White Manet
After Monet, now Manet via the new “Manet/Degas” show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Since the 1983 Manet exhibition in Paris, his work has always mattered to me. This time, I was struck by the centrality of white, whiteness, and white supremacy. Reading against the grain of the rather conventional themes of the hang—origins, genre, modernity, and so on—I saw Manet trying to shift white sight from the absolutism of slavery to a republican imperial-racial hierarchy of the “civilizing mission.”
This republican imaginary centered on his visualized intersection of gender and race, articulated by his work in and with white paint itself. It failed when the repression of the Commune showed that the contradictions in racial capitalism do not lend themselves to such neat solutions. The crowds already flooding to the Met show how strong the liberal desire for such resolution remains.
White Paint
Among the first Manet first paintings you encounter in the Met is the curious portrait of his wife Suzanne Leenhoff entitled La lecture/ Reading (c. 1866). Layers of white paint in her dress and on the couch float and dazzle, while her skin is oddly inert. Her whiter-than-white skin showed extreme care had been taken to avoid the sun. From this painting, I set off on a dérive in the different registers of white, drifting from one canvas to the next to register the politics of all this white on white.
Next up was Olympia, on her first visit to New York and for once beautifully lit so that her servant, based on the artist’s model Laure, could be seen clearly. The whitest white is in a flower at the center of the bouquet being proffered by Laure, as she seemingly announces the name of the unknown visitor. This white sets off all the varying tones of off-white and grey in the folds of the bed and on Olympia’s body. As art historian Anthea Callen taught me long ago, Manet didn’t mix colors so much as braid them together.
This layering and braiding was not purely formal but an attempted articulation of racial hierarchy into form. Manet left signs as to his purpose. Just as Laure’s coral earrings signify her Caribbean origins, as Black scholar-curator Denis Murrell points out in the catalog, so too was Suzanne Leenhoff-Manet surrounded by aspidistras, native to Vietnam, recently colonized by Napoleon III’s Second Empire (1852-70).
From abolition to empire
Against chronology, Olympia (1865) is followed by Manet’s 1862 portrait of Jeanne Duval, the Haitian-born actor and dancer, often remembered only as “Baudelaire’s mistress.” Painting Duval just fourteen years after the abolition of slavery in Martinique and Guadeloupe, and sixty years after Haiti’s world-historical revolution, Manet was searching for a path from abolition to empire.
The sea of floating bright white paint that evokes her crinoline dress and the net curtains behind her all serve to set into contrast Duval’s light brown skin. It is the intensity of her dark eyes that ensure the point is made. Contrasting with what Murrell calls these “gaping black voids” across the room are Berthe Morisot’s brown eyes ringed with white, gazing out from Le Balcon (1868).
The poet Paul Valéry, cited in the catalog, would later refer to Manet’s painting of Morisot’s eyes as “a presence of absence” [original emphasis]. While that might be the misogyny of the artist, this absence also connotes what I call the “double unconsciousness” in white sight—the double refusal to see whiteness either as a way of seeing or as a signifier of racializing hierarchy.
Le Balcon is all about memory and absence. It derives its title from a Baudelaire poem, dedicated to Duval, which opens:
Mère des souvenirs, maîtresse des maîtresses, Ô toi, tous mes plaisirs! ô toi, tous mes devoirs!
Or, in Elaine Marks’s 1962 translation: “Mother of memories, mistress of mistresses, O you, all my pleasures! O you, all my duties!” In the shift of memory and pleasure from the Haitian Duval to the very light-skinned, white-dress-wearing Morisot is the register of change from abolition-era whiteness to its imperial-republican successor.
Young-White-Woman
That shift came via a full-size painting of Manet’s favorite model, the artist Victorine Meurent, entitled simply Young Woman in 1866. I’m sure Manet did not give it this title. The painting is the frontispiece of the catalog, facing Manet’s explicitly anti-slavery Battle of the USS “Kearsage” and CSS “Alabama” (1864). Presumably, then, it carries significance to the exhibit as a whole. Let’s correct the title: Young-White-Woman (1866).
The Young-White-Woman is seen here fully clothed, unlike Olympia, wearing a curious garment that begins as a buttoned white Pierrot costume in the manner of Watteau and becomes a day dress, with one slipper poking out. What is she performing? Whiteness, certainly. Meurent is white as white can be, while wearing white. The parrot placed prominently next to her had served as a symbol of empire since Albrecht Dürer put one in his engraving of Adam and Eve (1504). Manet now evoked the tropics through non-human life rendered into commodity, the imperial circulation of extraction.
The Young-White-Woman performs sexuality, of course. Like Olympia, she wears a little black choker with a pendant, as does Morisot in Le Balcon. Whether in the demi-monde of Bohemia or the monde of “society,” all the young white women were connected, at least in the eyes of the male painter. The Young-White-Woman is not alone. A little bouquet of violets—almost invisible in the Met against their oddly lilac walls—signifies the presence of an admirer. Or a painter.
And yet. The half-Pierrot costume suggests a certain non-binary, perhaps queer, perhaps trans, possibility here, evoked too by Meurent’s quizzical gaze. Whatever she is she is not “absent.” She holds the flowers, condensed from Olympia’s bouquet into a nosegay, as little as she can, as if touching them might be toxic. Is there a certain toxic masculinity in the room?
The Young-White-Woman was painted in properly classical style, against a Velazquez-style dark grey background with a Dutch still life lemon-as-object-of-consumption in the foreground. It’s a little theatrical this lemon, oddly placed on the floor. The canvas was life-size, 72x 50 inches. If Manet had gained admittance to the Salon, the painting would have been hung above viewers’s heads—which is why she seems to be looking down—and the lemon would have been in their eyeline.
The Young-White-Woman is what the collective Tiqqun would call a “form-of-life,” the precursor to the Young-Girl who was the “model citizen” of consumer society in the century after the First World War. The surreal co-presence of the Young-White-Woman, the parrot and the lemon made Empire visible as a “vision machine” for the production of life as a commodity. Despite all this, its liminality, its way of being between ways of seeing, made it the most compelling painting I saw.
The White Man’s Duty
As a young man, Manet had seen slavery at first hand in Brazil. He supported the Union over the Confederacy. Yet Manet floated with the rising tide of French empire, doubled in size by Napoleon III. The direction of that tide was toward a rearticulation of racial hierarchy as duty rather than property law.
In the exhibition catalog, scholar Isolde Pludermacher quotes Degas’s racist uncle—even famous artists have this problem—Eugène Musson, defending the Confederacy in 1862:
In imposing work upon the black race, which has hitherto remained in total idleness, white race only accomplishes its right and duty.
This inflection of white sight via enforced labor under slavery was modulated under empire into the “civilizing mission.” Its principle was articulated in 1884, the year after Manet’s death, by the Moderate Republican prime minister Jules Ferry:
the superior [white] races have a right because they have a duty. They have the duty to civilize the inferior races.
From this duty followed the necessity of colonial expansion, according to Ferry. The emphasis has shifted from labor to civilization, which must be defended. In the same vein, Ferry’s laws on laïcité, in particular the separation of religion and education, continue to drive French white supremacy today. His explicit justification for empire in 1884 was the need for export markets in a period of US protectionism. The leisure and consumerism celebrated by Impressionism dovetailed nicely with this expansion.
The Republic Was Not a Commune
The Met exhibit reveals how the Commune broke Manet’s hopes for a “universal” Republic in the Hegelian sense. What, for example, was he doing painting a portrait of Berthe Morisot in 1871, after the Franco-Prussian war, entitled Repose? Morisot is perched awkwardly on an elaborate piece of furniture in a gloomy interior. Her body has taken on the disjuncture earlier seen in Jeanne Duval. Just as Duval’s foot seems oddly out of place, so does Morisot’s here, beneath a sharp twist in the hips, a pose that looks anything but restful.
Manet’s accusatory lithograph The Barricade, showing the mass executions that ended the Commune, is visibly a reworking of his Execution of Maximilian, shown here in the fragmentary form re-assembled by Degas. Empire at home and away? Perhaps but while Maximilian certainly paid the price for Napoleon III’s adventurism, he was no radical hero. As Marx pointed out in Capital, Maximilian had re-introduced slavery to Mexico. The move was so blatant it even caused protest in the US House of Representatives.
Perhaps Manet was protesting the execution of a visibly white man by brown people, dressing his soldiers as “French” to indicate where he thought the responsibility lay. In that sense, the painting looks forward to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness rather than back to Goya: “the horror, the horror.”
In this version of The Barricade, the man being executed looks plausibly like Manet, a self-portrait of the artist’s dying hopes, shot by his own imagined imperial police. In this light, I saw the Young-White-Woman in Manet’s Plum Brandy and Degas’s Absinthe—paired as the exhibit advertising—not as the sex workers of art historical legend but as people mourning the loss of comrades, friends and lovers after the massacre of the Communards.
To undo the “civilizing mission”
And so, what’s the point of all this? Not, I think, to create a better or more inclusive “art history.” Rather, this major exhibition should cue a continued focus on how to challenge the long legacies of the 19th century “civilizing mission,” which has morphed in the US into “Western Civ.” Courses of that title are taught widely and , while classes that explore racial hierarchy are banned. Museums and other institutions explicitly or implicitly rely on the notion of civilization.
Manet relied on the state as a civilizing institution, submitting his work to the official Salon and accepting a Légion d’honneur. Degas and the others who became known as Impressionists decided to set up a limited liability company, trusting instead in the capitalist market. I situate both options as infrastructures of whiteness. While Murrell and others have done vital work in questioning the deployment of Black people and blackness in Impressionist art, the word “whiteness” occurs only once in the doorstop catalog to this show.