Breaking the waves
Sebastian Smee
Edouard Manet: Impressions of the Sea Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, until 26 September
Modern art knew no more enigmatic or contradictory figure than the man commonly described as its founder, Edouard Manet. Among the strangest and most overlooked aspects of his oeuvre were his representations of the sea, and these are the subject of a marvellous exhibition at the Van Gogh Museum, which gathers together more than three quarters of the 40 marine subjects Manet painted.
The word 'representation', rather than 'depiction', feels fitting in Manet's case, since his pictures were as self-consciously presented, and yet as dashingly executed, as a fashionably tied cravat. The exhibition opens with a large and sensuously painted still life, which shows two fish nestling on a table beside a pile of shucked and unshucked oysters, a darkly squiggling eel, and a copper pot just waiting to be put to work. The picture, surely, is there to remind us of what a civilised and pleasure-loving fellow Manet was; the depictions of the sea that follow may veer into the realm of drama or wild imaginings, but they are all filtered through Manet's ineradicable urbanity. He was, in today's parlance, 'cool' — not unlike his hero Velazquez.
The still life struggles to hold your attention for more than a few seconds, because dominating the adjacent wall is Manet's huge seascape, 'The Battle of the USS Kearsarge and the CSS Alabama'. This picture was inspired by newspaper accounts of a duel in the American Civil War. After a dramatic chase across the Atlantic, the battle had taken place off the coast of northern France only a month before Manet and his family arrived in Boulogne for a seaside holiday. His painting shows a pilot boat advancing towards some sailors clinging to a spar and, some distance off, the smoking body of the Alabama sinking by her stern. The victorious ship, the ironclad Kearsarge, is almost entirely obscured by smoke in the background.
It is odd, but somehow typical of Manet, that his one indisputable maritime masterpiece should be the painting in which he addressed the sea for the very first time. Two things astound: firstly, the main action is daringly demoted from centre stage to the background. What has stolen the spotlight is not so much the pilot boat as the sea itself. And this is the second astonishing thing: Manet's sea-green — layered with blue and flecked with rumbling blacks and whites — deserves its own monicker, like 'Yves Klein Blue'. It dominates all his subsequent seascapes, and seems so wonderful just because it teeters on the edge of artificiality, saved for realism only by the brushy verve and directness with which it is applied.
The sea delighted Manet, who, alone among the Impressionists, painted almost no landscapes. He had crossed the Atlantic from Le Havre to Rio as a 16-year-old boy, in order to win the right to re-sit naval officer school exams. He failed again, but the adventure was important, since the teenager earned recognition on board as a talented caricaturist. It also fostered in him an intensely receptive love of the sea.
For many 19th-century artists, the sea was a perfect pretext for 'pure' painting — the kind that took its cue from Delacroix's brushy Romanticism and kicked against the slick precision of photography. You feel this especially in Manet's seascapes, which revel in sensuous brushwork and the dramatic modulation of blacks and bluetinged greens. But in painting after painting, one can't help also noticing Manet's boyishly keen interest in maritime details: the precise way sailboats sit in the water as they harness high winds; the way steamboats belch smoke; the details of ships' decks, harbours, beaches and jetties, all pockmarked by industry and populated by holiday-makers.
Still, Manet was as interested in artifice — in good picture construction and arthistorical allusion — as he was in realism. In even a simple-seeming beach scene, for instance, you notice that the two attractive girls on the sand have serendipitously adopted the poses of classical goddesses. The seascapes by Manet's Dutch maritime predecessors and French contemporaries which fill out the rest of the exhibition include dramatic, weather-filled masterpieces by Courbet; thinly painted enigmas by Whistler, several knockouts by Monet, and two absolute stinkers by the ghastly Renoir. The exhibition — a nautical feast for land-weary eyes — is complemented in Amsterdam, its third and final stop, by a small exhibition illustrating Van Gogh's relationship with the sea. British readers should also be aware of a rewarding exhibition at the Bowes Museum called Boudin, Monet and the Sea Painters of Normandy, which covers related territory and contains work by some of the same artists.
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