Renoir's children's nanny, Gabrielle, or
Suzanne Valadon, whose bodies were those of more mature, rotund
females, and who made his nudes seem like raucous gatherings of
behemoth libertines. But they often had very small heads, out of
proportion with their bodies, which suggests he used someone else...
perhaps Julie to model for his faces, but not so much exposure of the
rest of her. Renoir was known to use Lise Trehot for his
early nudes, and no doubt recruited Mery Laurent and other models of
the day as well.
Here is a rare, incredible photograph,
which I believe to be the gathering of four of France's most famous
artist's models. This was one of several “grand slams” as I
called them, which I have acquired, impossible groupings never seen
before but certainly possible, of persons from a particular place and
time, whose faces would be hard to confuse with any others. The odds against finding so many "lookalikes" together, from the same period, and the same country, are astronomical. All four of
these women were part of a network of French families involved in the
arts, and in particular the Impressionist school. Lise Trehot on the
far left was Renoir's favorite body model early on. Julie Manet on
the far right was Renoir's favorite head model beginning during her
childhood and for the next twenty years. Above center appears to be
Mery Laurent, who married Stephane Mallarme, a sort of adopted
step- mother to Julie Manet, and a favorite model for Edouard Manet,
Julie's uncle. She was often photographed in Moulin Rouge-styled
dancing garb, and had been a popular entertainer at one time. Mery
once played Venus on the half shell on stage, in the nude, and was
sponsored by a wealthy American in her own salon, where she became
the mistress of France's most admired cultural lights. She
entertained the legends of the times, such as Whistler, Zola and
Proust. Zola based one of his novels on her. The woman on the bottom
may be Gabrielle Renard, Renoir's faithful, convenient, most utilized
model, mistress and baby sitter.
Beautiful Camille
Claudel followed the tragic path of the pretty art student turned
muse- turned lover- turned miserable and shamed. She studied under
Rodin and after an affair was then smothered by his ego and banished.
The other women artists
were not quite so attractive or willingly immortalized; Marcello. Eva
Gonzales. Her sister Jeanne modeled for her. Rosa Bonheur.
Marie Bracquemond. Mary Cassatt, who joined the Impressionists and
took up where Berthe left off. She also painted her sister. And
hundreds of other women. She rarely posed for herself, nor did many others ask her to pose for them. When Degas tried, she hated the results.
Victorine Meurent
was the top model of the day. An accomplished artist and musician as
well, the slender redhead regularly posed for the best artists in
France, including Manet, Degas, Toulouse Lautrec, Puvis de Chavanne
and Alfred Stevens. Victorine was believed to have been romantically
involved with Stevens, but she never married and never had children.
She made her living modeling and painting until, as legend suggests,
her hand was injured. Her art, now almost non-existent, was better
received in her own time, and certainly more than any of the
Impressionists, including Morisot, and she was juried in to the
annual Salon exhibit in 1876, her self-portrait beating Manet as she
was accepted and he was not. Only three or four of her paintings have
been preserved, including the self-portrait which established her
talent and made her the most essential and most adored woman in
French art history.
It is Victorine who is
believed to have modeled nude for Manet's scandalous blockbusters,
Dejeuner Sur de L'Herbe (The Bath) and Olympia. She was also supposed
to have been the boy in Manet's The Fifer. It has never seemed to
bother art historians that these people did not look like one another
and did not look like Victorine. But history said so. French art
history was written long ago, and that was the end of it. As a blogger, I have the freedom to challenge some of these long held assumptions and offer a twist far
more interesting.
First of all, when you imagine Victorine,
think Nicole Kidman. Then as you scrutinize
Manet's final version of Olympia, hold that
thought. You can have only one conclusion:
No way!
Victorine grew up in a
blue collar family. Both of her parents were industrious and even
creative. Her mother was a hat maker, her father a craftsman at a
foundry, and she was a budding artist. She started modeling for Thomas Couture in 1860, when just
sixteen years old. That is where she may have met one of Couture's students, Edouard Manet, who would later draw her into the greatest controversy of her life.
Somehow this girl from humble beginnings learned
respectable skills in music and painting, and had the good looks to
make money by just sitting still. Manet supposedly hired Victorine
to model for a battery of projects, including The Street Singer,
Mademoiselle V and The Bath around 1862, meaning this very beautiful
girl from self-respecting origins, with artistic skills of her own,
agreed to pose as herself, a bull fighter, and nude in the role of a
courtesan for a virtually unknown artist. And she was only eighteen.
All of this is possible,
but at eighteen auburn-haired Victorine was lithe and sexy, unlike
most of the females Manet was to portray. She may have posed for The Singer, hiding her face, and some for Mademoiselle V, even though the
likeness is minimal, but the portly gal in The Bath is quite solid,
with enormous thighs, and brunette. A smaller exploratory version, which sports a
redhead, looks as if Manet may have stuck Victorine's head on a very
large-bottomed woman. This suggests that Manet used Victorine, not surprisingly, mostly as a head model. Early photographs of Victorine Meurent suggest
that she was lean and well proportioned, and classically long faced.
The somewhat hefty, but sexy woman in The Bath looks to be far older
than eighteen, and shamelessly flattered by any attentions, honorable or otherwise.
Manet came out the next
year with his most famous work, Olympia: a bold prostitute spread out, looking the viewer
square in the eye, with nothing covering her nakedness but her sporty house shoes. The woman is obviously short and stout, and round
faced- a Mediterranean brunette, and actually looks a great deal like
Suzanne Valadon, but who was only three years old at the time. Art critics
have opined about the scandal of Manet painting Victorine, a nineteen-year old
art student in such an outrageous context. And how many people, as has been supposed, would
have recognized his model, and been all the more
excited or offended. Really? They never saw the earlier sketches... and Olympia had nothing in common with Victorine except that both were female. But Victorine had probably bragged that she had been modeling for the artist... and people did the math.
Yes reader, the story behind the
painting has always been as important as the art.
Victorine Meurent has been recorded
by history to have posed for as many as nine of Manet's masterpieces,
over a twenty year period. And there were probably more. But five of
them were modeled before the end of 1863. Two more were modeled in
1866. Then there was a seven year lapse. It was during this time that
Victorine really honed her own painting skills, and posed regularly
for Alfred Stevens. Stevens' tasteful, precise style of art was more
to her liking than the crude swaths and risque subjects of Manet's
canvases. The last time she posed for Manet was in 1873 when
Victorine sat, still elegant and gorgeous, for The Railway,
completely clothed with a child at her side and a puppy in her lap.
It is important to note that she was rarely known to pose in the nude
for artists. When she did, she never the less covered herself
prudishly. Stevens once supposedly managed to expose one breast, but I think that painting has been mis-attributed. The model for that was probably Mery Laurent, someone far more likely to throw caution to the wind. And after
Olympia, no one was to ever see Victorine's naked waist or legs, or even her
feet again.
This is one reason that I
am suspicious of the use of Victorine as the primary model for any nudes at all. But yes,
I think artists used her face in a number of ways. Artists are
ruthless composers, in search of the elements of their inner visions.
They are body snatchers... body part snatchers... gesture and
expression snatchers... always on the hunt for a sly grin or the
gleam of the eye... a nicely defined muscle. The idea that they would do this seems to be lost
upon non-artists, who think in a linear way. A picture of a woman
must be a picture of someone- a presentation of a person in a
time and place- a sample of that moment, and an expression of...
truth.
But to an artist, a
picture of a woman might be the culmination of everything he or she has
ever learned, or loved or experienced... and often the conflation of
a lifetime of observations and preferences and... the artist's ideal.
In other words, a larger, all-encompassing truth.
Olympia was such a
composition. Every painting is. Who modeled for it? Maybe Victorine, at least for the thumbnails and preparatory studies. Or maybe an unknown prostitute. Or both. The earlier sketches of the
composition feature a slim redhead... but she quickly disappears. In the end a very different type emerges on the final work. Or
maybe Manet was dreaming the whole time about his wildest fantasy, or
his mother, or maybe someone whom will never be told, buried
underneath all of the stupid speculations and assumptions. But sadly,
for people to get interested in art, there must be a story,
preferably naughty, behind it.
It was such fun for the
French, enjoying their sexual revolution, to imagine that the model
for Olympia was the sexy teen-aged redhead. And Manet was glad to a
point- for morons to make up stories and fuel the fires of
controversy. As one of my artist friends once discovered, and
explained pragmatically after being labeled in a negative way in the
Austin newspaper, “It does not matter what people are reading about
you, as long as they are talking about you.” For artists, scandal
is the equivalent of free publicity. My friend reasoned that a year
later they won't remember what they read or heard, only that you are "famous."
It was said that after the
wild, unexpectedly hostile public reaction to Olympia, Manet was
mortified and fled the country. He could not have been that
surprised, nor the French so outraged, and surely the French had seen
a nude before, many of them. What was the big deal? Manet was merely
following a natural progression, after being inspired by the works of
Spanish masters such as Velasquez and Goya. In fact his paintings
were direct answers to their greatest works. Still, there was wailing
and gnashing of teeth. And surely they were not so upset about the artist's choice of footwear...
A brazen nude, staring at the onlooker,
had been done 300 years before, and
many times since... but always BAREFOOTED.
Why the fuss?
It boiled down to Manet's
attitude. He was not liked, and art critics were determined to be
less than charitable. His courageous canvases were attacked as much
for political purposes as any real concerns about art. As with any
controversy, the facts pertaining to the painting were thrown around
loosely to sell newspapers and... well, contribute to the fun. A
casual nude woman, simply resting as a servant presents a fabulous
spray of flowers... which I'm told would have been no big deal to
Europeans... presumably an honest depiction of a "working girl," who suddenly transformed into a brazen whore, unashamedly looking at
her onlookers, and an unacceptable breech of social interaction.
Naked ladies were not supposed to look at you. That was the advantage
of art: You were supposed to be able to goggle at a naked woman, and
not feel any discomfort. And in truth, it had been done before... by
Goya and others.
One of Manet's associates, the ill-fated young French
master Bazille painted a similar painting just before the
Franco-Prussian debacle, when he was killed in action, his answer to Manet's answer to Goya's answer to Titian's... We will never know, but he seemed to be trying to meet with the critic's approval, as his nude's waist is covered, and she wears only one turquoise shoe...
La Toilette, by Frederic Bazille. 1869-70.
Bazille's alabaster, long-limbed beauty
looks more like an Olympic swimming champion...
resting after a round in the boxing ring!
Chaplin's
maidens were a little more shy, rarely looking towards their admirers when bare-chested. Clement and Courbet had already been cranking out brazen,
buxom, naked ladies for several years. Certainly Parisian art
enthusiasts were not looking upon anything they had not seen before.
The objections today seem shallow and infantile. But just as today,
it was not so much what Manet said... but how he said it.
How Victorine might have
felt, we can guess by her choices from those days forward. She
modeled for Manet much less... finally breaking away and modeling
only for artists whom she could trust to protect her dignity. But at
the time, and ever since, she has been pigeon-holed as Manet's muse.
Wild speculations continue even today, as nude souvenir photographs
of a fully mature woman are brandished on the Internet as her, even
though she would have to have been only thirteen years old when they
were made. The art world wants its muses dark and nasty. Scandal has always been the selling point of art. Later European galleries would perfect this strategy marketing Cezanne, Van Gogh and Gauguin. Lunacy, self-mutilation and debauchery in exotic places superseded the mild glimpses of the world's oldest profession. But in the early days, artists fully expected to rise through artistic excellence and the recognition of it. If Manet left the country in humiliation, we can only imagine what
anguish and depression might have followed young Victorine, equated at twenty with the whore of Babylon.
In 1866 Manet released his
Le Fifre, an adorable portrait of a young military musician... which
was supposedly based, again on Victorine. At twenty-two years, it is
safe to assume that she looked nothing like the young boy in the
painting. Not the height, nor the face, or the sex... That art
historians have accepted and believed and taught these
identifications for so long just proves how little most art critics and "experts" really
know about art or artists or human beings. I don't care who
originally made these claims. They were either ill-informed or lying.
It seems that Victorine
Meurent became a catch-all for any mysteries in Manet's sources.
Someone in a moldy French gallery basement was trying to catalog his works and just made a stab at Manet's probable
models, and wrote it down, and Meurent was certainly a probable, and then somebody else repeated it... In fact they both probably
wanted to think that the paintings had been modeled by Victorine. It
was sexy to think of the beautiful redhead beneath the fifer's
uniform. And more importantly, it would help sell the most mundane of
portraits. I can hear the art dealer telling his sales staff,
“...Tell them it was Victorine... the Americans will snatch it up
immediately!”
The impossibly contradictory faces of
Victorine Meurent. The alleged nudes...
The green background on the Rt encompasses
those captured by Alfred Stevens... and perhaps
the most accurate. Bottom left and center are Manet's round-faced subject, long considered to be Victorine.
Let's compare! What could
be the reason for all of the inconsistencies? How could two artists see one woman so differently? I will strive here to
put all of the confusion to rest.
First, let's look at this
lady, The one in Manet's paintings... and study how a better portrait painter depicted Victorine, a veritable Victorian template for Nicole Kidman- and how he
actually captured her face. Alfred Stevens saw an entirely different
person than Manet often did, and certainly one more consistently
beautiful. Victorine did burn off some “baby fat” in the early
years, and then added on some weight as she aged, but she was never
short, or pear-shaped, never full-lipped, never a changeling whose
skull stretched or condensed as Manet's “Victorines” seemed to
do.
The metamorphosis of Olympia along
the bottom... from redhead to brunette.
The weathered face of Suzanne Valadon's
mother, upper left. The various versions
of Suzanne by several artists, top row.
Morisot and Renoir got it right, showing
Valadon's oval face.
My observation about the
similarity of Manet's Olympia to Maria “Suzanne” Valadon, a
popular model, and mistress of Lautrec and Renoir, and an
accomplished artist in her own right, has brought me to my own, not
so baseless speculations. Born out of wedlock and never knowing who
her father was, she was too young to have been a part of the creation
of Manet's groundbreaking works. But her mother would have been, not
only similar in looks and stature, but the perfect age to have been a
model and lover of Manet's. And the striking similarity of Olympia to Valadon cannot be ignored.
An older picture of Susanne Valadon (Rt) compared to
a portrait she did of her mother in her old age,
show several facial similarities, including wide
cheek bones, arched eyebrows, an upside-down smile
and a downward sloping nose. Might her mother looked
as much like her daughter in her youth?
“Suzanne” Valadon was given her nickname by
Toulouse Lautrec; a biblical reference recalling an innocent young woman
hounded and blackmailed by would-be older lovers.
Another clue was Manet's "coincidental" depiction of the Susanna story in Dejeuner Sur de
L'Herbe, better known to the English speaking world as Luncheon on the Grass, Manet's modern reenactment of the
negotiations between two interested men and a young woman, supposedly
having just bathed. The Susanna in the painting is listening to their
overtures and looking at us, as if to say, “Here we go again!”
A preliminary sketch of Dejourner does feature
a redhead... her head very small in proportion to
the rest of her body. But look at those massive arms!
And that gut! The body of a mature woman.
When we admit that the full, round face in the larger version of this composition barely resembles Victorine Meurent, and her muscular body in no way suggests the youth or slender attractiveness of the famous model, we can at least toy with the idea that someone else modeled for the final painting.
Manet's theme not only perfectly parallels the Susanna legend, it may have been an unwitting clue, when Lautrec's conflation is added to the soup. Lautrec saw in Manet's painting the perfect illustration of a Bible story, the parallel of which he knew his lover was caught up in. She became "Suzanne," the French cognate for the ancient name Susannah. The significance of this religious legend should not be overlooked.
Lautrec, a struggling artist who loved Maria and knew her “intimately,” may have given her the name “Suzanne” for deeper reasons than the mere ogling of her grizzled old mentors and employers, artists like Renoir and Chavannes, as has often been repeated. In the apocryphal story of Susanna and the Elders, two lustful and powerful men conspire not only to have their way with a beautiful woman while she bathes, but threaten her if she tells anyone of their advances. They try to blackmail her, saying they would use their considerable influence to have her arrested and stoned for adultery, and they were willing to bear false witness against her to do so. In other words, “Submit or we will make your life miserable.”
But Susanna is strong and
does not yield to them. And her reaction not only drew attention to
the situation, but it put her in deadly jeopardy. She argued with the
blackmailers...
“I
am completely trapped. For if I do this, it will mean death for me;
if I do not, I cannot escape your hands. I choose not to do it; I
will fall into your hands, (suffer the consequences) rather than sin
in the sight of the Lord.” (Susanna 22–23; NRSV)
Suzanne
Valadon was
quite pretty and often modeled for Chavannes,
Manet and especially Renoir- and is believed to have bedded with some
or all of them... There is no doubt that she was embraced, groomed
and nurtured to become the first French woman accepted into the
prestigious Société
Nationale des Beaux-Arts.
Yet, things were political then as they are today, and I believe she was also being compensated by the art community- for past
injustices.
The missing piece, a long
neglected person in this drama who brings my theory home, if it has a home, would have been Madeleine Valadon, Suzanne's mother, the possible target of the blackmail, who arguably could have looked a great deal like Suzanne when
she was young. And a generation before was a single woman trying to make
a living in hard times... perhaps yielding to offers to pay her to
model in the nude... and horror of horrors, when Olympia created such a stink, then worrying about her
family and friends learning of her leanings towards what many Frenchmen considered prostitution; And then living with that threat all of her life.
And her unwillingness to be exposed kept her from getting fair treatment from her artist/employer/lover... who possibly fathered her child... and never helped to support her... and the mother chose to raise the child without help, and if the artist was Manet, rather than take the risk of being embarrassed as a model and muse who inspired a national scandal.
What if one of these
artists, so quick to nurture and edify Suzanne, was actually Suzanne's father, making things right with her? And all of this circle of artists knew it, and
eventually all of them later adopted her into their “family,” and
collectively oversaw her artistic success? She was accepted in time
into the status of recognized artist, and Degas assured her that “You
are one of us,” after purchasing one of her early works. Perhaps
she was one of them more than they would ever admit.
And since she played nice,
they did as well, and the blackmail held over her mother was ended,
and she found her “family.” And then a young painter of
prostitutes (Lautrec) lived with her and dubbed her "Suzanne," reflecting the dark, complicated world in which she had endured and
prevailed.
Surely no other artist or model in France better embodied
Olympia, and no other spent such a great deal of their life identifying
with the painting. Suzanne seemed to say with many of her own nudes, often reminiscent of Olympia, “I know who Olympia is!” She was proud of her associations, and
yet (I suggest) bound to never tell... to protect all parties
involved. And Victorine had already been taking the heat for twenty
years. It was old news.
Since Valadon admitted
that either Chavannes or Renoir were the father of her son, because
of social taboos on incest we can reduce the suspects of who was her
father. Then Manet emerges again to the forefront. The man who
painted the mysterious Olympia, who refused to ever publicly support
the Impressionists for fear of their negative association, or clear Victorine
Meurent of her undeserved social discomfort, the greedy artist who
always elbowed his way to the front to paint the most beautiful
French women, but who rarely did them justice. Did Manet paint
Dejeuner Sur de L'Herbe as a cunning warning of blackmail of an heretofore
unknown model, and mother of his unclaimed child, releasing his
masterpiece as a blockbuster and simultaneously as a looming threat to the modern day Susannah?
We will never know. But it went down something just like this.
So mercifully, for noble
reasons, or perhaps not so noble, my theory proposes that Suzanne's
mother was cheated out of the fame in history for starring in the
most scandalous nude in France in her time. Or dodged a huge bullet... But she lived with a real
fear of wearing the public shame heaped on Victorine Meurent, if the
artist of Olympia ever set the record straight. Manet craved the
attention, the reputation, the glory. He would share with no one.
All while he took his long-suffering wife for granted (yes, he had a
common law wife- ironically also named Suzanne) and seized every
opportunity and slithered out of every encumbrance.
Ruthless, ambitious,
relishing in attention even if it was negative, it is easy to imagine
Manet as the blackmailer of Lautrec's Susannah; The manipulative
artist who got a poor model to give up her modesty or much more; the
wanna-be master held back by his poverty... and poverty of mind-
perhaps unable or unwilling to pay his first hapless models, or marry
those he impregnated, as he skirted responsibility... as he did in
every facet of his life. But in my imagined Lautrec scenario,
Susannah was the daughter of the wronged woman, bravely facing the
elders, and being lavishly compensated for her mother's lifelong
oppression.
My proposed scenario
answers several long standing curiosities. It explains why young
Victorine Meurent was falsely saddled with a ludicrous rumor, the
chosen fallen woman, and while young Suzanne Valadon was escorted to
the height of French art achievement, her fallings were kept discreet. Why
the most prominent of the Impressionists embraced her, helped her,
taught her, and yes bedded her like “one of their own.” Why
sexuality, not family or children, was at the core of Valadon's art;
Why Suzanne spent most of her art career painting nudes, many with
the very same “in your eye” expression as Manet's masterpiece.
Why many of her paintings were of herself, at least nude to the waste, seen
from a mirror, looking at the world with a sneer, in the very spirit
of Olympia.
Without women, Manet's
portfolio would have been a few bad self-portraits and some luckless
elders sitting in the woods looking at one another. Suzanne was not
just a great model and artist, she may well have been “Olympia's”
revenge... and atonement. Long overdue acknowledgment- payment for
services long since rendered. Such a paradox, if so.
Because
it was Manet who breathed excitement into the French art
scene, even when the judges refused to reward him. Manet who made
women of common origins the focus of society. It was Manet who
discovered and edified Morisot and Meurent, and introduced French
beauties such as Guillemet, and Demarcy. It is obvious that they were
his obsession. That he thought about nothing but women. That women
were his reason for painting if not for living. Yet he will always be
remembered as the exploiter, the user, the man too busy achieving to
be bothered with love or sentimentality. Women were the ultimate in
Creation. But women were also the earth under his feet... perhaps the
dirt between his toes.
So Manet, make up your
mind. Like Rembrandt and most artists since, Edouard Manet was a man
before he was an artist, and he thought and acted like the worst of
them, even while he worshiped the muses he exploited. The passion and
human contradictions have fascinated art lovers for generations.
In spite of his flaws,
Manet in many ways was the instigator of the Western vision of
women's liberation. His bathers, and especially Olympia, who became
the symbol of female charms, both wholesome and illicit, in a
controversial epiphany, were awarded a strange kind of dignity in
their brazen exposure. Olympia insolently stared back at a world
which had always condemned or denied her, and took the bouquet, and
whatever else due her, making sex a normal function, rather than the
habits of animal instincts. And Suzanne Valadon became the living
embodiment of his allegory.
The servant, the flowers, the luxurious
bedding, she had earned them. Olympia had taken her place as not only
the muse of a blunt painter, but of all humanity. The muse, the giver
and keeper of love, the confessed obsession of art and literature and
music, of most of mankind... and of most entertainment and
advertising today... Olympia became the true, irrefutable goddess of
mankind, just as Queen Victoria began her thorough campaign to
establish otherwise.
Queen Victoria threw all
the influence of her empire at her impossible task, to make woman
submit to her vision of civilization, to hypnotize the Western world
into the subversion of sex, the forbidding of the very words used to
discuss it. And still Olympia glared back, until she eventually won.
Another epic example of the power of art.