Lucia Flórido

 "I truly believe that Voice Lessons helped me become a better teacher."

The Bad, the Ugly and the Nasty: Manet, Debussy and the Critics Who Hated Them

Impressionism as a movement drastically stirred the nineteenth-century creative scene.  It parted from the Romantic canon and its traditional idea of art, embracing the need for innovation in all matters set forth by the fin de siècle’s economic prosperity and creative impulse.   While Impressionistic literature, or Symbolism, explored words as musical entities and viewed mental imagery as spawning from conventional meaning, Impressionistic art painted reality as a moment in flight, as seen under the influence of hyperactive senses.  Music, for its part, also broke away with traditional arrangements and forms, opening space for the possibility of sounds that evoked images, of compositions that sounded like poetry or were somewhat as visual as a canvas.  If nowadays critics and scholars are unanimous in accepting Impressionism as a landmark moment in the history of the arts, critical readings of pre-impressionistic and impressionistic pieces contemporary to the movement are not often as undivided.  On the contrary, both Claude Manet and Claude Debussy, who as pioneers best exemplify the movement’s struggles, felt first hand the hostility of a public still very accustomed to convention and not yet ready for innovation.

For many years, Manet’s paintings were an endless object of disaffection among their viewers.  However, they survived admirably the wave of criticism, being appreciated today as some of the most evocative and noteworthy canvases of the second half of the nineteenth century.  Curiously, when Debussy first established himself as a composer, Impressionism in art and literature had already found a faithful group of enthusiasts.  Debussy’s work, nonetheless, provoked countless invectives from the part of music critics of the time, as if the whole concept of an impressionistic take on art had never been heard of before.  During the first decade of the twentieth century, one will seldom find another musician whose work was so diligently butchered by critics.

If we study Manet and Debussy, taking exclusively into account their subject-matter and technique, both reveal much about Pre-Impressionism and Impressionism’s trends and ideals: we can easily understand why they became undeniable symbols of modernity.  If we choose to examine the paintings and the musical pieces through the writings of critics or the drawings of caricaturists, they teach us a great deal about the reception of art during the Second Empire and early twentieth century.  Using Manet’s Olympia as a foundation to our analyses, we will approach the negative criticism it incited and compare it to similar reviews inspired by some of Debussy’s most well-known compositions.   

I

n 1865, Edouard Manet exhibited his painting Olympia at the Paris Salon.   Olympia depicts a naked courtesan with a cat and a servant.  The latter carries a bouquet of flowers to the woman lying in bed, who, in a typical scene of boudoir, is most likely expecting a client.  The subject matter, however provocative it might sound, could hardly be called ground-breaking or controversial.  Paintings of naked or semi-naked females were common at exhibits and part of the classic canon.  As an artist, Manet, a sensitive and elegant gentleman, was not looking for any sort of upheaval: he sought only recognition by the general public and reviewers.  To his astonishment, all he actually experienced were fierce attacks from all sides.  In a letter to his friend, the poet Baudelaire, Manet wrote: “they are raining insults on me.  Someone must be wrong.” [1]  

Strong disapproval appeared through verbal and pictorial form in the press of the period.  One critic commented that Olympia was “beyond all eccentricities, beyond painting, beyond art itself.” [2]   Another stated that:

the author represents and gives us the name of Olympia, a young girl lying on a bed, having as her garment a knot of ribbon on her neck and her hand for a fig leaf.  The expression of her face is that of being prematurely aged and vicious; her body, of a putrefying color, recalls the horror of the morgue. [3]   

Most could only see the work as an insult to art everywhere: poorly executed, it was also an “inconceivable vulgarity” and somewhat disgusting (Hamilton 72).  As for reactions towards Manet himself, one reads: “he succeeds in provoking almost scandalous laughter, which causes the Salon visitors to crowd around this ludicrous creature called Olympia.” (72)  Some reviewers, maybe in an effort to understand what inspired Manet’s unusual composition, strayed from the openly malicious claims and interpreted Olympia as a parody of the classic masters from which it derived.  A few, however, saw on his oil the beginning of a new episode in art and realized that “the crude public finds it easier to laugh than to look, understands nothing at all of this art which is too abstract for its intelligence.” (77)  Not everybody, however, saw the public as an ignorant bunch.  In Paul Robert’s reading of Mirbeau satire on the “Sunday afternoon painter,” a phenomenon then taking over France, he explains that: ”the initial hostile reaction to Manet and his followers in the 1860s and 1870s was not a sign of a public without knowledge of art.  On the contrary, the public believed they knew about it only too well.” [4]  Caricatures poking fun at either the painting itself, or the responses it provoked, also abounded.  If the written accounts of the work reeked with anger and scorn, the graphic ones seemed, in their turn, to reproduce Manet’s canvas by adding a comic twist to it.

By and large, average salon goers didn’t care for intellectual readings of works of art.  Those facing Manet’s canvas reacted to what they saw in an unsophisticated, rather simplistic manner, because “a new kind of public flocked to the annual Salon, far more numerous but less cultured than the restricted largely professional of the past.” [5]   Their gut instinct told them that Olympia, the woman, was a Fleur du Mal.  Consequently, Olympia, the painting, could only be viewed as bad and immoral.  For this emergent Parisian middle class, it was difficult to dissociate art appreciation from a moralistic perspective of the world depicted by the work.  Faced with their own moral inadequacies, such as the increasing demand for prostitutes in the city of Paris, they somehow felt deeply affronted by what they interpreted as Manet’s open mockery of their so-called values.  The mere vision of Olympia seemed to be enough to disrupt the social order.  As an article contemporary of the exhibit recalls: “You had seen Manet’s Venus with the Cat flaunting her nudity on the stairs.  Public censure chased her from that place of honor.  One found the wretched woman again, when one did find her, at a height where even the worst daubs had never been hung [...].  (73)   Viewers were so troubled by the image on the canvas that, to prevent Olympia from being physically damaged, guards were assigned to protect it, and, as Antonin Proust wrote regarding the matter: “If the canvas of the Olympia was not destroyed, it is only because of the precautions that were taken by the administration [of the Salon].” [6]   But, since courtesans were not an unusual subject matter, why did Manet’s Olympia bring about so much controversy when it was first shown, remaining contentious for years to come? [7]  

Another important contextual aspect of Olympia that helps us better appreciate Manet’s canvas is his source of inspiration.  Titian’s Venus of Urbino (1538) is one of his most obvious influences: this Renaissance masterpiece will provide the setting, the posture for the model and also some of the details that characterize Olympia, such as the pet animal (in Titian’s oil, a fancy little dog sleeps in bed by the woman), the bracelet (only garment of this naked Venus) and the servant in the background.   As far as the subject matter and placement of objects on the canvas, it is also evident that Manet recalled Giorgione’s Venus Asleep (1519), another Renaissance painting, and Ingrès’ Odalisque (1814) and Odalisque with a Slave (1858), Neo-Classic paintings.  In Olympia, the coloring and brush work, however, stray away from the classic masters and approach the innovative techniques developed decades earlier by Goya, who, like Manet himself, struggled to have his genius recognized.  Contemporary of Neo-Classic painters such as David, Goya stood apart for breaking with tradition and creating a style that reflected his own needs as an artist. Nowadays, it is not by chance that modern art criticism seems by times divided between Goya or Manet as being the Father of Impressionism. 

All this being said, Manet’s choice of subject matter should not come as a shock neither to Salon goers nor to art reviewers. Praised many times in the past as an image on canvas, real prostitutes were themselves an ordinary element of the urban scene.  Prostitution was a dangerous but financially reliable road for poor young women to earn a living on the streets of mid-nineteenth century Paris.  Industrialization led to an increase of capital circulating among more people than ever before.   All this money, on the hands of the nouveau riche, served to fund pleasures not as affordable or as available in previous decades.  Prostitutes were then divided into categories according to the public they served, or to the place where they carried out their occupation.  It became a sort of métier with a clear career path: street walkers aimed at becoming courtesans and to serve a limited number of high paying clients. 

It is important to note that, thirty five years before the exhibit of Olympia, open prostitution on the streets had been forbidden by Paris city officials.  Also in 1830, the sanitarian Parent-Duchâtelet, in two volumes entitled De la prostitution dans la ville de Paris, proceeds to associate prostitution with filthiness and disease.  According to him: «Prostitutes are as inevitable in an agglomeration of men as sewers, cesspits, and garbage dumps; civil authority should conduct itself in the same manner in regard to the one as to the other: its duty is [...] to render their presence as inconspicuous as possible.” [8]

If until then a more observable distinction between family women and whores subsisted (through, among other things, the dress code), after the ban, prostitutes had to opt for a less obvious look in order to continue to work the streets.  This fusion, and subsequent confusion, of what is honesty and what is vice did not come easy to the middle-class, whose moral standards were suddenly clouded by the inability to categorize the objects of their loathing and to ostracize them among the other undesirable populating the streets.  A practical effect of the confusion of values, however, was that it suddenly became easy to pretend that immorality had vanished and that Paris had turned into a place where integrity prevailed amid its citizens.  Until them, prostitution in art seemed to obey the same general rule: one could portray a prostitute, provided she didn’t really look like one.

On the The Painter of Modern Life, Baudelaire wrote that:

If a patient and meticulous artist of mediocre imagination decides to paint a courtesan of our times and for this purpose searches for inspiration ... in a courtesan from Titian or Raphael, it is very probable that this artist will create a fake, ambiguous and obscure work of art. [9]

Having this is mind, what remains original regarding Manet’s canvas, is that, despite receiving direct influence from the Classic canon, he does not disguise his prostitute in order to make her less of an outcast.  Unlike the depiction of Classic, Neo-Classic and Romantic courtesans, who often came masked as Goddesses of Love or placed in a far-distant and exotic setting, “Olympia is a Parisian prostitute, the first who has appeared thus in the painting of our times...[Manet] has created a woman who embodies the habits of the city, the appearance of a class.” (Reff, 28) 

The exemplary Romantic prostitute from art and literature, with an inclination to play the role of Magdalena, suggested to the public that she was prone to be regenerated by the virtues of true love.  The Renaissance or Neo-Classic courtesan, on her turn, was placed in a far-off setting, thus becoming too much of a stranger to offend anyone in a Parisian art exhibit.  Olympia, however, with her business-like looks and down to earth body, didn’t make any allusions to the sublime or to foreign lands: “the narrow black ribbon around her throat, and the silk slippers [...] showed that she belonged to the demimonde far more than to the demi-dieux.” (Hamilton, 68)  So, what caused so many polemics was the fact that Manet dared to paint a true to life portrait of Parisian mores.  The young lady was not in a harem, she was in a bedroom; tending to her were not pink cherubs, but a black maid, by her side, an ordinary cat (everlastingly symbol of negative sexuality) replaced fancy little dogs or exotic birds.  Olympia’s posture, staring at the viewer, as only expected in portraits of high-quality women, was far from implying that she was a poor demoiselle forced by fate into prostitution.  Moreover, Olympia doesn’t seem neither penitent, nor apologetic nor ashamed of her occupation.  She appears instead to be someone in control of her body, proud of herself, instrument through which she makes her living.  She also gives the impression of being somewhat tired and bored by the dull repetition of her work.  The new bouquet wrapped in newspaper is like the previous one and all clients are alike: no romanticized hero is expected to suddenly enter and rescue her from her degrading lifestyle.  In short: “the languorous Venus and the sensual climate she establishes are features entirely alien to the rigid Olympia, who conveys instead a spirit of modern Parisian intelligence.” [10]

Olympia’s candid depiction of a bedroom, by all accounts an inner and private setting suddenly brought into the public domain, projects an image of the city as conceived by Haussmann during the Second Empire.  Paris urban reform planned ample avenues, new parks and squares for the recreation of its inhabitants.  Upscale and middle-class Parisians appreciated being outdoors, to parade themselves and to observe others strolling around.  Old houses and buildings were torn down to give place to new constructions: modernity came hand in hand with accessibility.  The opening of urban spaces corresponded though to the disclosure of interior ones.  As the brother Goncourt declared regarding the new Parisian way of life:

to live at home, to think at home, to love at home, ...we find this boring and inconvenient.  We need publicity, daylight, the street, the cabaret, the café....We like to pose, to make a spectacle out of ourselves, to have a public.  The Parisian does not have a home anymore.  Everyone behaves as if he lived in a cheap hotel. [11]  

In this universe of open doors, it remained however often inconceivable to expose the city and its inhabitants’ pitfalls so overtly without paying the high price of social condemnation.  Manet, maybe overestimating the open-mindedness of seemingly avant-garde Parisians, painted a prostitute that looked exactly like the city: Olympia was modern, easily accessible provided one could afford her and astonishingly concrete.  Emile Zola, who viewed Olympia as Manet’s chef-d’oeuvre, wrote that: “When other artists correct nature by painting Venus, they lie.  Manet asked himself why he should lie.  Why not tell the truth?” (Williams) 

The veracity and modernity of Olympia’s become visible through Manet’s painting technique as well.  For a public accustomed to the rich colors and mid-tones of the classic palette, to the finesse of detail and correctness of subject matter displayed in traditional paintings, Olympia was an intolerable faux pas.  First of all, Olympia’s body lacks the shapes and curves of a true-to-life image of a woman.  The almost solid skin tone, contrasting with a dark background that appears to engulf both black servant and black cat, create in the eyes of a conventional spectator a visually disturbing effect.  Regarding this matter, a reviewer of the 1865 Salon wrote: “the color of the flesh is dirty, the modeling non-existent.  The shadows are indicated by more or less large smears of blacking.” [12]   And another perplex critic added:

white, black, red and yellow make a frightful confusion on the canvas; the woman, the Négresse, the bouquet, the cat; all this hubbub of disparate colors and impossible forms seize one’s attention and leave one stupefied. (Frascina 23-4)

For purists, thus, if put alongside, for instance, the Venus of Urbino, Olympia would be some sort of still-life. Instead of painting a dead bird laying on a table, it reproduces a stiff body laying on a bed.  Unable to understand the originality of what he saw, Félix Jahyer wrote what could summarize the usual response to Olympia: 

I cannot take this painter’s intentions seriously.  Up to now he has made himself the apostle of the ugly and repulsive.  I should hope that the derision of serious people would disgust him with this manner so contrary to art. [13]   

Manet seems to have aimed at simplicity in all aspects of his oil, but simplicity was then opposite to artistic achievement.  In contrast to classic works, there are no superfluous technical details on Olympia: the choice of colors is fairly narrow and the brushwork is rough, as the painter was trying to convey an idea more than an ideal.   While Manet’s canvas didn’t reproduce the faithful image of a woman’s body, it is out of question the first authentic depiction of a Second Empire prostitute. 

Decades after the attacks on Manet’s Olympia, Debussy would experience the same sort of grief.  When Debussy premiered the opera Pelléas and Mélisande in 1902, critics were fast to remark on the composer’s technique, insisting on its lack of melody and plenty of peculiar arrangements.  D’Harcourt, writing for the French newspaper Le Figaro, commented that the score of Pelléas and Mélisande “defies description, being such a refined concatenation of sounds that not the faintest impression is made on the ear.” [14]   As it happened to Manet’s Olympia, Debussy’s Pelléas came out as a hopelessly flawed, horribly assembled piece of work.  While the courtesan was shapeless, colorless, cadaver-like and, in sum, insulting to art, Pelléas was on its turn “vague, floating, without color and without shape, without movement and without life.”

(Slonimsky, 90)  The parallels between the criticisms received by both works can be so readily established that not knowing their source one might think they were written by the same person or about the same work of art. 

The same sort of razor-sharp comments were made regarding L’Après-midi d’un faune and La Mer at the time of their premiere.  The first was described as “a strong example of modern ugliness,” in which “the suffering Faune … seems to need a veterinary surgeon.” (92-3)  Regarding the second, one reads that: “it is possible that Debussy didn’t intend to call it La Mer, but Le Mal de Mer… It is a series of symphonic pictures of sea-sickness… The hero is endeavoring to throw up his boot-hills.” (95)    

Debussy resented the critics and, in a way, found it astonishing that they would slander a musical piece without taking into account the amount of dedication it implied or, even, without conceiving that the composer was, perhaps, aiming at something different from the usual.  In a reaction to reviewers of Pélleas and Mélisande published in Le Figaro on May 16, 1902, Debussy wrote: “Critics?  They are fine people, very fine!  Or so I would like to believe… they have the right to pass judgment on the several years’ struggles and labors of a work’s gestation – all in one hour.” [15]   Hurt by the bad press that continuously took his efforts for granted, he treasured the comments from those few who saw in his work the extra-ordinary meaning he had intended.  Thus, in a letter to a critic of Pélleas who reviewed the work positively, we read: “you will never know what a great solace it has been for me among so much detestable stupidity, as well as a valuable reward for twelve years of work.” [16] Debussy’s relationship to his music revealed itself to be of a quite special nature.  In his correspondence, he affirmed that finishing a work of art is rather like the death of someone you love, isn’t it? … Pélleas and Mélisande are my only friends at the moment.  Indeed we are getting to know each other too well perhaps and every time we talk… we know perfectly well how it is going to end. (Lessure, D Letters, 76) 

Since Debussy felt his music as inseparable from himself, any negative review would necessarily be felt as a personal attack.  

Interestingly enough, Manet and Debussy were both accused of sacrificing method in the name of innovation, which represented a transgression of rules not meant to be broken.  Marchesi, in the Monthly Musical Record (May, 1902) stated that “through the intellectual refinement of a crazy pursuit for novelty, Debussy has arrived at the greatest negation of every doctrine.” (91)  Thus, the prospect of art and music that transcended conventional parameters didn’t foster enthusiastic reactions, but rather bothered the public.  Since it seemed far more complex to observe Manet’s and Debussy’s pioneering pieces with a fresh look than to rely on the same old point of view, one can only see intellectual lethargy as one of the main reasons for the initial rejection of both artists. 

When writing their reviews, both music and art critics often focused on assessing technique and form, giving far more value to how a work was composed (and the obvious results arising from the artist’s choice), than to its content, unless the content is exceedingly distasteful, as was the case of Olympia. 

The same Paris that inspired Manet to paint Olympia was in the heart of many of Debussy’s musical composition.  When abroad, he longed for the ambience of the cafés and the artistic atmosphere felt at every corner.  In short he needed the sounds and colors of Parisian life to boost his creative impulse.  In a letter from Rome to a friend, Debussy wrote that; “I would like to see some Manet and hear some Offenbach.  This may seem something of a paradox but I can assure you that breathing the atmosphere of this spleen-factory gives you the most strange and fantastic ideas.” (Lesure, D on Music, 186)  His friends and collaborators were poets, painters, musicians and dancers, and in many cases the dialogue among them was transposed to music sheet.  Mallarmé’s poem was translated into the Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un Faune, Turner’s paintings, which reflected his own childhood memories of having a sailor for a father, gave birth to La Mer.

In point of fact, images of water abound in Debussy’s music: they are in his titles and arrangements, unmistakably evoking Hokusai’s prints and Monet’s canvases as well. [17] The water imagery, especially sea water, and all the unstable cadence, fluidity and elusiveness that it implies are dear to Impressionism as a movement.  Debussy, an Impressionistic composer himself despite his dislike of the term, finds in water a means to convey the idea of malleability of music, which in turn mirrored the shifting moods of his own artistic expression: “like the French Impressionist painters and symbolist poets, Debussy was a master of evoking a fleeting mood as misty atmosphere.” [18] This connection between music and art is even more evident through Raymond Bonheur’s quote of one of his conversations with Debussy: “How I envy painters,” he used to say, “who can embody their dreams in the freshness of a sketch.” (Roberts, 125)  However, the connection between Impressionism in art and music didn’t exist only as a concept though.  It was a concrete endeavor, as the concert in an art gallery in Brussels (1903) demonstrates.  There Debussy performed his String Quartet, surrounded by Impressionistic paintings and other forms of modern art.  It goes without saying that the critics of Debussy united his music and the art on display in their disgust for both: “Is it a work? One hardly knows.  Is it music?  Perhaps so, in the sense that the canvases of the neo-Japanese of Montmartre and its Belgium suburbs may be called paintings.”  (Roberts, 128)    

Another of Debussy’s definite influences was Javanese music, which he heard for the first time at the Paris Universal Exposition of 1889.  Debussy was then 27 years old.  The music of Java produced such a deep impression in the young composer’s mind that, years later, commenting on the subject of musical composition he wrote: “Remember the music of Java which contained every nuance, even the ones we no longer have names for, there tonic and dominant have become empty shadows of use only to stupid children.”  (Lesure, D Letters, 76)  This almost primitive form of making music, a return to the core of artistic expression as an echo of the human essence, was for Debussy the only true reason for composing.  Music should thus go far and beyond to convey the composer’s meaning, even if it has to break every canon and oppose every suitable style: “As a young man, Debussy was once asked which harmonic rules he followed; he replied simply, “My pleasure.” (Kamien, 414)  This statement, as simply as it may sounds, embodies an entirely new outlook on music theory.  Within the field of musical influences, one must not ignore Debussy’s love-hate opinion of Wagner, who himself received his share fare of insult from the critics.  Debussy’s reactions to Wagner’s were mixed.  If on one hand he found him to be “a harmless lunatic,” on the other he was aware that “Wagner… can never quite die… [he] was a beautiful sunset that was mistaken for a dawn.” [19]   Still one can clearly hear Wagner in many of Debussy’s works. [20]  

Despite of--but also thanks to--all these influences, from painting to poetry, passing by music and dance, Debussy managed to create his own style, distinct and original, and yet reflecting the world around him as well as his own interior universe.  As the pianist Claudio Arrau once said regarding Debussy’s body of work: “he was one of the great geniuses.  His music is absolutely unique.  It is like the music of another planet.” (Roberts, 283)  It was exactly Debussy’s distinctive way of creating music that brought him so much grief but also that spawned the international recognition, which was achieved still in his early days as a composer.  As everything that is greater than life, that crosses acceptable boundaries and set new ones, Debussy’s music was meant to trigger contradictory opinions from his contemporaries.  Today Debussy is viewed by many critics as the greatest French composer of all time. 

            Gustave Monet offered Olympia as a gift to the French government after Manet’s death in 1883.  One would think that, by then, outrage would have given place to appreciation among the general public.  In 1893, however, when the canvas was selected to be part of the Louvre collection, many still considered it outrageously offensive and immoral due to its subject matter.  Manet’s technique, on the other hand, initiated the Impressionist movement and didn’t spawn much outcry anymore.  It took time until Olympia ceased to generate polemics and received all the praise it deserved.  As Manet himself wrote: “time itself imperceptibly works on paintings and softens the original harshness.” (Williams, web)  Time most definitely acted in Olympia’s favor and, since its first appearance in 1865, Olympia has proven its timeless modernity by continuously inspiring new generations of artists.  Now occupying a place of honor at the Musée d’Orsay, Manet’s canvas reflects, like no other, the face of Paris at the second half of the nineteenth century.  It would take forty years until another work inspired so much controversy and fostered such a drastic change in taste and style.